Superman Through the Ages! Forum

I always thought it was so cool that in L. Sprague de Camp's "Viagens" books set around the low-tech swashbuckling planet Krishna, the Earthmen refused to build rocket or mining bases on Krishna's moons - because they felt that the first being to set foot on these moons should be a Krishnan.

Okay...here is Lex Luthor, a guy that is da Vinci and Einstein and Edison rolled into one, who dislikes Superman because with Superman's limitless power that makes everything easy, and his alien super-brain, he makes a mockery of real human accomplishments.

Is Lex Luthor right?

At first the instinct is to say no because Lex Luthor is filled with rage and irrationality, the sort of person you alternate between hating and feeling sorry for. He can't be counted on to be rational and see things as they are, because he's so emotional. Also, Superman's such an awesome cat that this is hard to believe.

But I was just reading "The Seven Secrets of Superman," a story from WORLD'S FINEST #62 (1953), which was reprinted in SUPERMAN #278 (1974). The story features Lex Luthor capturing Lois Lane inside a tube and threatening to kill her unless Superman can recover several capsules teleported away by a scientist, which contain the secret of his teleporting Fourth-Dimensional Projector. The capsules are placed in the deepest part of the ocean, the highest mountain, and so on.

Now, here's the thing: they mention in this 1953 story that Mount Everest has never been scaled (presumably this must have been a few months before Sir Edmund Hillary made history and climbed the mountain). But there we have Superman go up the summit to find the capsule.

So technically, on Earth-2 (or wherever this one is set) they'd have to list in the record books that SUPERMAN is the first man to conquer Everest!

(On an unrelated note, this story gave me a far greater respect for Lois Lane. In this story, Lois Lane, when captured in the glass case, said "It was the fault of my own recklessness I got into this!" Which shows a surprising maturity, penitence and awareness of one's own behavior that Lois Lane doesn't usually have. Very often Lois Lane is the Superman version of Daisy Duck, an easily angered complainer that is pleased with nothing.)

There was also a Lola Burnett gossip column in that very same issue that seemed to reinforce this idea. Usually they show some gimmicky feat in a panel, like Superman doing his part during the energy crisis by pulling fifty cars at a time, or cooling Metropolis down during an energy crisis by bringing an iceberg from the south pole to make a skating rink. This by the way, is something I miss about Superman: him doing great feats casually when he doesn't have anything better to do.

The Lola Burnett column had several astronauts land on Mars. Only to find when they get there that on the sides of the crater in hundred foot tall letters they say SUPERMAN WAS HERE."

At the time, because it was just a single panel, I thought it was the sort of jaw-dropping feat of Superman's that takes your breath away. But if I was an astronaut on that mission, I would have thought, "Superman, you DICK! I didn't go to astronaut school for eight months to bring back some rocks. How could you rub our faces with hundred foot letters in the fact that our mission was in second place here?"

Well, this sort of thing isn't limited to Superman, is it?  Over at Marvel, Reed Richards and crew were in space in 1961 and on the moon not too long afterward, meaning those poor schlubs who trained for years in the Apollo program had their thunder stolen by a college professor, his (seemingly untrained at anything) girlfriend and her teenage brother, flying in what appeared to be a privately owned rocket.

Comic book heroes were forever scaling heights, exploring depths and breaking records to put the average joe to shame, and you have to wonder whether that wouldn't crush the adventuring spirit of mankind. 

But back to your question.  I don't think Luthor objected to Superman on any high-minded moral grounds.  All he cared about was that Superman was stealing the limelight from HIM personally.  I think it's possible to feel sympathy for Luthor...everything he does, however remarkable, is eclipsed by an off-worlder.  But really the stuff Luthor comes up with is no less fantastic than what Superman does, and seems to come to him with as little effort, so in his own way he's just as superhuman as Big Blue, and not, for me, a representative of mankind.  Luthor is, like Superman, a titan, just a mental one more than a physical one.  Their battles are like contests of the gods, not mortal versus god. 

I think Nightwing has a point. Even though Luthor's intelligence is natural, it could be considered a super-power. After all, no regular person is as smart as he is.

I bet anything that on Earth-1, just about half of the Guiness Book of World's Records belong to one of of the four Challengers of the Unknown. Whether it is the world's deepest sea dive, the land speed record, etc.

But I suppose it's different when it involves Superman because Superman's an ALIEN, with such overwhelming powers and intelligence that for him, nothing is an effort. Master Jailer's rage against Superman for building his prison suddenly becomes clearer. Superman, with access to alien technology and limitless power and a superbrain, beat Jailer by creating a prison that was 10,000 feet up. Getting outscooped like that must, to the Jailer, almost be like cheating!


