Comics Rainbow - Lex Luthor

Well this has been a strange year for the Superman franchise.  On the one hand it enjoyed what has been easily the franchise’s best live action installment since Superman 2 in the form of CBS’ Supergirl.  On the other hand, it was struck a possible deathblow by the worst live action Superman entry of all time in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, a film so bad it killed any future plans for more Superman movies.  Given my maniacal obsession with topicality and the fact we’re still talking about Superman related things I figured I’d jump on board with a look at Superman’s greatest foe Lex Luthor. 

Lex Luthor is one of the most well-known and oldest super villains of all time, first being introduced in 1940 and working his way through numerous live action and animated adaptation.  In the 70 plus years of his time in the comics he’s gone through numerous changes and re-imaginings, some terrible, some brilliant, some meh and we’re going to dive in to get the full spectrum on all of them.  

Panel Vision - Legends

In March 1986 DC Comics would change the course of the comic book medium and superhero genre forever in the conclusion to their major event comic Crisis On Infinite Earths.  The conclusion featured the first ever universe reboot and a line wide relaunch, essentially allowing the company to start over from scratch after nearly 20 years of continuity.  It was a risky move in a long history of risky moves DC had been making throughout the late Silver Age such as launching numerous non-superhero comics, selling their merchandising rights to Kenner toys, and launching the Superman movie. 

The revival was a major success but with it came new issues, mainly based around establishing the comic universe’s new status quo and where a lot of characters from the previous era stood now that everything had reverted back to square zero.  So, in November of 1986 DC launched a special 6-issue mini-series entitled Legends written by John Ostrander and Len Wein with artwork by John Byrne, let’s take a look. 

Panel Vision - Top 25 Super-Jerk Covers

Edited by Robert Beach

Earlier this week, Frank Miller released one of his first illustrations in a long time. Miller’s suffered a great loss of physical mobility in recent years, so the fact that he’s recovered enough to draw again should be a pretty major event. Unfortunately, his newest piece of art was 1. Linked to the upcoming Dark Knight: Master Race and 2. Kind of terrible. It’s a picture of the Atom getting punched into Space by the ugliest Superman you’ve ever seen complete with comically massive fists and a visibly outlined dick. 

At this point, “Frank Miller does kind of awful thing” is hardly news, but in the midst of the Internet all having a good laugh about #SuperJunk, Kurt Busiek raised the interesting point that Superman’s ugliness on the cover was intentional. It was an interesting argument, and even though I don’t fully agree or think the intentionality of the image makes up for the hilariously poor artwork, it did get people talking and thinking. Specifically, it go me thinking about all the great covers of Superman being an asshole…so that’s what we’re doing today.