Lex Luthor
49 years ago - Lex Luthor is born in Suicide Slums in Metropolis. He is the son of Lionel Luthor, The only surviving Luthor, a family that once helped build Metropolis but that had been ruined in subsequent generations.
39 years ago - 10-year-old Lex's mother dies when his father refuses to pay for her medical treatment. Lex stages his father’s death, collecting a massive insurance payout.
35 years ago - 14-year-old Lex is admitted early to MIT.
33 years ago - 16-year-old Lex graduates from MIT and begins inventing a series of new advanced technologies, building his company Lextech.
30 years ago - 19-year-old Lex begins moving his operations into Metropolis, buying up property across the city. When Moxie Manheim attempts to strongarm him for protection, Lex completely takes over organized crime in the city, reducing Manheim to his underboss.
27 years ago - 22-year-old Lex completes construction of his building in Metropolis, and incorporates Lexcorp. When Perry White's work threatens to expose his role in Metropolis organized crime, he buys the Daily Planet. He gives them an open hand to pursue any story they like, as long as none of them involve him.
25 years ago - 24-year-old Lex secures defense and space exploration contracts gaining unprecedented access to military resources for a private company, analyzing all alien biomass for the DEO.
21 years ago - 28-year-old Lex forces a truce in the ongoing gang war in Metropolis between Tobias Whale & The 100 and Bruno Mannheim's Intergang. He grants control of the drug trade to Whale, limiting Intergang to weapon smuggling.
20 years ago - 29-year-old Lex begins dismantling the Daily Planet. It is purchased at a massive loss by outside investor George Taylor, who creates trust funds to maintain the paper as long as Perry White becomes Editor-In-Chief.
19 years ago - 30-year-old Lex receives Metropolis's key to the city.
15 years ago - 34-year-old Lex dates upcoming hotshot reporter Lois Lane. When she declines to continue seeing him, he presumes it’s because she is associated with the Daily Planet. Lexcorp acquires Schott Toys to utilize their robotics patents, causing Winslow Schott to have a public breakdown.
14 years ago - 35-year-old Lex catches Mercy Graves attempting to steal from him, and watches her single-handedly beat his entire cadre of security guards. He chooses to hire her, cleaning her up as his new valet & bodyguard.
13 years ago - 36-year-old Lex contacts Superman when he first comes to Metropolis, offering to make him a Lexcorp asset, and is personally affronted when he refuses. He is interviewed by Clark Kent for the first time.
11 years ago - 38-year-old Lex's experiments with alien biochemistry accidentally turn Rudy Jones, a Lexcorp labs janitor, into the Parasite.
9 years ago - 40-year-old Lex brokers a deal with Amanda Waller to acquire the Order of St Dumas cloning technology, supplying it to Cadmus.
8 years ago - 41-year-old Lex attempts to clone Superman, accidentally creating Bizarro. He stops the attack of Brainiac, and is commissioned by the government to extract data from the Brainiac nanomodules, which are kept in cold storage in a Lexcorp facility.
6 years ago - 43-year-old Lex discovers that he is dying of cancer from his Kryptonite ring. He stages his own death in an explosion that puts Mercy Graves in a coma and costs her arm. He moves his consciousness into his own clone, posing as Luthor Jr.
5 years ago - 44-year-old Lex's apparently 23-year-old clone uses Cadmus to grow a human/kryptonian hybrid clone, but its accelerated growth is interrupted. It takes the name Superboy.
4 years ago - 45-year-old Lex's clone rapidly ages. He stages his own return, claiming Cadmus was holding him. He brings Mercy Graves brought out of her coma and gives her a weaponized cybernetic arm. He rebuilds Metropolis after the attack by Doomsday, using this as the platform for his presidential campaign. He wins the election and is elected president, naming Jefferson Pierce as his Secretary of Education.
