For the duration of the Silver Age, one question persistently came up in Superman’s life – Lois Lane or Lana Lang? While it was never resolved, writers as diverse as Cary Bates, Elliot S! Maggin, and Alan Moore all came up with their own way of handling the quandry.

Bates wrote date scenes with Clark and Superman seeing both women, though not at the same time, damn it. Maggin actually had Clark spend the evening with Lois in a story that got a bit censored. Moore mused upon the matter in his classic “Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?” that ran in Superman #423 and Action #583, settling the entire thing as definitively as possible for any writer. Hell, the Lois/Lana dichotomy is now a lynchpin in Smallville, a situation that I’m not entirely happy with because I’m the sort of Superman fan that thinks that Lois represents Superman’s future while the strangely Asian-appearing Lana is the past, the life Clark leaves behind when he accepts his destiny.

What everyone concerned with this whole matter fail to realize is that some unknown writer solved the problem neatly in Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #41: