Blanding

An elderly playwright, driven to the brink of suicide by the “cruel drama notices” accorded his latest play, who enters into a scheme, concocted by a sympathetic Lois Lane, to publicize his next play, entitles The Sleeping Beauty, by having Lois pretend to fall victim to an ancient Egyptian curse supposed to consign its victims to a sleep of 1,000 years, thus transforming her, to all appearances, into a modern Sleeping Beauty reposting in a sleeplike trance. Superman exposes the hoax in September-October 1948, but then goes to work with his mighty super-powers to produce Blanding’s play almost single-handedly and see the production through to a brilliantly successful premiere (WF No. 36: “Lois Lane, Sleeping Beauty”).