Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Superman: Birthright, Issue #7 – “Friend or Foe?”! Back at it after the briefest of detours. In the previous installment, Lois and Clark visit Lex Luthor, and not only does he not remember Clark at all from childhood, but he’s a big, crazy creep! Who would’ve thought!

So Clark, maintaining his journalistic integrity, must write about Lex Luthor’s Superman research-based Superman opinions, and now the city is afraid of him.

Too bad things went south immediately with this whole superhero idea, huh? Now we get to see Clark flail around trying to get everyone to like him.

Superman: Birthright, Issue #7 [April, 2004]
Written by: Mark Waid
“Friend or Foe?”

And even as Clark Kent, the world around him seems to be unintentionally shutting him out. On Monday in the office, everyone signed Phoebe’s birthday card…except for him. On Tuesday, Clark asks Lois to pass him some milk for his coffee, but she doesn’t even hear him. On Wednesday, the janitors and the end of the day walk by Clark and turn off the lights to the office. So lonely! So lonely! So lonely! *Sting bass riff*

On Thursday, everyone from the newsroom meets up at a restaurant…except for Clark. They pulled the old switcheroo, telling people to convene at one restaurant and then later telling everyone but Clarky a different restaurant! Lois and Jimmy almost missed the memo and got caught in the rain, so they show up soaked. The room is already throwing shade. Talking smack. Straight dissin’. “The guy has the charisma of a mailbox. You hardly even realize he’s there, and then you remember he’s been standing next to you for ten minutes. It’s like he’s going out of his way to be dull.

Lois thinks that’s a little harsh, but doesn’t disagree too vehemently! He’s just shy is all.

Another woman tells Lois that he’s not shy, she just thinks that because he has a crush on her. Jimmy admits he does too and slinks in his chair; Lois pretends this little weasel isn’t even in the room. “It’s no crime to be quiet. You want him to wear a red cape?” Lois asks, and if there was any time at all to make the connection, this would have been it. The moment passes, and she’ll never get to that point again.

“It’s the only way he’d get your attention,” responds the other woman bitterly. Cat fight! Meow! Hiss! Scratch! Purr!

What none of these people know is that Clark is across the street, at an empty restaurant table, spying on the conversation with his magic Kryptonian yellow-sun-fueled hearing. Lois asks what would happen if he walked into their restaurant right now and saw everyone purposefully excluding him. The response? Maybe he’d show a little emotion for once.

Showing emotion is awful! A real zero-sum game. Never let other people know you have feelings.

The conversation gets cut-off in Clark’s ears by a bridge explosion somewhere else in town! Before the waitress even finishes asking him if he needs anything else, he bolts like a Sonic the Hedgehog blur out of the restaurant. Cash floats slowly down to the table. Looks like only $2.50! Cheapskate much?

Horns are honking, cars are trying to scramble off the suspension bridge quickly without much success. Before it has a chance to buckle, rumble, collapse, and crumble (!), Superman is already Superman-dressed and grabbing every loose cable he can get his tender little hands on.

People are out of their cars and on the bridge running, but they stop to see what Superman is doing. Just like in Mark Waid’s Captain America, the dialogue of the civilians is slow-witted and effusive. Just a lot of “Izzat him?” and “Dude, look at Superman go! Go, Superman, go!” Good job, Mark, you’ve really captured the spirit of the American everyman.

Somewhere offsite, Lex Luthor sits at a laptop watching a feed of the bridge, listening to the cheers of Superman. “Oh please. First, the bang…now the whimper,” he declares as he presses a key. Another explosion rocks the other side of the bridge. Superman gasps in agony, trying to hold onto what he can as more snapped cables cause further collapse.

“Oh my God! He’s not holding the bridge! He’s tearing it down! Run! Run!” yell a couple of bridge ninnies.

Lex marvels at the splendor. “And, if my theories are correct, there’s icing on the cake…” he mutters to himself quite diabolically. He hits another key on his laptop with a TAK.

It’s unclear to me exactly what this TAK did, but kryptonite is involved. As Superman scrambles around the bridge, hollering at everyone not to panic, he suddenly grips his chest and makes an embarrassing gurgling sound. Like this: “–KK-KKUUHH–”. Is that a gurgle? Sounds more like a rooster crowing.

OK, look man, that’s not helping.

He turns slightly green, crashes on the bridge pavement, eyes bulging hysterically, while a woman yells for help. She’s desperately hanging on to the side of the bridge! This sickly-looking bastard slumps and flumps over to her and uses everything he’s got in him to hoist back up onto the bridge. “You sound hurt. Are you hurt? What’s wrong?” she asks panically.

He doesn’t know. Then somersaults down into the river.

Cool rescue.

Superman makes the front page news on the next day’s Daily Planet.

“DEMOLITION MAN? Failed rescue or deliberate sabotage? Eyewitnesses argue. Lex Luthor warns city to ‘maintain its vigilance’, offers to match federal funds for alien investigation.”

