Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Superman: Birthright, Issue #8 – “Every Town Has a Secret… Lex Luthor in Smallville”! In the previous installment, Clark is getting a lot of cold shoulders at the Daily Planet merely because he’s boring. Later, while trying to stop a bridge collapse caused by Lex Luthor, he gets blasted with kryptonite radiation and falls into the river.

A flashback shows the start of Clark and Lex’s somewhat tense, but respectable, friendship. Lex was, and still is, a little bastard.

The issue ends with Lex Luthor trying to communicate with Krypton through some kind of portal. I’m not sure what’s going to happen with that yet, but I’m excited to see more Smallville backstory with respect to Lex and his angsty, teenage, aspergers face.

Superman: Birthright, Issue #8 [May, 2004]
Written by: Mark Waid
“Every Town Has a Secret… Lex Luthor in Smallville”

Cool, if the cover art is any indication, Lex Luthor will burn his hair off and he’ll never have hair ever again. What a darn tragedy for Mr. Clean over here.

Jon and Clark scale a weird cliff that overlooks the town of Smallville, which seems completely inaccurate for flat-as-hell Kansas. Especially in a small residential town. But, nevertheless, there they are, and there is where the Luthor house used to be before the wreckage was razed. Sounds like Lex Luthor burned his house down, probably from the heat caused by all the friction from angstily jerkin’ his gherkin.

They had looked for the meteor Lex had buried in this area, but Clark had always assumed it was destroyed in whatever catastrophe ruined the Luthor homestead. Obviously WE know Lex took it with him, but these hicks didn’t know that until Clark confirmed it. Now his fears have been validated: Lex Luthor, his old friend, is now intentionally using the kryptonite on him.

Sorry, buddy. Maybe you shouldn’t have been friends with this piece of shit! Or, better yet, maybe try not having a weakness to kryptonite, you sissy.

Anyway, Flashback Time again! High school, where a young Lex Luthor mouths off to his English teacher. When asked if she’s boring the Honorable Mr. Luthor, he all but says “fuck yeah” and asks her why not make the material relevant if the subject is “deductive reasoning”?

-For example, we know Paul Cho cut first period chemistry because there’s mud on his shoes and it didn’t start raining until after the bell rang.
-OR, Roland McGinley is Lana Lang’s secret admirer since his is the only class schedule that takes him past her locker at the same moments that those love notes were dropped off.
-OR, Jacob Stewart keyed Jack Targoni’s car, because the key he hangs on his belt is now in his pocket.

Good stuff. He’s also got dirt on the teacher:

You frisky young lovebirds!

Clark tries to stick up for Lex like a goddamn moron, and now they both need to stay after school for detention.

“You know, associating with you isn’t exactly improving my social profile,” Clark mutters as he claps a couple of chalkboard erasers together.
“Among philistines? I’m doing you a favor,” retorts Lex, not clapping anything together.

JUMP CUT. Lex approaches the mayor of Smallville with some civics research and notes. Before he even has a chance to get a word in edgewise about anything, Mayor Parr instructs his secretary to call the school immediately and let them know that there’s a kid playing hooky, rabblerousin’ like the dickens in the mayor’s office!

Lex storms out sullenly and throws his notes in the trash. “A Revised Plan for the City Government”. Probably a lot of eugenics and genocide.

Clark seems to think that he was able to understand Lex Luthor better than anyone else, and he could tell that Lex noticed the way everyone – schoolmates, townsfolk, carnies, nuns, Hungarians – looked at him. Like they were all afraid of him.

TOM’S SIDE NOTE: Almost all of that is Lex’s own fault, Clark. Kid’s a jerk.

BUT, at the time, he sort of had his heart in the right place. If not for individuals, then for groups and/or populations of people. He earnestly wanted to make Smallville a better place. He tried to use his family’s money to propose designing and financing a new high school stadium. The school board said no. So Lex started putting his energy and money toward revenge instead.

Clark can think of something else that’s gonna get creamed in about a few seconds.

