The timing on this issue of SUPERMAN was fortuitous, and couldn’t have been simply a coincidence, as it follows up on a story recently reprinted in the SECRET ORIGINS SUPER VILLAINS treasury I had just read–the origin of Luthor. I can recall comparing panels from this story against their equivalents in the Treasury edition, and marveling both at their similarities and their differences. Sometimes, it’s the smallest things that make an impact.
Luthor was pretty clearly writer Elliot S! Maggin’s favorite character in the Superman pantheon, and he took every opportunity to explore the different facets of him and his relationship with Superman and the other players in the cast all through his career–most notably in the two Superman prose novels he wrote. But this story was, I believe, the first time he began to scratch that itch, and to give Luthor greater depth and personality than he’d possessed before.
The issue opens with a melancholic Superman repairing the damage caused in his latest conflict with his arch-enemy. As he repairs an airport, his mind’s eye flashes back to earlier that day, when Luthor attacked a plane in order to draw the Man of Steel out. Superman beats Luthor speedily, but he takes no joy in his victory.
And that’s because he can remember another Lex Luthor: the one whose family moved to Smallville years ago. A highly-intelligent prodigy who was also a bit maladjusted. Clark quickly befriended Lex both in his civilian guise and as Superboy–but tragedy struck when, in trying to devise an antidote to Kryptonite for Superboy, Lex set his lab on fire–and when Superboy put the flames out, the effects of his actions also destroyed Luthor’s newly-discovered protoplasmic life form, and caused all of Luthor’s hair to fall out.
At this point, Lex went full-on psycho, his friendship with Superboy curdling into hatred, his every moment spent on devising ways to humiliate or destroy the Boy of Steel. Lex’s criminal actions cause his parents to disown him, and his own anti-social tendencies kept him at arm’s length from even the other lawbreakers who would enter his orbit.
And that brings events back around tot he present, where Superman is resigned to the fact that his old friend will attempt to kill him at every opportunity, because that goal, that focus, is really all that he has left in his life. As a story, “The Luthor Nobody Knows” isn’t much more than another origin recap, but it’s given a bit more extra texture by focusing more on Luthor’s internal life, and the profound loneliness and disconnectedness that he must feel.
The back-up story is a relatively cliche Private Life of Clark Kent story in which Clark is put-upon by hardcase Duke Calvert as he waits for an interview subject to show up. The big, drunk man is spoiling for a fight, one that Clark can’t give him without revealing his true identity. By the end of five pages, of course, the two have become buddies, and Duke orders Clark a double milk from the bar.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 