What I find most interesting about Lori is that even among the people that LIKE her, she's not a favorite. The Timothy Dalton comparison gets more and more apt the more I think about it: even among people that like Dalton, he's never their favorite.
Unlike the Bizarro World (a terminally retarded concept that Jeph Loeb made a big mistake in resuscitating) I have a great deal of fondness for Lori Lemaris. I like her a great deal. However, she deserves a better niche than just "Superman's third or maybe fourth best girl."
This is from the 1980's Pre-Crisis:
So the Bizarro concept was used in a deliberately retro and irrelevant manner after the deserved cancelation of his backup in the middle sixties? Wow, I guess that just torpedoes my whole point, doesn't it? I take it. All. Back.
Incidentally, summarizing the period of 1959-1986 with a broad stroke is deeply unwise,. as if Byrne and Wolfman and the rest somehow invented laughing at Superman's more out-there Silver Age elements in 1986, when that isn't true at all. Bizarro was a joke in lettercols as early as 1971. And when Gerry Conway actually had White Kryptonite serve a functional purpose in a story, the response was disbelief.
And this doesn't change the fact that the primary way Bizarro was written going back to Pasko's seventies issues, was as a mentally retarded, half-scary half-sympathetic monster.
This conversation brings to mind one thing I really, really liked about Martin Pasko's work on the Superman villains: he never treated one as a joke. He always took them seriously, even if they were somewhat ridiculous or less famous. Pasko was responsible for the restoration of the Rogues Gallery. Not only was Pasko the guy that brought back the original Toyman, he also gave us the second Metallo, the Atomic Skull, Master Jailer and brought Bizarro back after years and years of disuse.
Pasko never wrote Mxyzptlk as a clown, either. His two appearances of Mxyzptlk had him be a proud little elf whose humor comes not from his surreality, but the idea that Mxyzptlk was a supreme egotist...and that's hilarious because its coming from a midget in a derby hat. Under any writer other than Pasko, Mxy's never worked for me, because under other writers, Mxy bothers Superman out of some insane whim that's not sufficiently detailed. I guess they figure because he's a magical elf they don't have to give him a motivation like any other character. Pasko had Mr. Mxyzptlk bother Superman for a reason: in SUPERMAN 349, Mxyzptlk resents Superman; why should HE be happy when Mxy's having problems with his love life?
In other words, Pasko eliminated the LOST IN SPACE-ing of Mxy. What I mean by that is...in shows like a Western, if a bear or Indian attacks a man, they have to explain why it does so. On LOST IN SPACE, on the other hand, they figure, "Oh boy, let's have a big one-eyed gorilla come out and blast everybody!" And never explain why.
I have a question for you, SuperMonkey: were there any bad ideas in the Silver Age? Give specific examples. No, I don't mean ideas that were "bad" because they were similar to Marvel or the Iron Age, like the Doom Patrol's angst or the violence of Kanigher war comics. No, I mean something in the Silver Age that is a bad idea, that fails in the context of being a Silver Age story: I mean something like the Kite-Man or Bat-Mite, or Streaky the Super-Cat, or stories involving gimmickry like evil twins or a hero being regressed back to their childhood.
I strongly suspect there's an act of intellectual dishonesty going on here - that the Silver Age is exempted from having bad ideas (except when its like the modern age).