During the next football game, Clark tries to ask Lana Lang to the homecoming dance but chickens out. Meanwhile, Smallville is losing to a really shitty team for the first time since the original Ghostbusters was in theaters. Turns out that the other team’s coach was sneaking out to the sidelines every few minutes to get some tips from America’s #1 Football Fan hiding under the bleachers, Mr. Not-Bald-Yet Probabilities and Patterns. “Come back in five and I’ll have your entire third quarter mapped out,” says Lex, clandestinely, like a real James Bond spy-type spy man.

Lex’s actions caused a state scoring record. The opposing school’s coach landed a college football gig. Blowjobs were had by all (except Clark and Lex, sorry boys). After the game, Clark congratulates Lex on his victory.

“Was I that obvious?” asks Lex. Only the people who know him. So, just Clark. And goody-two-shoes Gallant to Lex’s Goofus begs him to never do something like that again.

Smallville went undefeated for the rest of the year.

Little was known about Lex’s home life. Presumably, his parents caught onto Lex’s intelligence at an early age and worked him like a dog to try to make him – them – rich and famous. His mother died while he was very young, and his dad was a huge, gaping, bleeding butthole.

Father issues. Sound familiar?

Lex’s dad (I don’t know his name, let’s just call him “Rex” for now) is even rude to Clark, telling him to all but fuck off when Clark knocks on the front door and asks if Lex can come outside to play. He even asks Rex Luthor if he can just wait for him outside. “No,” says the blunt lump of shit before slamming the door in Clark’s pretty face.

…then that means…it’s BROKEN! Ha! “Smartest on Earth” indeed.

Lex was on his way back home just then anyway. He has a device that looks like a metal detector, only it detects aliens instead of metal. “Extraterrestrial matter”, he says, as if the periodic table has a completely different set of elements and on different planets. The thing goes nuts when it’s near Clark.

This would have been a great moment for Mr. Deductive Reasoning, the so-called smartest person in the world, to figure out the connection at this point. But he doesn’t. And he angrily smashes his new machine to pieces. “It doesn’t work!” he bellows petulantly.

“If it’s not right, then it’s worthless! WORTHLESS! Stupid and worthless…” he cries, projecting like hell and making quite an awkward scene. Clark tries to stop him, but Lex runs into his house with tears streaming down his face and starts tearing up his bedroom. Just kicking shit everywhere. Breaking everything. Clark just watches.

Is any friendship worth this? I would’ve bailed ages ago.

Back in the present day, Clark tells Jon that he has about a dozen similar stories of Lex’s outbursts. Each time it happened, Lex would stay isolated in his house longer and longer.

About two weeks after that particular incident, Clark decides (unwisely) to pay his friend another visit to see if he had gotten over…you know, being fucking out-of-control. In that timespan, the kid has skipped school completely and built a makeshift laboratory on the side of his house. God only knows what he’s doing there. Cloning babies, impregnating squirrels, who knows? Clark’s curiosity is getting the better of him. Plus, the lab’s walls are lined with lead, so Clark can’t even use his look-through-women’s-clothes x-ray vision! That means Lex is fooling around with radioactive substances or something. It all sounds so wack.

Lex lets him into the lab after Clark shows him an unknown “peace offering”. He looks disheveled and feral, like he’s been gnawing on drywall for sustenance. He’s been hoping Clark would stop by eventually, honestly. “If you were a reporter, Clark, you’d win a Pulitzer tonight,” he declares, bringing him deeper into the skunky laboratory. Lex needs a witness and a notetaker. This is gonna be huge.

I don’t know about this, man. Are you sure you don’t wanna just tell me you’ve been impregnating squirrels?

Lex admits that he and his dad moved to Smallville because Lex discovered something there while on vacation that validated his belief in extraterrestrial life. He convinced his dad that it was going to make them rich and famous beyond their wildest dreams.

“Uh huh…” Clark says uneasily, starting to make those low-IQ faces again.

Lex unveils his machine, a radiotelescope receiver. All he needs to do is finish the transformer, which will allow him to create the wormhole! And they key this…come closer, Clark…the key is this little piece of…here, Clark, get right up to it, like you’re close enough to smooch it…this little glowing green piece of rock! Here, have a taste.

