Superman and Lois Lane finally married in 1955, 17 years after they met — but it was all just a dream.
Written by Dorothy Woolfolk and drawn by Wayne Boring, Superman Marries Lois Lane! (Action Comics 206, July 1955) shows readers events — for once — from the girl reporter’s point of view.
When Superman whisks her away from a burning and collapsing brick wall, Lois impulsively plants a kiss on him, startling the Man of Tomorrow so much that he almost drops her.
Alone at home that night, Lois wistfully muses about how much she loves Superman — and sees him fly past her window to the roof of her apartment building!
Hurrying upstairs, she finds him with a “strange, uncertain look in his eyes.”
Superman loves her too and wants to marry her. When she agrees, he happily hurls her up into the air.
“Sorry, Angel, but I was so overjoyed that I kind of forgot myself,” he explains as he zooms up to catch her.
“I understand, dear — but remember your little angel doesn’t have wings!” Lois replies.
Superman skywrites his love for Lois in the clouds and asks Clark Kent to be the best man at their wedding.
“Well, Lois, I guess the better man won!” Clark says.
“It took a Superman to do it, Clark!” Lois replies. “Only a Superman could ever take your place!”
Criminals plant a bomb in their wedding cake, and its explosion turns out to be the ringing of Lois’s alarm clock.
In the 1980s, I interviewed Jackson Gillis, the screenwriter for several of the best episodes of TV’s The Adventures of Superman. His version of the same story, The Wedding of Superman, aired in May 1956.
“With Superman, the ‘what-if’ quality of what would make a magical thing always appealed to me,” he recalled. “I did one about a dream, for example…”
“Lois’s dream about the wedding,” I replied.
“…In which she imagines, when the jewelry store window broke, that he picked up all the diamonds and squeezed them into one huge one,” Gillis said. “To use his powers in a sort of wishful thinking way.”
I pointed out that that was about the only time that the TV series touched on the romance between Superman and Lois.
“Yes. It took some argument, as a matter of fact. Mort… Mort, what was his name? He represented the comic book company.
“Oh, Weisinger,” I said.
“ Weisinger. He was leery of it because they’d never really gone into it, and of course, they didn’t in this one, because the whole thing turned out to be a dream. And he was still the clod he always was.”
“The Wedding of Superman opens with an uncharacteristic monologue,” noted Gary Grossman in his book Superman Serial to Cereal. “’ I’m Lois Lan,e and this is my story…’ The lonely gal whines that she is the last person who should handle advice to the lovelorn, but when she barges into (Perry) White’s office to complain, she is ogled by the hungry eyes of patronizing middle-aged men… The only one who doesn’t return her glance is the man she wants. ‘Superman, aren’t you even interested in love?’ she asked with a devilish grin.”
Unlike the comic book version of the story, Gillis’s TV script suggests that, on some level, Lois has always known who Superman really is.
He reveals his secret identity to her in her dream, and after she wakes up, confused, she tearfully asks Clark, “Aren’t you even Superman?”
And for once, the mild-mannered reporter can find nothing to say.
“I find it intriguing that in her romantic dream, she knows the truth that Clark is Superman,” wrote John Kenneth Muir. “Her conscious mind may not let her believe it, but somewhere, her subconscious knows and understands the truth. Lois’s inability to ‘recognize’ Clark as Superman is a facet of the mythos that irritates a lot of people, I suppose, but it seems to mirror a universal human fact that the truth sometimes hides in plain sight.”
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