People say that about Batman too, but I suppose the argument makes more sense when applied to Lex Luthor than Batman. Batman's physical feats are incredible but still possible to the absolute upper limit of human athletic potential (there are people out there in this world that can catch paintballs in mid-flight and kick ten times in a second). Batman's personal devices are usually stuff like a tricked out sportscar, or a suitcase with a secret compartment. Batman could exist in the real world...which as Dick Giordano has pointed out, is part of his appeal to readers.

Lex Luthor with some of his more STAR WARS-esque inventions, like hoverboots and so forth, goes WAAAAAY beyond just Batman's smoke bombs or UV fingerprint dust.

To be honest, this is why I liked the Gene Hackman Lex Luthor more than a lot of other people, despite the fact he wasn't truly grandiose or terrible. He was able to (temporarily) beat Superman using his cunning, and by having a plan.

JulianPerez writes:


This lets him off the hook, IMHO.  So what if Superman goes to the top of Everest, or the bottom of the Ocean, or Mars, before humans do?  The humans who eventually do those things will still have their place in the record books because they are still the first MEN to do them. 

I think it's worse that Reed Richards, Namor and Hank Pym make chumps out of Neil Armstrong, Jacques Cousteau and Bill Gates, respectively.  In a world where Attuma leads an Atlantean army into Manhattan, who would care that Robert Ballard found the Titanic or the Bismark?  And so on. 

This always bugged me about the Marvel universe.  Here you have the biggest collection of geniuses of all time, and they spend their every hour on selfish pursuits like fighting each other and chasing girls.  What advances might have been made if they'd stopped punching things and turned their minds to advancing mankind?

There's that memorable moment in Starlin's "Death of Captain Marvel" where super-scientist Richards, genius inventor Tony Stark, chemistry whiz Peter Parker and wonder surgeon Stephen Strange all stand there looking blank and saying, in essence, "Oh, yeah...Cancer.  Oops."  When they try to come up with a cure in the couple of days they have left, of course they come up short.  Great pathos and all that, except it never seems to occur to any of them to continue the search for a cure as a tribute to their fallen comrade.  Soon enough they're back to their usual hi-jinks.

Nightwing wrote:

So now Superman isn't a man?

Really, Nightwing.  ::)

The first time your son is able to stay balanced on a moving bicycle and ride it without falling off, that is an incredible and beautiful accomplishment.

The fact that you have already done it a long time ago does not in any way belittle what he has done.

Although it's distinctly possible that George Leigh-Mallory may well have beaten Hillary to the summit of Everest, in 1924, but perished on the way down.

There's always a movement that springs up around theories like this one.

It's a bit like my countryman Richard Pearse and his flying machines. There is a movement that won't let it go, despite the fact there is no real proof he beat the Wright Brothers to it, although I personally think there's a reasonable chance he was first.

The Mallory story has other problems, in that he didn't return from the mountain, and this means he failed to conquer it, no matter what happened up there.

There's no question he was a formidable mountaineer, however.

This topic raises many of the same points as Maggin's "Must There Be a Superman?" in that Superman has to face the fact that he can't interfere directly in human affairs without slowing human progress (in fact, the fact that the story deals with his siding with Mexican labourers in the US gives it surprising relevance today, but I ain't touching that one: if Americans have to count on me to solve their problems for them, they'll never progress).

True, Superman's always doing things before the rest of us ordinary lot, but it's not much of a feat to get to the top of Mount Everest when you can fly, and I think that in a world with a Superman in it, people would understand that. When some guy breaks the world record for longest time spent underwater, nobody says "Big deal, fish do it all the time".

As far as Luthor's motives go, I don't think they're exactly pure as the driven snow. His problem isn't that Superman is slowing humans down, it's rather that he is afraid of Superman becoming a god-like figure instead of him. At least, that's the new take on the character; personally, I prefer Maggin's version, in which Lex is basically a decent man whose achievements are so extraordinary that earth isn't big enough for the both of them.

Permanus:

I think that's a far too benign view of Luthor, Permanus. I, too, like Maggin's interpretation, but is that really the character he gave us? Luthor has been twisted by some pretty powerful emotions like hate and jealousy, and even in Maggin's version he has killed (or attempted to kill) innocent people in cold blood.

There could be a debate, I suppose, about who Luthor would be if Kal-El's rocket had never arrived here; but he has that inclination towards great evil, and he's not sorry about it, whereas a "decent man" might be.

Well, Aldous, I can't find the exact quote (to be honest, I haven't even looked for it), but in his Last Son of Krypton novel, Maggin states quite bluntly that Luthor never caused the death of anyone - in effect, the only person he's interested in killing is Superman, so it's got to be personal. (It's rather hard to believe, given the scope of Luthor's crimes, that he didn't at least indirectly cause someone's death, but that's another story.) Certainly, Luthor is crippled by hatred and anger, but I think Maggin means that this comes from the frustration of being an isolated genius nobody understands - he just takes this out on Superman.

