Lex Luthor

• 1. Introduction

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  Lex Luthor has no superpowers, no secret identity and no alien heritage, yet he has outlasted nearly every other enemy of Superman. Writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster created him, and he first appeared in Action Comics #23 in April 1940. Readers of DC Comics know him as Alexander Joseph Luthor, the genius who treats his own mind as a weapon.

  Superman stands for hope and selflessness. Luthor stands for the opposite wager, the belief that human intellect deserves more respect than raw superhuman power. His strength is brains, money and influence over politics, science and technology.

  That raises questions the rest of this story will chase. What does a man with no powers actually want from the strongest being on the planet? Why has his hatred of Superman been explained in so many different ways? And why is he bald, when the answer to that has changed again and again?

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• 2. Intellect Versus Might

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  In the Blackest Night crossover, Wonder Woman binds Luthor in her magic lasso. Under its spell of truth, he confesses that he secretly wants to be Superman. The admission exposes the engine under all his bluster.

  Luthor does not envy heroes for their abilities. He envies the adoration they receive, because he believes the admiration of society is recognition that belongs to him. Proud, calculating, pragmatic and vengeful, he has no ethical principles to restrain his hunger for control. He is certain that only he has the intellect to lead humanity.

  Superman, in his view, is more than a personal rival. An all-powerful protector, Luthor argues, teaches people to lean on someone else and keeps them from reaching their potential. Many times he has claimed that he could build a better life for everyone if Superman would only stop interfering.

  The ambition grows in every version of the character. Each incarnation begins by craving applause and command over Smallville or Metropolis. The target eventually swells to Earth, and sometimes to the whole universe. Running alongside it is the urge to destroy Superman and humiliate him, either by winning without any superpowers or by proving that Superman acts from selfish motives.

  The claim that he would help humanity does not survive a test. When Superman had been out of sight for a year, he returned and pointed out how Luthor had spent that time. Instead of curing disease or achieving technological breakthroughs, Luthor had gone looking for "a big destructive machine so he could break things."

  His ego also blinds him. Luthor has often been shown proof that Clark Kent is Superman, and he almost always rejects it. In his mind, a man with such power could never bear spending half his time pretending to be ordinary. In one post-Crisis story, a computer analysis reaches the correct conclusion, and he decides that both the machine and its programmer must be at fault.

  In stories by Grant Morrison appearing in JLA and 52, Luthor cannot believe that Superman truly cares about a planet that is not his native world. He decides the hero's good deeds are passive-aggressive ways of flaunting power and popularity. When Superman helps form a new, powerful Justice League of America, Luthor treats it as a direct challenge. His answer is an "Injustice League" of supervillains built to rival it.

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• 3. A Mistaken Haircut

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  Superman #10, dated May 1941, shows a Luthor who is completely bald, noticeably heavier and marked by visible jowls. Only months earlier he had been a middle-aged man with a full head of red hair. The change was not a story decision. It was an error.

  The mistake is attributed to Leo Nowak, a studio artist who illustrated the Superman newspaper dailies at that time. The bald look appeared in the strip first, then in the comic book. Comics historians noticed that the new Luthor closely resembled a stockier, bald henchman from Superman #4, published in Spring 1940. They guessed that Nowak had mistaken the henchman for the villain. DC Comics editor Bob Rozakis later confirmed it. The sudden hair loss has been referenced several times in the decades since.

  The debut story that gave Luthor his red hair is an odd one. He lives in a flying city held aloft by a dirigible and plots to provoke a war between two European nations. Lois Lane and Clark Kent investigate, and Lois is kidnapped. Luthor fights Superman with a green ray and loses. Superman destroys the dirigible with the villain still aboard and concludes that he is dead.

  Death became a pattern. Stories in those first years kept ending with Luthor apparently killed, and he kept turning up alive later. That set him apart from Superman's previous archenemy, the Ultra-Humanite, who escaped cleanly at the end of most stories.

  Superman #4 sends him after a weapon stolen from the U.S. Army, a device capable of causing earthquakes. In a second story in that issue, he builds a city on the sunken lost continent of Pacifo, populated by recreated prehistoric monsters. Superman foils him, and the dinosaurs he created seemingly kill him. In Superman #5, he places hypnotic incense in the offices of leading financiers so that he can profit from a nationwide economic depression. Superman smashes his plane in mid-flight.

  These schemes chase money or world domination. Luthor shows no deep animosity toward Superman, only the resentment of a man whose plans keep being ruined. The obsessive hatred arrived later.

