Lex Luthor is a hard guy to get right. He’s the absolute archenemy of the most powerful superhero of all time, but he has no superhuman abilities himself, and that can be hard to get a bead on. As much as we love Gene Hackman, his Luthor wasn’t ever a credible threat, and the fact that Kevin Spacey was just doing his best Hackman impression lumped his right in with that. Superman: The Animated Series and the subsequent Justice League cartoon got a solid characterization of him – you’d almost want Clancy Brown to be able to play him in the next live-action film.
The best villains are often the ones you almost agree with, and whose perspectives you can actually understand. Lex Luthor at his best has one of those worldviews. The capitalist ideal is fame, fortune and renown, and that’s what the billionaires would have us believe is what this country was founded upon – you wouldn’t be poor if you just went out there and achieved everything, so stop whining. Lex Luthor is a capitalist writ large, a businessman of epic, world-shaping success, but the arrival of the brightly-colored man-god from Krypton completely overshadows his achievements. It completely overshadows all human achievement, and that sticks in the craw of any human not gifted with a stunningly handsome personage or impossible physical power. Thus, Luthor wants to destroy Superman, because if anyone is going to inspire humanity to greater heights, it should be an actual human. You can kind of see his point.
But you have to balance his public businessman side with his original mad scientist incarnation and, by definition, “mad scientists” are generally cartoonishly evil – which isn’t always a drawback for a comic book character, of course. But riding that line between realistic captain of industry and crackpot inventor of maniacal schemes is a significant balancing act, and in Action Comics #23.3: Lex Luthor #1, writer Charles Soule blends those two sides with curious results.
The issue opens with a facially-disfigured Luthor getting out of prison, taunting a guard with an unspoken, vague sort of threat, before boarding a helicopter and noticing the conspicuous absence of Superman observing his early release. His assistant Casey notes that Superman hasn’t been seen anywhere all day, and Luthor ruminates that Superman is obsessed with him and it’s inconceivable that he wouldn’t be there. An interesting reversal – Luthor imbuing his own fixation onto his fixation. Then, Luthor goes about getting his face fixed up, sets about destroying a hostile competitor, tests out a new battle suit and threatens his scientists to make it better, and launches a “Project Ghost Town,” which involves sending a shuttle up into space, then having it fake an emergency call to draw out Superman. Of course, he’s nowhere to be found, so Casey believes this is Lex’s chance to prove he’s a hero by saving the shuttle himself. Instead, much to her horror, he just lets the crew die, because they’ll see it as Superman’s failure, not his. When Casey realizes the man she’s working for is a sociopath, it’s bad news that they happen to be standing on a ledge for some reason, and Luthor just shoves her over the edge to her death once he confirms that she’s “like them.” Then, he relishes a good day with no one standing in his way, and he gets a new assistant by the time he has his 6:00 meeting with Thomas Kord, leading right up to the opening pages of Forever Evil #1.
We saw a lot of the mad scientist side of Luthor over in Bizarro #1, and this issue is obviously more focused on the ruthless businessman side of him, although it certainly touches on his hands-on approach to research and development. I know it’s ridiculous to complain about Lex Luthor being too evil, but it feels like it’s a little much for him, as I guess I prefer it when you can somewhat get behind his reasoning, if not his methods – especially if he winds up being the leader of a villain revolution against the Crime Syndicate in Forever Evil, as seems to be the intimation. In this issue, he treats his employees like shit and even kills several of them, as well as murdering a guy who was trying to take over a fertilizer business he owned by dropping shuttle wreckage on his house. His “Ghost Town” plan – sabotaging his own “Lexspace” shuttle so it fails in a national tragedy just to blame Superman for not stopping it – doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. We’ve had a couple of shuttle explosions in real life, and the first thing that happens is that people give NASA the skunk-eye and ask them what the hell went wrong – why wouldn’t fictional people do the same for Lexcorp? One thinks it would do more harm to the public trust of Lexcorp than anything.
Regardless, this is Lex Luthor doing what he does, using people as pawns to further his own ambitions, and one can imagine the lack of Superman made him a little more prone to sacrificing those pawns because no one is around who can put him in check. Enjoying his freedoms and all. The art from Raymund Bermudez is solid, and you really get a sense of how cold Luthor is. Depending on what brand of Lex you like, this could be an awesome issue for you, as his eerily calm ruthlessness definitely brings across a feeling of malevolence – and it feeds into what Geoff Johns had Luthor do to Kord in FE #1. It fits well enough. I suppose I just prefer my Lex to be a bit more perversely inspiring. An antithesis of Superman should be able to hit him where it hurts and make him doubt everything about himself by seeming to be absolutely in the right – but apparently, that’s being left to Wraith over in Superman Unchained, relegating Luthor to Montgomery Burns-style everyday villainy and… well, cartoonish supervillainy.
