Good comments.
BTW… I don’t endorse (
at all) the mindwipe. Very unSupermanly! But it had been done in the comics before — usually, as with
SII, to fix exposure of the secret identity. And I guess few clued-in to the fact that erasing someone’s memory (against their will) is a very personal assault/violation.
I think there was a Silver Age book in which Supes used a special combination of X-ray and microscopic vision (
) to erase Lois’s knowledge of the secret identity. Unfortunately, I couldn’t verify this with a web search. But here’s a similar example.
So, back in the day, lots of highly inappropriate manipulations of the mind and memories.