>>150246309
>the writers would come up with a comically high stakes premise that jeopardized Superman's reputation only to come up with a genuinely great excuse for his behavior at the last minute, vindicating him completely
Allegedly this is because they would come up with an attention-grabbing cover first, and then had to write a story that not only explained the cover but also made sense as a Superman story. It's also why these stories had so many fakeouts like dream sequences, robot duplicates, etc. just so they could explain why a cover showed Superman fighting Clark Kent, or killing Lois Lane, or other stuff like that.

Which isn't to say there wasn't any unhinged stuff in the comics themselves, but a lot of it was just making up ridiculous cover images to grab the attention of the readers.