Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Superman: Birthright, Issue #5 – “Menace to Metropolis”! In the previous installment, Clark Kent arrives in the big city, makes a scene at the Daily Planet office, bumbles through his terrible interview, saves Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen after Lois crashes the company helicopter (lmao), and then gets knocked the fuck through a building after catching a quick glimpse of his old pal Lex Luthor.

So only four minutes as Superman and already he has a nemesis to fight! That’s called MOVING THE PLOT FORWARD. Thanks Mark Waid, you’re not so bad after all I guess.

Superman: Birthright, Issue #5 [January, 2004]
Written by: Mark Waid
“Menace to Metropolis”

God, look at the ugliness of that cover art. These are supposed to be human faces. They each look like they’re attempting to push out turds of three very different consistencies.

The government building operating the terrifying helicopters is in a frenzy. “Someone’s overridden our remote control of the copters!” cries a frantic private at the command console. An anti-terrorism test has turned into accidental terrorism! “Then abort the mission! Now!” screams General Pickford, not hearing the “overridden our control” part.

It’s no use. They also can’t shoot them down in a heavy urban environment either, even though that would likely do less damage in the long run. I’d make that call. I should be a military general.

“Then how did two of them just fall into the East River?” asks the grim-faced and liver-spotted Head Army Man. Well, sir, according to the droves of crazy, homeless witnesses, it was a strong man in tights flying around what did it. But a copter shot him through a building. I swear on my mother’s piss-stained grave, sir, I’m not making this up!

Well, everyone’s in luck, because the Tights Man can’t be killed or hurt by anything ever, so he gets up from the wreckage more determined than he was before. “Well…that won’t happen again,” he says with his poorly-drawn “durrrr” face.

“Who is that guy?” the people on the street point and ask with awed wonder as Superman flies straight into a bunch of bullets and plows through a copter, breaking it into shrapnel.

♫ Diamonds, Daisies, Snowflakes, That Guy! Chestnuts, Rainbows, Springtime, That Guy! ♫

Superman managed to grab the radio as he busted through the copter, which six distinct voices are talking through at the moment. One of the voices announces that skyscraper evacuations have begun in the heart of downtown.

And in front of the tallest building in Metropolis, Lois Lane bullies Jimmy Olsen into trying to sneak up in order to get a better glimpse of Superman. Lois has balls. Jimmy has no balls to speak of.

Lex Luthor is in his large, crumbling office getting briefed by a screaming man. “Who is he? No visible means of negating gravity, impervious to bullets and explosions and God knows what else–”. He also has time to inform the Bald One that the last chopper has gone down in the park before he gets cut off.

Superman breaks a window entering Luthor’s office. Luthor stays remarkably calm.

“I’d prefer you make an appointm–”
“Shut up.”

Luthor stays seated while Superman speaks to him across the room. “Two dead, seventeen injured. Is this what you’ve come to?”

Luthor doesn’t even know who he is! Superman tells him to drop the “innocent businessman” act and displays the copter radio. “Innocent people suffered because the remote units in those helicopters were sabotaged with ultrasonic signals. I traced them to your towers and to this office.”

Luthor maintains his remarkable calmness, but now the teeth are gritted. When asked how Superman traced these alleged signals, Superman claims he saw them.

This is when Lex Luthor starts turning the tables, making threats that he’ll sue this dork for property damage and false accusations and bankrupt him into learning the high-tech equipment he’s using to fly and use force fields and look so ravishing in those colors of his.

Superman ain’t scared. And Luthor stops mid-sentence when he sees a band of light drape over the front of his shadowed assailant, revealing a portion of the S. Luthor drinks that shit in.

A team of mercenaries enters the office to try to protect the bald bastard. Superman says “No,” when they tell him to freeze, then he does the opposite of freeze. Namely melt. With his eyeballs. All the guns.

“Heat…came out of your eyes… you melted state-of-the-art ordnance,” Luthor states with a frown.
“Add it to my bill, you diseased maniac,” Superman retorts, being a little crude toward the obvious cancer patient in front of him.

Now Lois and Jimmy pop into the office, all smiles. They’re told to leave. She says no.

Oh wow, ok, two good questions. Let’s see… the one that’s bad I had nothing to do with! Heh heh. And the one that’s good was actually me and not this guy. Any other questions?

Lex Luthor puts on his slimy politician hat and starts flapping his gums about the senseless tragedy that befell the city with respect to the creepy self-driving death helicopters. “This stranger’s amazing actions no doubt prevented the loss of countless lives, meaning that whoever he may be…he is a friend to Lex Luthor.”

He plasters on a big phony smile while Jimmy’s camera goes off, immediately followed by a side-eyed scowl.

The soldiers start kicking Jimmy’s ass while Jimmy hollers “Freedom of the press! Freedom of the press!” Superman blasts them with his heat spooge again.

Luthor has had enough and demands everyone to get out of his office! Superman flies away. Security roughs up the two reporters, takes Jimmy Olsen’s camera, and sends them both out the front of the building. Jimmy grabs his own head and has a Rain Man fit about everything. “I let you down,” he moans to Lois, and she’s nice enough to not agree with him out loud. “C’mon, let’s get back to the newsroom. There’s still plenty of story here.”