  The war years brought an unexpected brush with government censorship. The War Department asked for certain Superman newspaper dailies to be pulled. The strips in question were created in April 1945 and showed Luthor bombarding Superman with radiation from a cyclotron. That violated voluntary wartime guidelines meant to help conceal the Manhattan Project.

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• 4. The Smallville Fire

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  Adventure Comics #271, published in April 1960, gave the villain a first name. Lex was later said to be short for Alexis, a detail eventually retconned to Alexander. The issue came after DC Comics reimagined the Flash in 1956, which began the Silver Age and a wave of reinvented characters. The older Golden Age stories of Superman and Batman were later said to have taken place on Earth-Two, a parallel universe within the DC Multiverse.

  This new Luthor was a teenager in Smallville who worshipped Superboy. In one telling, Lex saves the young hero from kryptonite, and Superboy builds him a private laboratory in gratitude. Lex is determined to prove he is Earth's greatest scientist by creating artificial life. After thousands of experiments, he produces a living protoplasm. Overjoyed, he accidentally starts a chemical fire.

  Superboy puts out the blaze but spills other chemicals while doing so. The artificial life form is destroyed, along with the research notes that took years to compile. The fumes also make Lex's hair fall out. Unwilling to blame himself, he decides that Superboy was jealous of his intellect and caused the fire on purpose. Feeling betrayed by his hero and friend, he swears revenge.

  His first schemes are grand engineering projects around Smallville meant to steal Superboy's thunder. Without Lex knowing, Superboy quietly supports them, hoping the constructive work will console him. Each project fails badly, and Superboy must step in. Lex wins only the scorn of the townspeople, and his hatred grows. After Lex's first attempt to murder Superman fails, Superboy declares that they are even. He hopes Lex will straighten out and use his intelligence to help humanity.

  This origin makes the feud a personal one. It also suggests that Luthor might have grown into a better person if events had gone differently. Elliot S. Maggin's novels Last Son of Krypton and Miracle Monday play up that tragedy, and the idea that Lex and Clark could have been a force for good together. In 1962, Jerry Siegel adjusted the backstory so that the two could fight as teenagers, and so that the baldness belonged to the origin.

  Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane #23, from 1961, gives Lex a family. His parents are Jules and Arlene, and he has a younger sister named Lena. When Lex turns criminal, the family moves away and changes its name to Thorul, an anagram of Luthor. Lena is a toddler at the time and grows up unaware of her real surname. Her parents tell her that her older brother died in a mountain climbing accident. Lex watches over the grown Lena, making sure she never learns she is tied to one of Earth's greatest villains.

  As an adult, this Luthor wants to kill Superman and rule the planet as a stepping stone to the universe. He often teams up with Brainiac, though the two betray each other as well. He is jailed repeatedly and escapes routinely. He also makes sure to be out of prison on the birthday of Albert Einstein, which he treats as a holiday.

  A non-canonical "imaginary story" from 1961, titled "The Death of Superman," lets him finally succeed in killing the hero. To do it, he pretends to reform and befriend Superman.

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• 5. Lexor and the Warsuit

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  In that 1961 story, Luthor lures Superman to a distant, arid planet orbiting a red star, where Kryptonians lose their power. Luthor befriends the inhabitants and helps them rediscover lost technology that restores their water supply. The grateful people see him as a hero and Superman as a villain. They rename their world Lexor, and it becomes his regular retreat between attempts to conquer Earth. There he meets a local woman named Ardora, first called Tharla, and the two fall in love and marry.

  A later story returns to Lexor with Luthor deciding to retire for good. He learns that Ardora has borne him a son, Lex Luthor Jr. A few weeks into family life, he discovers that the planet suffers from the same core instability that destroyed Krypton. While building a "Neutrarod" tower to stabilize it, his hatred of Superman returns. He admits to himself that life feels unsatisfying without their conflict.

  Beneath Lexor he finds an ancient laboratory, a relic of the planet's lost age. He spends weeks building a "warsuit," a highly destructive suit of flight-capable power armor designed to match Superman in physical combat. To test it, he commits acts of destruction across the planet and feigns ignorance about the "mystery marauder." When Superman arrives, Luthor attacks him in the armor. The people of Lexor realize who the marauder is, and learn that he does not care what he has done to them.

