Chuk Austen's character assassination of Lana Lang

Picked up a huge lot of Action Comics off of Ebay (roughly #800-870) and have been reading through them and I have to ask: how did they fix Chuck Austen's character assassination of Lana Lang?

Austen made Lana a complete psycho bitch, one who dumped Pete Ross and ran off, denying him access to his son and basically stalking Clark and being a complete cunt to Lois and ranting in private that she "settled" for Pete (who was fucking Vice President/President of the United States!!!) and wanted Clark all to herself......

Austen's last issue (before he was fired for shit talking Lois in interviews/wanting to have Lana break up Clark and Lois's marriage because Lana/Clark was his OTP) had Ma Kent tell her to leave Clark the fuck alone and then after two issues of Eddie Berganza writing under an alias to wrap up the Gog/Doomsday plotline, Gail Simone and John Byrne took over the book and Lana pretty much vanished from the series while Gail was writing.

Did they just drop Lana from the Superman books after Austen got fired and then used Infinite Crisis to erase his character derailment via having Lana and Pete showing up married again and having never split up in the first place? Or did one of the other Superman books (Adventures of Superman or Superman dedicate time and issues to pretty much retcon Lana turning into a cunt being some sort of mind control or brain tumor or to having her realize she was being a cunt and basically groveling to have Pete take her back and Pete and Clark having a laugh at Lana degrading herself in order to get back into Pete's life after she showed her true cunt face to both men?

Chuck was a passable, sometimes enjoyable pornographer but his characters had deep-seated emotional immaturity I assumed was there to move the story along.

Why did he ever think he needed to move into cape books and why did both Marvel and DC ignore his previous work

Not only ignore his work but immediately give him some of their biggest books.

It's not like he cut his teeth on Alpha Flight and Doom Patrol or something.

He wrote Uncanny X-Men and Action Comics.

>Why did he ever think he needed to move into cape books and why did both Marvel and DC ignore his previous work

He came back to cape books because of Bendis.

She was in (I think?) Busiek's run with some Insect Queen stuff and was mostly fine there as far as I can remember.

I don't believe she and Pete ever really got back together though.

Lana/Pete's break-up was resolved in the other Superman books (Adventures of Superman IIRC); they went the Hobgoblin route of revealing that one of Superman's closests allies (Professor Hamilton) had gone evil and basically was brainwashing Pete, causing him to turn evil and lash out at Lana and basically prepping him to be his fall guy in the event that Hamilton ever got caught trying to kill Superman in his new villain alter-ego "Ruin".

The writers of Adventures of Superman had Lana and Pete reconcile at the end of the story but after Infinite Crisis, they were once again divorced: Lana was running LexCorp and still an asshole, though they heavily implied that Gorilla Grodd was mind controlling her before it got jossed in the pages of Superman/Batman.

Lana was still a black sheep of the Superman family, pissing off Supergirl by not telling her that she had been infected with a bug creature that turned her into Insect Queen and nearly killed a bunch of people. Kara eventually forgave Lana and Lana herself got fired from LexCorp right before the Action Comics Lex Luthor arc, when Lex revealed that there was a clause in the CEO contract Lana signed when she stole LexCorp from him, saying that anyone caught helping Superman in any shape or fashion without Lex's expressed permission, is to be fired.

He got work in the 00s and on big properties because of two reasons:

1. His wife was a big time executive (I think with Disney; IIRC she was one of the producers on Power Rangers during the first couple of Disney seasons) and she was friends with Bill Jemas, so she got Chuck work at Marvel

2. Chuck could churn out scripts ASAP, which Marvel needed in the early 00s because the early Jemas/Quesada years needed their books to come out on time, to stave off the angry fanboys who were already pissed off at some of their earlier nerd baiting.

With UXM in particular, he got the job because they had to fire Joe Casey for being a worthless drug addict who killed sales on Uncanny X-Men and they were already dealing with people hating Claremont's X-Treme X-Men and forcing Morrison to use fill-in artists for his super-lazy main artist and fill-in artists, since Marvel couldn't give Morrison the same leisurely "release the issue when the artist felt like doing it" pace Whedon later had. They needed a warm body and they gave him the Avengers because, for all of his character derailment, he managed to restore UXM to it's normal sales level after Casey killed the title.

Of course, with the Avengers he pissed everyone off and then some and that killed the sales on that book, but still... as fucked up as his hate boner was, his pitched version of Avengers Disassembled would have at least made more sense continuity-wise than Bendis's version did.

The sad thing about Austen's Action Comics run, is that if you cut out the character derailment of Lana and his interviews where he went full retard and attacked Lois/the Lois/Clark marriage (seriously, DC should have it as boilerplate, that anyone writing Superman CAN'T BADMOUTH the Lois/Clark marriage since it only brings bad sales to writers that trash talk it), his Action Comics run is passable and readable and not ENTIRELY horrible.

Remove all of the Lana shit and you'd probably have a run looked upon like the Simone run or the Casey run of the era; perfectly acceptable Superman that isn't terrible but not groundbreaking.

To be honest, Chuck Austen wasn't the only shitting on the Superman/Lois Lane relationship.

Remember the OUR WORLDS AT WAR and the whole sub-plot where Superman sees what appears to be Wonder Woman, fall after her battle with Imperiex, and he follows her down to Earth to rescue her while ignoring Lois Lane cries for help, only to find out that it was Hipollyta donning the Wonder Woman mantle and that Imperiex forces had attacked the White House killing Sam Lane, Lois' father, when he was busy, which made Lois hate Superman for condemning her father by prioritizing to save Diana's mom, because she thought that meant he loved Diana and not her. That little subplot was milked for ages.

>that she "settled" for Pete
Sounds accurate.

There's just no other way of looking at it, you were Superman's girl, any following boyfriend is going to be a downgrade. Furthermore, marrying the other male childhood friend is really stupid and corny, creates a shitty love triangle and kind of reinforces the stupid notion that a man and a woman can't just be friends, they have to also date at some point.