3 years ago - 46-year-old Lex uses experimental technology to redirect an earthquake to hit Gotham and cuts it off from relief so that he can declare it a national disaster zone, strengthening his presidential platform. He secretly forms the Injustice Gang to battle the Watchtower.
2 years ago - 47-year-old Lex donates funds to the mysterious Q Society in exchange for access to certain technology patents, causing Uno to cut ties with them. His body is used by Johnny Sorrow as a host for Despero’s consciousness, and he is only saved by the combined Justice League, Justice Society & the Watchtower. Luthor attempts to frame Bruce Wayne for murder in retaliation for his speaking out against his response to Gotham. He hires David Cain & Danton Black to kill him, but Cain retreats when he is defeated by Cassandra Cain. He diverts a meteor to nearly strike the planet, framing Superman. He is exposed by Superman and Batman with the help of the global-monitoring of Heino Okata, and attacks them with his battlesuit, losing the presidency.
1 year ago - 48-year-old Lex assembles a new Injustice Gang under the influence of Mageddon. He uses the public knowledge of Mageddon to be exonerated in court. He retakes control of Lexcorp with diminished resources. Mercy Graves rejoins him. He is invited to join Gorilla Grodd's Legion of Doom, but declines.
Lex Luthor is one of the single most recognizable villains in comics. So much so that he's actually become a bit of a cliché; even people who aren't fans of superheroes (they exist, I've met them) will immediately recognize him. You do see a lot of villains evolve over time as their heroes evolve over the decades, but the fact that Superman has whole extremely well established swaths of his history that most modern readers are completely unaware of mean that Lex also has undergone a few pretty dramatic recharacterizations, and to this day modern writers debate as to just what the 'ideal' version of Lex might be.
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Lex's Comic HistoryLex's first appearance was in Superman #4 in 1940. He wasn't Superman's FIRST recurring villain, that title belongs to the Ultra Humanite, but in a book where Superman was usually going up against criminal organizations and corrupt politicians, Luthor arrived as a fully formed villain of particularly grand scope. In his first appearance he was attacking Metropolis with an Earthquake weapon, and later we saw that he was the owner of an entire flying city. He was operating at a scale closer to Vincent Price in Master of the World. He moved with a sort of villainous swagger that modern audiences might recognize as similar to the "No, Mister Bond I expect you to die!" energy of Gert Frobe in Goldfinger.
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It's really hard to track the overall order of Luthor's appearances from that point forward because he was kind of EVERYWHERE. Superman had Action Comics & Superman, Superboy had Adventure Comics & Superboy, There was World's Finest, and the Superman newspaper strip... and Luthor showed up constantly. His first name was eventually given, Lex (the Golden Age version with hair would later be given the name Alexi). It's not actually certain why he started being depicted as bald, one theory was a misprint in the comic strip, another was that an artist actually got Luthor confused with the Ultra-Humanite. His arch-criminal role evolved over time to make him more of a Mad Scientist archetype, and his goal of world-domination morphed to be much more focused specifically on defeating Clark, particularly in the Superboy stories where it was revealed that the origin of his hatred is because he believes Superboy was responsible for him losing his hair.
It's really relevant that so much of Superman's lore, at this point in his history, is derived both from his adult and teen stories. Lex, as we know him from this era, is very much a mingling of both versions. We see him, as an adult, still wearing his suits and acting as a career criminal, but the teen version of Lex is more focused on his mad science, and a lot of the stories that are really based on that idea (like the creation of Bizarro) actually start there. |
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The seventies saw some interesting evolution to Lex. In Superman #282 in 1974, we were introduced to a new costume for Lex; a purple and green battlesuit with lots of gadgets he could use to actually go trade blows with Superman. This was a deliberate effort to make him a more physical presence in the story. This costume would persist across almost all of his seventies and early eighties appearances in both comics and animation, including his appearances in Challenge of the Superfriends, which really cemented that purple shirt design as part of that era of theatrical super-villainy.
