I was looking at the
Superman Showcase volumes in the store today and I realized something: many of the Lois Lane stories weren't very flattering to the character. She was always trying to trick Superman into marraige or Clark into revealing his secret or some other "treacherous female" behavior that didn't make her look very good. One story had Lois and Lana fighting to the "death" for Superman's affections and playing a trick on him to force him to pick one or the other. Anyone with the volumes knows how the story ends and those who don't can find it fairly easy, but it just made me think that perhaps if the pre-crisis universe is a continuity, then this might not be a very good thing to have as part of official Superman history. This very sexist behavior would be official cannon.
This got me thinking about a much larger question: is the pre-crisis universe really a continuity at all? Superman's history was constantly being "updated", even until the last year with
Superman the Secret Years. This certainly doesn't fit the pattern for a conventional continuity. Take Bizzaro for instance; he was origianlly an accidental clone of Superboy created by a duplicator ray, yet just a few short years later, he had become a delibrate creation by Lex Luthor. Or how many times did Jimmy Olsen travel back in time to Krypton to help Jor-El spare Kal-El? I can think of at least two stories that took place in less then a decade of each other with that very theme. Superman himself went back and met his parents at least two years prior to the famous Lyda story. Then there is still the question of what age did Superboy start his career? Some stories say he was in elementary school, others say he was a teenager.
All of these raise serious questions about what is or isn't, or even what should be, cannon in Superman history. Is it just me, am I thinking too hard?