  During the fight, an energy blast from Luthor overloads the Neutrarod. Lexor is destroyed along with everyone on it, including Ardora and Lex Jr. As after the Smallville fire, Luthor cannot face his own responsibility. He psychologically blocks part of his memory to persuade himself that Superman is to blame. His thirst for vengeance returns stronger than before.

  The suit itself has a toy-shelf origin. George Pérez designed the warsuit for the Super Powers toyline of the early 1980s, and it entered the comics in 1983. It vanished in 1986 when Crisis on Infinite Earths rebooted continuity. It returned in 2004, now built from Earth and alien technology, including tech from Apokolips, with various forms of kryptonite in its gauntlet.

  The red-haired Golden Age villain, meanwhile, survived on Earth-Two as Alexei Luthor. In DC Comics Presents Annual #1, from 1982, Alexei teams up with Lex of Earth-One. Alexei is arguably colder. He would destroy all of Earth to prove his superiority, while Lex hesitates because he has no wish to rule a lifeless world and does not want his sister to die. They extend the alliance to Ultraman, since the Luthor of Earth-Three is a good guy.

  In the 12-issue Crisis on Infinite Earths, Luthor and Brainiac recruit an army of supervillains across the Multiverse. Alexei complains that the army does not need two Luthors, and Brainiac kills him. When the universes converge into one, Luthor goes back to prison with his memories of the Crisis erased.

  The pre-Crisis Luthor gets a final story in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" He finds Brainiac's head and hopes to revive his old partner. Instead, Brainiac takes over his body. Luthor begs a superpowered Lana Lang to kill him, and she does.

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• 6. Tycoon Versus Scientist

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  For the 1986 limited series The Man of Steel, Marv Wolfman and John Byrne rebuilt Luthor from scratch. They wanted a villain the 1980s would recognize, and they chose an evil corporate executive. Wolfman, who wrote for Action Comics, explained his reasoning: "My view was if he could afford all those labs and giant robots he wouldn't need to rob banks." He also wanted a villain without powers. "Luthor's power was his mind."

  Byrne modeled the new Luthor on the businessmen Donald Trump, Ted Turner and Howard Hughes. At first he was brutish and overweight, and later he became a sleeker, more athletic figure. His hairline now recedes naturally, with no chemical fire involved. He is born in the Suicide Slum district of Metropolis, a product of child abuse and early poverty who is driven to become a self-made man. As a teenager, he takes out a large life insurance policy on his parents and sabotages their car brakes. After graduating from MIT, he founds LexCorp, which comes to dominate much of Metropolis.

  He does not fully appear until the fourth issue, over a year after Superman arrives. Terrorists seize his yacht, and Superman rescues it. Luthor admits that he knew about the attack and let it happen to watch the hero perform. He then tries to hire him. Enraged, the Mayor deputizes Superman to arrest Luthor for reckless endangerment. The charges are quickly dropped. Still, the humiliation of a public arrest, plus Superman's refusal to work for him, leads Luthor to pledge Superman's destruction simply to prove his power. In these stories he also courts Lois Lane, who plainly does not return his feelings.

  Not everyone loved the businessman. The Final Night and other 1990s stories restored his scientific brilliance. By 2000, it was said that his real accomplishments in several scientific fields had helped LexCorp succeed so quickly. Neil Gaiman voiced the nostalgic view: "It's a pity Lex Luthor has become a multinationalist; I liked him better as a bald scientist. He was in prison, but they couldn't put his mind in prison. Now he's just a skinny Kingpin."

  Mark Waid's 2004 series Superman: Birthright tried to blend the two. It restores the Silver Age idea that Lex befriended Clark Kent as a young man. The two find kinship as outsiders who share a wish to explore space and find alien life. Lex discovers kryptonite samples in Smallville and uses them to power a machine meant to pierce space and time and reach Krypton. Clark falls ill near the device, and Lex mistakes this for doubt about his sanity. An explosion follows, and the radiation blast strips away his hair. Years later, research built on his ideas about alien life earns the fortune that founds LexCorp.

  Waid had wanted to bring back the mad scientist. He conceded that the corporate Luthor was easier for readers to recognize. His reasoning, from the trade paperback, was that a Luthor allowed to operate uncontested for years "makes Superman look ineffectual."