Action Comics #544 in 1983 is a particularly important issue in that it gives us a massive evolution of both Luthor and Brainiac; introducing Luthor's very first Power Armor. I really recommend people read this story just as an example of the huge swings these comics took in this era; Luthor leaves Earth, redeems himself as a hero on another planet where he has a wife and child, discovers technology from an ancient advanced civilization and uses it to build his Power Armor... It's wild. The entire Silver Age storyline for Superman uniquely actually had an ending written for it in 1986 by Alan Moore in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?", a story specifically stated to NOT be canon, but notably it features Lex Luthor's body being taken over by Brainiac, a concept that gets regularly revisited. Lex has often been taken over or piloted by Brainiac as well as several other fellow villains. |
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The John Byrne redesign of Syperman's lore in the 1986 Man of Steel miniseries and subsequent series brought with it a version of Lex Luthor that is at once a reimagining; casting him as a wealthy corrupt businessman, but also arguably a return to a more classic version of Lex who is more of a criminal mastermind and occasional scientific genius rather than a guy in Power Armor punching aliens out of the sky.
This is actually one of the main points of contention you often see about Lex, and every version of the character you've ever seen since then essentially occupies a point on a spectrum running between the Silver Age overt supervillain and the Machiavellian corrupt billionaire genius. Personally, I think it's worth pointing out that both of these versions evolved from the same source code, as it were.... the original Golden Age Luthor absolutely had both takes on the character in it's DNA, and so I don't think there's inherently a wrong version of this. Frankly, if anything, a correct version of Lex would be a character who actually can do both, someone who can be the legitimate CEO of an international tech company, while also, in his evenings, wearing a purple shirt with a big collar and assembling the Injustice Gang. Obviously Lex has been part of a million different stories over the decades, but perhaps the most canonically relevant is that Lex ran for, and WON, the American Presidency in 2001. He held the office until he went nuts with his Power Armor in 2004. Politics. |
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Our Lex Luthor StoryJust like every person to ever dabble in Superman's world, one of the first things we have to work out is just where on the spectrum from powersuit Lex to boardroom Lex do we fall? For our purposes, one of the most important things Lex brings to the table is his role as a linchpin for the overall mythology. The billionaire Lex is foundational to the whole world of Metropolis, and is such a fixture in the way that entire story operates. We do, of course, want to also include all of his super villainous antics as well, but frankly the fact that Lex does both should be a major part of what makes him the character he is. The idea that corrupt corporate businessman Lex Luthor somehow manages to regularly lead criminal organizations and even has his own supervillain costume should be half the fun. It does strain credibility at TIMES that he keeps getting away with it? So we tried to build some moments into his timeline where we specifically describe the events he's manipulating to clear his name.
This should be be obvious, but since we're not doing Clark's Superboy career, we're also not including the elements of Lex's backstory where he lived in Smallville and befriended Clark. You really need the former for the latter to work, or be necessary. |
Lex's FutureThis is a really interesting question. As we leave our current timeline, we are just starting to introduce the idea that Clark is starting to look to the future. Jon Kent will be born soon, and Superman will start to rely more on Kara & Connor as his focus shifts more to his role as a father. As correct as this feels for the gradual evolution of the Superman mythology, what does it mean for a character like Lex who is so totally defined by his relationship with Clark specifically?
Lex's role, regardless of what version of him you subscribe to, is to counterpoint Superman himself. Clark is an unflappably good person using his unlimited power to always do the right thing. His original villains, corrupt landlords and evil businessmen and fascist despots were his opposite; the worst of humanity. Lex is meant to be the ultimate expression of that, and in doing so there should always be a strong element of human fallibility in him, and ultimately of tragedy. If the future of Superman's story is to be a father, to bask in the experience of being human... It might make sense for Luthor to somehow distance himself from his humanity. There are lots of stories where he finds different ways to do that, and I think that as the story slowly shifts to Clark's proteges, you'll see a less and less human version of Lex... but that hubris and fallibility will always be at his center. |
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