As Jimmy continues moaning and groaning about losing the proof, his unbroken camera drops from the sky into his already-open hands. Superman winks and grins in the distance looking like a real celebrity. A real Christopher Reeve-type.

And sure enough, the photo of Lex Luthor giving his full shit-eating-grinned endorsement of Superman makes its way onto the front page of the Daily Planet. The front page of the website, anyway. Luthor is designated within the news article as an “astrobiologist”, which is like the biggest waste of a college degree I’ve ever heard. If any astrobiologists are out there reading this, come fucking fight me you 84-pound twerp. Superman is designated as the “Flying Strongman”.

Thank you very much “Martha from Accounting” and “Tim from Human Resources”. Your congratulations mean the world to me.

A bruised and possibly drunk-on-the-job Perry White approaches the cubicle with a sheepish Clark Kent. “Not to interrupt the Pulitzer Awards going on in your darling imagination, but I want you to meet your new partner.”

Lois Lane looks like someone just took a big shit right on her face. “Just for a while, while he learns the ropes,” White promises, but starts walking away all the same, “I wasn’t going to hire him, but he filed one hell of an exposé on the chopper sabotage.”

A guy at Waynetech named Otto Juris (back when he worked at Lexcorp) uses a fake name Paul Paxton these days. He built the copters, and Lexcorp is trying to bid against Waynetech. BUT, since the copters started fucking shooting people for no reason, Waynetech backed out. HOWEVER, the connection (that can’t be proven definitively) caused the government to remove Lexcorp out of the running for the bid. Fascinating stuff, guy!

“That’s the first dirt anyone’s turned up on Luthor that I can remember. I’d say that earns Kent his shot.”

Kent whistles to himself like he think he cute. Lois shoots him a skeptical look, but is nevertheless intrigued!

Hmmm…too many ugly fucking frown lines to be Superman…

“Off a pretty thin lead. How’d you stumble across it?”

She gets right up in his face and he attempts to both maintain a boring white-guy face and his bursting erection. Clark Kent probably had to learn the hard way not to wear regular underwear in the office. I hope that gets addressed in another Clark Kent first-day-on-the-job story.

“Overheard somebody. Followed a hunch,” he responds vaguely, maintaining his pallid and frowny demure. He asks what she’s staring at, and she thinks he looks familiar. She actually puts her hand on his face to keep his mouth open to check his teeth (boner is now inverting itself due to Super Underwear and rupturing his rectum).

She spends several panels staring, taking a load off the comic book artist for about a page.

“…ah, forget it,” she says, giving up and walking away. Off-panel, Clark returns his penis to its normal place with a SuperFart and moves on with his day.

Clark makes a note for himself to let Ma know that the being-boring tactic worked. And he didn’t even have to try that hard. Because he’s boring, you see. “…but Luthor was another matter altogether,” he writes later in an email.

He goes on to write that he bumped into Luthor completely by accident, and was disappointed in what he had witnessed. Clark had always hoped they’d be friends again some day, but it doesn’t seem to be in the cards anytime soon. What with the fact that Lex will be performing experiments on him regularly in the future, that’ll effectively create somewhat of a rift. He also wishes that he was able to practice his identity-hiding chops before “dangling it in front of the world’s smartest man”, but I think we can all be happy that his identity was the only thing he dangled in front of Luthor.

Still, though, this whole dual-identity is just crazy enough to work, you crazy old dingbat! He concludes the email by declaring (brazenly) that he wants to bone Lois Lane, and then a breaking report on the office TV screen announces a hijacking situation. Gotta go do my reporter superhero thing, Ma! Send! Fly away!

I’ll know for next time, sir. Are kale and bouillon cubes still your favorite?

Meanwhile, in Colorado, at a Lexcorp-owned facility, SEX Luthor arrives via helicopter. “Mr. Luthor, sir, what a…pleasant surprise,” says a scientist with a clipboard, who probably first thought to say “pain in my ass”. He asks her to cut out the pleasantries; Lex Luthor doesn’t have time to be fake nice in front of people who aren’t news reporters, politicians, or pre-teen girls! “You followed up on the narrow-band spike of October 14th?” he asks.

“A supernova in Skysector J172, nothing more,” she, Dr. Chun, responds. And the multiple signals on October 29th? Why, those were just the result of atmospheric interference! What did you want me to tell you? That it was the aliens from Sesame Street trying to make contact? Remember those, sir? Yip yip yip yip yip! Heh heh! Never mind, sir, sorry.

She tells this dude to listen up: finding random messages in the sky is going to take some time, so if you’re looking to shut us down because we’re not finding anything, then I’m going to hit you on your shiny dome with a baseball bat! “Put your worries to rest, doctor. I want you to keep monitoring the stars,” he says as he boards the elevator. “Still, tell your team to switch to the emergency generators. There’s about to be a brief power outage.”

And down into the depths of the facility he goes. Down to a secret containment chamber, where a secret thing is being contained within the secret containment chamber!

A large, green crystal shard in a sealed glass tube.

“Marcy? Clear my appointments for tomorrow,” Luthor speaks into the phone, smirking fiendishly, “Tell Mr. Kent I would like to see him.”

Final Thoughts

I can’t wait! Clark Kent is going to show up at Lexcorp and Luthor is going to start stabbing the guy in the chest with a sharp piece of kryptonite, unprovoked, like goddamn Buffy the Vampire Slayer.