“The meteorite inside this lead box is the heart of the entire apparatus,” Lex explains, grinning from ear to ear, “It gives off a unique radiation that is inexplicably clean, Clark – and, as impossible as it sounds, completely harmless.”

Of course, Clark stands there contorting his expression like someone threw acid on his face. However, the immensely emotionally unintelligent Lex Luthor interprets Clark’s pained face as an expression of complete disgust at his project. “You – ignorant – jackass,” Lex growls with all the wispy pugnacity of a skinny, 94-pound mouse.

Somewhat incapacitated, Clark tries to defend himself to no avail. “SHUT UP, you stupid hick farmboy! You think I don’t know that look?” Lex squeaks. Now he gets it! Now it’s all coming together! Clark is no better than the rest of them! He’s afraid! He thinks Lex is a freak! Get the fuck out, bitch! Go on, now! Git! *stomp* Get out of here! *stomp stomp* *flail* *clown horn*

“As of this moment, you and your crummy parents – and all of Smallville does not exist as far as I’m concerned!”

“Nothing good will ever come out of this hick town but Lex Luthor! NOTHING!”

Give it up, son. It’s Chinatown.

Right now, Lex is frothing and Clark is crying. Perfect time to test out the machine! Lex flips some big switches. Clark, outside, sees the lights in the whole neighborhood start to dim. The Luthor Boy is overloading the power grid, but he doesn’t care! This is about aliens, man!

Clark hits the barricade so hard he dents it up completely. Meanwhile, the portal grows and swells and crackles and zaps. Before long, a bunch of Krypton nerds are on the other side looking right at Lex with faces of bemused pity or something. “Contact! Yeah! I did it! I really–”

And just like that scene in Terminator 2 with Sarah Connor’s nuclear holocaust nightmare (without the fence-gripping skeleton bones!), an explosion rocks Lex’s big, smug face.

“NOOOOO! The computers! All my notes–! God, the meteorite!” Lex screams, hairless and grasping in the wreckage for his little chunk of green kryptonite. The house is completely destroyed. Just a smoking crater of fire and sadness.

Nearby, a voice yells for help. A dying dad voice, the kind of dying dad voice that comes from a dad who never loved or liked his son, but he’s dying now so he has no other alternatives.

Up yours, fugly! It’s every man for himself!

The blast launches Clark about a hundred feet away. Unhurt, of course, since a bomb exploding in his face is child’s play. But the lasting effects of the kryptonite persists. He’s weak. He can’t help. Only his superhearing and his x-ray vision still worked. He could still hear and see everything.

“By the time the volunteer fire department arrived, everything – including Lex’s father, was cinder and ash,” Clark recounts. As the firefighters attempt to help and comfort the young Luthor lad, he hollers in delirious anguish. “Don’t you touch me! You did this deliberately! You could have saved my father! You could have saved this house!”

So dumb. Everything is everyone else’s fault. Typical narcissist. Textbook dipship syndrome.

Clark blacks out, but he hears the firefighters attempt to chase Lex, who begins to run away. Then they find Clark…

ANYWAY, how’s that for a story!

Jon reiterates to his son that none of this was his fault. Lex Luthor was, and is, an incel! I mean, basically. He was one school shooting away from putting a bullet through his own brain. I’m still of the opinion that Clark should never have consorted with this whackjob.

“If you still want to take responsibility for him, then concentrate on stopping him before he hurts anyone else,” Jon advises quite wisdomly! And the rest is history, as they say, since Superman still hasn’t stopped Lex Luthor after decades of trying.

The next day, Clark returns to work after a mysterious absence and a pretty flimsy alibi, honestly, but no one cares because, pfft, it’s Clark.

There’s quite a ruckus in the office, though! Did Clark miss anything juicy in the zeitgeist while he was away??

“LEX LUTHOR PROVIDES PHOTO EVIDENCE OF WARSHIPS WITH FAMILIAR CREST PENTAGON: SUPERMAN ‘JUST THE FIRST’; VANGUARD OF IMMINENT ALIEN INVASION”

lol

Final Thoughts

Lex Luthor is a little snot-nosed bitch. He should have died! There’s my two cents. So much depth to my analyses, huh? Good thing I don’t get paid a dime for any of this bullshit!