  The 2009-2010 series Superman: Secret Origin rewrote the past again. Lex grows up in Smallville with his younger sister Lena and an abusive, alcoholic father. When Clark offers friendship, Lex rejects it. While in high school, he arranges for his parents to die in a car accident and uses the money to travel the world. Action Comics Annual #13, in 2011, adds that he studied under Ra's al Ghul and worked as a weapons maker for Darkseid. Back in Metropolis, he uses public relations to present himself as a near-savior, even granting good fortune to a random citizen. Superman's arrival threatens that image, especially after the hero tells the public to look to themselves for heroism. The Daily Planet, which Luthor nearly bankrupts in retaliation, becomes the center of the opposition.

  After DC Rebirth in 2016 and the 2017 storyline "Superman Reborn," this history largely returns. It gains a new layer in Justice League. Luthor's father Lionel worked as a scientist for the immortal villain Vandal Savage. Through that work, Lionel reached across space and time and brought a Martian child, J'onn J'onzz, to Earth. Lex and J'onn briefly became friends as children.

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• 7. Presidents and Clones

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  Superman (vol. 2) #2 gives Luthor his most famous weapon against Superman. After discovering that the cyborg Metallo is powered by a heart of kryptonite, he steals it and makes a ring for himself. He wears it as a symbol that he is untouchable. Radiation poisons him, and he has his right hand amputated to stop the cancer. The disease has already spread, and his condition is terminal.

  Luthor fakes his death in a plane crash in the Andes. In secret, his brain is moved into a younger, taller, healthier cloned body with a full head of hair. He presents himself as Lex Luthor II, his own illegitimate son from Australia, who only wants to do good. The new Supergirl falls for him. The clone body eventually breaks down, and he loses his hair and ages rapidly. Lois Lane exposes the scheme with Superman's help. Cornered, Luthor activates technology that Brainiac left on Earth and destroys large sections of Metropolis. He ends up a prisoner in his own body, unable to move or even blink.

  The demon-lord Neron then offers to restore his health in exchange for services and his soul. Luthor does not believe in souls, so he agrees. Later, he stands trial and claims a violent clone made by renegade Project Cadmus scientists committed all his crimes. He is acquitted.

  With a gang of villains and a reality-warping artifact called the Worlogog, Luthor attacks the Justice League. The Joker gets hold of the Worlogog, and a telepathic attack makes him briefly sane and remorseful. Luthor has him use it to undo the deaths, which leaves little evidence against Luthor. Batman concludes that Luthor merely used the Joker to avoid murder charges. Superman sees a sign that Luthor does not truly want innocents to die.

  Luthor later marries Contessa Erica Alexanda Del Portenza, and they have a daughter, Lena. When Brainiac 13 offers him control of future technology in exchange for his daughter, Luthor accepts. He tells Superman he now has a "kingdom." Of his daughter, he says: "As for my princess... I can always make another."

  Then Luthor runs for office. He becomes President of the United States on a platform of technological progress, and his first action is to send Congress a proposed moratorium on fossil-based fuels. On election night, Batman warns him that he can keep the kryptonite ring or the White House but not both. Superman is so enraged that he splits one of Saturn's small moons in half with a single flight. Luthor hands LexCorp to Talia al Ghul and appoints Amanda Waller as Secretary of Metahuman Affairs and Cat Grant as White House Press Secretary, both serving from 2001 to 2003.

  His rise is helped by the unpopularity of the previous administration's handling of the Gotham City earthquake crisis during the No Man's Land storyline. He wins further goodwill by working to rebuild Gotham. Batman learns that he forged deeds to Gotham's land in his own name. Bruce Wayne severs the commercial ties between Wayne Enterprises and the government. Luthor retaliates by arranging the murder of Wayne's lover, Vesper Fairchild, and framing him for it. When Imperiex destroys Topeka, Kansas, Luthor knew the attack was coming and warned no one, so that Earth could go to war and he could prove his leadership.

  The presidency ends in the Superman/Batman series. A kryptonite asteroid threatens Earth, and Luthor has been injecting himself with a version of the super-steroid Venom mixed with synthetic kryptonite. It increases his strength and speed but makes him irrational. He tells the media that Superman is drawing the asteroid toward Earth and offers a billion-dollar reward for his capture. When that fails, he injects more Venom, puts on a warsuit and fights Superman directly. Maddened, he admits he has no proof, and he reveals that he traded Doomsday to Darkseid for technology. The confession is broadcast. Talia has sold LexCorp to the Wayne Foundation, and Luthor flees as a fugitive. Pete Ross briefly assumes the presidency.

