Cover Story - Top 12 Lex Luthor Covers

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Lex Luthor.  It’s a name that wrings loudly through the halls of supervillain infamy alongside such titans as Dr. Doom, the Joker, Loki, and Thanos.  Created in 1940, Lex Luthor is one of the oldest and most well known super villains of all time.  He’s appeared in almost every Superman-centric piece of media we’ve had, played by countless actors and enjoyed numerous solo comic appearances as a protagonist in his own right.  

His obsessive dedication to destroying the man of steel has shaped up to be one of pop culture’s greatest David vs. Goliath stories running across decades and multiple iterations of the character: he’s been a rogue scientist, a business guru, President, and a superhero in his own right.  This Sunday will mark Luthor’s first live-action appearance on the CW show Supergirl, played by Jon Cryer, and while that’s not quite as momentous as it might’ve been given we live in the Superhero Age I’ve still decided to mark the occasion with a deep dive into the top 12 Lex Luthor comic covers.

 

The Flash S4 adds Hartley Sawyer as Elongated Man

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One of the best things about CW’s stable of superhero shows is their willingness to add swaths of additional superheroes to their single hero programs.  The name of the show might be Arrow or The Flash but both series also feature a rotating cast of supporting superheroes that help the world feel larger and more engaging.  It’s an approach that took Smallville years to stumble on but now they’re doing right out of the gate, like with Martian Manhunter appearing as a supporting character for Supergirl season 1.  And they aren’t slowing down, either, with new heroes joining the shows all the time and now we’ve got another name to add to that list.  The most recently announced new hero joining the CWnivere is Ralph Dibney, the Elongated Man, who will appear in The Flash season 4 and be portrayed by Hartley Sawyer. 

Panel Vision - Great Ten

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As the 21^st century prepares to exit its adolescence and enter its quarter-life crisis period, the idea that this will be the Chinese century seems more and more assured.  Chinese tastes and interests have grown into a major box office force for American blockbusters, Chinese industrialism drives a lot of the global economy, they’re the only people with the billions to dictate commands to the likes of Apple or Google, and recently they’ve established themselves at the forefront of the Green Energy push. 

This means that everybody has to adjust, hence why we see a larger Chinese presence in US blockbusters like Transformers 4 or Iron Man 3.  Comics are usually slow to adapt to these kinds of trends save for one exception at DC comics, who got on board the China train as early as 2006- 2 years before their coming out party to the world stage that was the Beijing Olympics.  They did it with a new prestige team of superheroes meant to embody various aspects of Chinese culture known as the Great Ten.

Comics Rainbow - Time Masters

It’s fitting that at the end of one year and the beginning of a new one time travel is a subject of some emphasis.  Back to the Future dominated the national consciousness once more during 2015, Doctor Who found itself reinvigorated with an amazing new season, and Legends of Tomorrow promises to whisk us away on an adventure through time with a mini-Justice League of its own making.  

Given all that I thought I’d take a look at the time travelers of the DC Universe, mainly because they’re a lot more straight forward and understandable than the mangled mesh of nonsense over at Marvel, seriously you do not want to have me explaining the relationship between Kang, Immortus, Ramma Tut, Dr. Doom, and Iron Lad to you.  For now let’s dive in to the Time Masters of DC Comics in all their shades, shames, and successes. 

Panel Vision - Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag

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So, as part of my ongoing celebration of the Suicide Squad trailer that’s been blowing up the internet I thought it’d be fun to look at one of the squad’s craziest comic incarnations with Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag.  In case you’ve never heard of the team, the Suicide Squad is a group of super criminals assembled by the US government for black ops missions of low survival rate.  The thinking is that they take easily controllable and super powered bad guys and have them take on problems so that if things go wrong the only people who get hurt were already evil and if anything gets exposed there’s plausible deniability. 

Though the roster is constantly shifting due to character deaths, these are SUICIDE missions after all, there are a handful of consistent team members.  Deadshot, an expert marksman and D-list Batman villain, Captain Boomerang, an Australian Flash foe, Count Vertigo, European aristocrat who fought Green Arrow, and Bronze Tiger, another bat foe, make up the team’s core membership.  There’s also the squad’s government handler Amanda Waller, one of the most badass women in all of comics.  The only other major human character on the team is the in field government asset Rick Flag Jr., the man from whom this mini-series takes its name.