In the Silver Age, when Lex ends up on Lexor, he becomes the planet's foremost - indeed, only - hero. His deeds there seem to indicate that he actually seeks the common good, but he also wants to be identified as the one who does so: he's got an ego, he wants people to tell him how fantastic he is. On Lexor, they do. He likes to be revered, but that doesn't necessarily make him a bad guy.

It's odd to find myself being a Luthor apologist, but the fact is that I think it is more interesting, from a dramatic point of view, if Superman's arch-enemy is not someone identifiably "evil", but rather someone with a conflicting viewpoint who happens to be able to give him a run for his money. It's true that in most stories, Luthor is just a downright criminal, usually motivated by his desire to kill Superman; but whenever he gets arrested, he makes the point that he is trying to defy Superman's perceived moral authority, presumably in the name of all humanity (to bring us back to Julian's original point). That makes their opposition rather more engaging than the run-of-the-mill "Superman foils supervillain" story. No?

Then my only problem with all that is, if Luthor doesn't kill (or even hurt?) anyone, and he is only obsessed with pandering to his own ego by being the nemesis of the top dog who gets all the glory, why does Superman spend so much time on him?

I do really like Elliot's Luthor, as I've said. I completely agree the pathos of Luthor's twisted motives make for a better villain. But I can't agree, as you've said, that he does what he does out of frustration at being an isolated genius and whatever else, and that he just takes this out on Superman. It's much more than that. In fact, Elliot MUST have thought it was more than that, because in his own writing he endorsed Jerry's origin story of Luthor. Luthor HATES Superman. That was his first motivation. He was a genius, and a reasonably well-adjusted one, before the accident that affected him. Why have that accident at all? If Luthor has been twisted by his own developing emotions, why have the accident at all, and WHY would he change in two seconds from a benign genius into a slavering madman who swears to destroy Superboy? This was not a natural development. As I said in my other post (on another thread), his brain was damaged by those chemicals, and it would seem to be the case that, even if the accident didn't spontaneously create his jealousy and super-ego obsessions, it most certainly accelerated their seeds to fever-pitch maturity in seconds.

No one can tell me Luthor doesn't kill. This is a man who will stop at nothing. He terrifies people with super-weapons, steals property and money, kidnaps, blows things up, destroys whole city blocks (who's under the rubble?), and must cost the Metropolis taxpayer millions. If no one ever got hurt by Luthor  ::) , there are plenty of other bad eggs around that Superman could spend time stopping.

Plus he tried to steal the SUN!

Hmmm, yeah, I see what you mean. Well, perhaps Superman's ego enters into it too. It's entirely possible that Superman feels that Lex may have a point - like many good guys, he gets guilted out easily - so their encounters are part of an ongoing discussion they're having; a sort of ideological sparring. Also, from an altruistic point of view, Superman admires Lex and wants him to reform, because he knows how much good he could do for humanity, so he spends a lot of time on him.


That goshdurned* accident, I wish it had never happened. Its dramatic purpose is clear, though - it acts as a catalyst for the bad feelings that were already there. I don't know, accidents like that are sort of comic-book shorthand to explain psychological motivations: do you really believe that an upstanding fellow like Harvey Dent would just up and turn into a villain because he got disfigured? You could probably write a whole book on the psychology of comics characters: in comics, people have nervous breakdowns at the drop of a hat and turn into homicidal maniacs. If baldness turned people evil in real life, Ghandi would have been one of the greatest villains of all time.


I know, I know. I just want him to be a good guy. I can't explain it, I just think it makes it more interesting. It's too obvious for Superman to go up against pure evil; we know he's going to win, so it makes sense for his greatest enemy to be someone he feels ambiguous about beating.

*I'm still trying to stay one step ahead of the language filter.

It would seem that by the 1950's, it would have been possible to take some sort of aircraft to the top of Mt Everest and lower someone down with a rope.

Speaking of flying, Lindbergh was hailed as a hero, even though something like 37 people had already crossed the Atlantic by air

You have a lot to learn about Everest.

Have fun with the research.

Ah, but nobody had flown across the Atlantic SOLO and NON-STOP before "Lucky Lindy".  THAT was what made his flight so remarkable -- fighting off fatigue and trying to navigate in poor visual conditions while flying an overloaded plane that needed a firm hand on the control stick at all times.  And he succeeded when far more famous aviators and larger aricraft failed.

Thanls Aldous, I didn't know if it was possible or not, just that it were possible, I wouldn't give the same recognition to the guy who went down on the rope.

DTO, yes, my point exactly.....