Romance Special: The Matrimonial Mishaps of Lois Lane, Part Three

Valentine's Day continues to approach unabated, and believe it or not, I'm still not done chronicling Lois Lane's various catastrophic weddings. Seriously, that lady's never a bridesmaid, and always--always--a bride.

So let's see: I've already covered the incredible effort she'll go through to rope Superman into marrying her, and we've all seen the slightly Satanic and potentially lethal relationships she gets into whenever she sets her sights on someone else. Tonight, though, things are going to get a little weird.



That, incidentally, is one of my all-time favorite Superman covers, just for the way he's laid back in the pews with his feet propped up, having a laugh at the expense of Lois Lane's life being thoroughly ruined. It's so vindictive and hateful, but really, who can argue with that handsome grin?

Anyway, back to the story itself. It'll probably become readily apparent about four paragraphs from now, but I'll go ahead and let you know: Pretty much everything that happens in Richard Hughes and Kurt Schaffenberger's "The Bride of Titanman" is going to turn out to be a crazy dream that Lois has. Normally I wouldn't spoil that right up front, since those kinds of stories tend to only operate on what I like to call the Richard Belding Factor (wherein you spend the majority of the story going "Hey hey hey what is going on here?!"), but I think this one's a lot more revealing once you realize that it's an uncompromising look at Lois Lane's subconscious mind.

Especially once the midgets show up.

The whole thing gets started on a typical day down at the Daily Planet, where Lois is interviewing Superman on his thoughts regarding modern women, while Jimmy Olsen--true to form--is making time with rail-thin '60s fashion icon, Twiggy. Unfortunately, since this is happening in Metropolis in 1969, the window washer turns out to be an agent of the Anti-Superman Crime Syndicate, and takes the opportunity to blast Superman with their new Annihilation Ray, which was designed to blast him into another dimension.

As it turns out, however, the Annihilation Ray is a pretty shoddy piece of equipment:



And that's where the dream sequence starts. Of course, why exactly an Annihilation Ray designed to blast the most powerful person on the planet into another dimension and sap his powers has no effect on a normal girl reporter other than to make her hallucinate for the next nine pages, the world may never know.

Regardless, Lois winds up standing outside the Daily Dimension building, and notices that something's up when she looks across the street and sees Perry White kicking it like Mario Batali:



I'm not sure what that says about Lois, but I'll be damned if that's not the happiest Perry White I have ever seen.

It's about this time that Lois figures out taht she's not in Metropolis anymore, theorizing that the blast of the ray knocked her into a parallel universe with "mixed-up variations," which, considering that the other story in this issue involves her being launched out of a catapult on an aircraft carrier painted to look like a giant chessboard, is a pretty reasonable assumption.

Before she has a chance to ruminate on how she's going to get back home, though, she's accosted by a crowd of walking manifestations of her own body issues:



Being that Lois actually has a set of curves--and Kurt Schaffenberger curves, at that--she ends up drawing a crowd of men who gawk at her on the street corner. That's when the cops show up, and that is when this suddenly becomes the greatest Lois Lane story ever:





And the Pièce de résistance...

"All the policemen on this planet are midgets, because the records show that we wee folk never turn to crime!"

Even discounting the fact that Lois knows full well that's not true, that may actually be the most fantastic sentence of the 20th century.

Anyway, Lois is eventually overcome by the Wee Police and dragged off to jail, where the cells are decorated with posters depicting what you did wrong with the words "REPENT YOUR CRIME" emblazoned across them, and where steak dinners accompanied by champagne are served for breakfast. So really, between a delicious filet mignon at ten in the morning and a huge picture of Lois shoving a midget cop so hard that he falls out of the panel, I really fail to see where the punishment is.

While she's in jail, she catches the eye of another inmate, who--as you should expect by now--turns out to be a strange visitor from another planet with powers far beyond those of mortal men: Titanman!



T-man, of course, is smitten with Lois and breaks her out of prison, returning her to his own home planet and proposing marriage. And since he's essentially Superman with blonde hair and a black leather costume with the shoulders cut out, Lois readily accepts, only to be confronted with Titanman's terrible secret!

The secret, which according to the cover was concealed by his mask? Polygamy!



Ah yes. The planet Utah.

Needless to say, Lois is not cool with that, so Titanman zaps her with a tranquilizer ray from his eyes and shoves her down the aisle anyway. Of course, Superman shows up, but in a surprise twist, the scene from the cover actually happens. Things are looking pretty grim, but, well, it's the last page of the story, so Lois wakes up back at the office just in time to see Superman chin-checking his would-be assassin, after which she totally makes out with a thoroughly confused Man of Steel:



So like I said, it all turns out to be a dream. Which is a shame, really: What with that giant red eight on her chest, she made a lovely bride.