  He returns during Infinite Crisis and its aftermath. Alexander Luthor Jr. impersonates him, and the real Luthor, calling himself Mockingbird, forms a Secret Six to counter the imposter's Secret Society of Super Villains. Afterward, he oversees Alexander's execution by the Joker in Crime Alley. Then he turns the dead man's body to his advantage in the 2006-2007 series 52. He persuades the public that the imposter, not he, committed the crimes. He founds the Luthoran Church and becomes spokesman for the Everyman Project, which gives ordinary citizens powers through artificial metagene treatment.

  On New Year's Eve, with Superman missing, he switches off the powers of nearly everyone in the program in order to discredit a new hero, Supernova. The result is death, injury and millions of dollars in damage. Supernova's rescue minimizes the disaster, and Luthor's plot fails. Natasha Irons, a program member, discovers that Luthor has given himself nearly all of Superman's powers. He considers conquering Earth and renaming it Lexor. She triggers an electromagnetic pulse, and her uncle Steel knocks him out. He faces more than 120 criminal counts, and Clark Kent's articles reveal the full nature of the crimes.

  He is cleared a year later, but his reputation is ruined. Doctor Sivana has drained much of his wealth, and Lana Lang now runs LexCorp. Furious, he assembles kryptonite and the villains Metallo and Kryptonite Man to power a Kryptonian warship. Superman destroys it. In Salvation Run, Luthor is exiled with many of Earth's villains, takes command, and builds a makeshift teleporter powered by unwilling fellow villains. After he uses it, he sets it to self-destruct and kills the Parademons that were attacking them along with the living batteries.

  In Final Crisis, he turns against Libra after learning that Libra is a prophet of Darkseid. He refuses to be a mindless slave while Earth is largely destroyed. He helps Superman assault Darkseid's forces and calls it a legendary first team-up between "good" and "bad."

  The next storyline brings a conviction. General Sam Lane offers him a chance to serve his sentence working for Project 7734, studying the captured Brainiac. Luthor uses Brainiac's ship to kill his guards, and the two villains flee. Later, a robot double of Luthor accompanies Brainiac to New Krypton and tampers with the body chemistry of the captive Reactron. Reactron kills himself, and the chain reaction destroys New Krypton and all but a handful of its 100,000 Kryptonian inhabitants. Because Earth is at war with New Krypton, Luthor is praised and receives a presidential pardon for all his past crimes.

  In Blackest Night, he fears that everyone he has murdered will rise as undead Black Lanterns. He becomes an Orange Lantern deputy, powered by avarice, but the ring soon passes to Larfleeze. Afterward, in the storyline "The Black Ring" by Paul Cornell, he fuses with a powerful entity from the Phantom Zone. It could bring peace and bliss to the universe, but he renounces it. His greatest enemy would never suffer again if he used it.

  The 2011 New 52 reboot removed his Smallville childhood. This Luthor works with the military and John Henry Irons on armor called "Metal-Zero" and tortures Superman to test his power. He feeds Clark Kent tips under the codename "Icarus." He later joins the Justice League for a time. In Doomsday Clock, Adrian Veidt approaches him about finding Doctor Manhattan, and the story ends with Luthor considering improvements to Veidt's methods.

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• 8. Rankings and Screens

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  In 2009, IGN ranked Luthor fourth on its list of the 100 Greatest Comic Book Villains of All Time, behind only the Joker, Magneto and Doctor Doom. Wizard magazine placed him eighth in its own ranking of the 100 Greatest Villains of All Time.

  His path onto film began with Lyle Talbot in Atom Man vs. Superman, released in 1950. Gene Hackman played him in the Superman film series of 1978-1987, and Kevin Spacey took the part in Superman Returns in 2006. Jesse Eisenberg played him in the DC Extended Universe in 2016-2017. Nicholas Hoult has the role in the DC Universe from 2025 onward.

  Other screens shaped the comics in turn. The 2001 television series Smallville, which follows Clark Kent as a teenager and young adult, shares with Birthright the strained relationship between Lex and his father Lionel. The Superman Adventures comic line, based on the animated television series, tells a gentler version of the post-Crisis origin. In that version, Lex's intelligence outshines other children in Suicide Slum, and his parents die in an accident. He uses the insurance to pay for MIT. His hatred of Superman grows because the people of Metropolis admire the hero more than they admire him.

  In 2009, the story of Luthor's collapse as president became a direct-to-video animated film, Superman/Batman: Public Enemies. The most telling detail of the character may be the one from his trial in Superman #4: even after decades of deaths, resurrections and rewrites, he is still being brought back.

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