Clark Kent is back at his parents’ farm. He’s reading over Martha’s shoulder in her Fox Mulder conspiracy nut home office! They discuss the feeling he felt on the bridge, it was a feeling he hadn’t felt since he was 15. Nausea, fever, sudden weakness. Diarrhea! Prolapsed anus! Scurvy!

Clark is impervious to the flu, so this is something else. Something deliberate. And Lex was involved back then too, oddly enough.

We see a quick panel of 15-year-old Clark afflicted with this mysterious ailment and he looks like a coked-up Sufjan Stevens.

Come on feel the KRYPTONITE

Martha can’t find a record of Lex living in Smallville at all 10 years ago. No school enrollment documents, no county clerk office files, no certificates, no nothing. All gone. And a guy like Lex, he can purge any damn record he feels like.

Jon’s been bugging everyone around town, and every time he mentions the Luthors the townsfolk are quick to change the subject. He gives his large adult son a noogie and tells him not to be too hard on himself. If he knows his son, then he knows his son is blaming himself for the monster Lex Luthor became. Nuts to that! Clark was a good friend! All sorts of nice and shit!

Hell, we get treated to a flashback of Clark bringing his redheaded, scowling friend home for dinner one day while they were in high school. Lex looks like he’d rather chop off his own dick with a plastic cocktail sword than be in the Kent household. At this time, Lex had just moved from Metropolis. Martha asks if he’d like lemonade, Lex answers with a curt “No.”

Martha and Clark talk about Lex behind his back. “Seems awfully old for ninth grade,” she observes, and Clark tells her it’s because he doodled a bunch of quantum physics shit all over a placement test instead of answering the questions properly. He’s also beefing with the principal after fixing the school furnace in four minutes without permission. His “fix” involved inventing a clean-burning heat pump replacement.

Jon asks if Lex had ever seen a farm before. Clark says he asked, but Lex grunted in response.

Your face isn’t helping much either, kid.

Ol’ Jonny is in the barn trying to fix his ancient milking machine. Lex spends about three seconds touching it before it starts humming as loud as a dang Cape Canaveral rocket launch, scaring the cows and pissing off Jon. Lex complains that the machine is twice as efficient now, but scared cows are scared cows. They’re also sacred cows. It’ll take months, years, to unscare them! Understand? These are now hamburger cows, doggonit. Go get the grill.

Clark tries to apologize on Lex’s behalf, but halfway through a sentence the little dork runs out of the barn. It doesn’t take long for Clark to catch up with his super speed, assuring him that Jon wasn’t yelling at him (he was), but he was yelling over the noise (and at Lex). Don’t worry, Clark is still annoyingly friendly! Hey, he’s got something to show you! Do you like SPACE?? Well, he’s got a telescope in the bedroom, all shiny and new. You can see stars and teenage girls undressing in houses that are two miles away, and–

“What did you have to do to get this?” Lex asks with complete astonishment, like telescopes are earned with a few less-than-willing blowjobs.
“Nothing. Have a birthday. My Uncle Kendall sent it.”
“Wait. Someone gave you this? For free?”
“That’s… how a birthday… works,” Clark responds, befuddled. Lex is a Bad Boy because he never got a birthday present? Oh boo hoo. My parents gave me bags full of razor-sharp broken glass, and now I blog about comic books.

Clark tells Lex to find Capella in the sky. After a couple of directions, Lex shoves him and tells him he doesn’t need help to find Capella. “I’m not stupid,” Lex whines with a gaping hole of self-awareness and giant garbage dump full of social stupidity. But then, stupidly, he’s not even looking at Capella, and Clark mentions that he’s off by about six degrees.

I expect Lex to start flailing and thrashing with petulant indignity, but he just gives Clark a bitter stare and then quizzes him on some other space knowledge. Clark passes.

Then they start bonding. They lie on the snowy roof outside of Clark’s bedroom dormer window, drinking Sunny Delight and eating Ho-Hos and talkin’ ‘bout their personal scientific theories. Clark disagrees with their physics teacher, who says that there can’t be anything between ultraviolet and x-rays on the electromagnetic spectrum. Lex finds the physics teacher’s statement preposterous as well, and asks Clark how he can even get out of bed in the morning knowing all these idiots are teaching in the schools.

“I’m never going to fit in here, am I?” Lex moans.
“In Smallville? Sure, I think if you–”
“No. Here.”
“What, Earth?” Clark laughs. Lex doesn’t laugh.
“Never mind, you wouldn’t understand anyway.”

Serves you right for trying to be pity-friends with the creepy kid.

Lex gets pouty again, pretty much calls Clark a fucking hick, and that’s the end of that pleasant flashback.

“The boy was good for you. For a while,” Jon muses, and Clark is inclined to agree. He was always a tough nut to crack, but once in a while he was able to get Lex going on a real conversation. A real conversation on a level that made Clark feel less isolated.

Too bad Lex was a little psychopath whose arms were probably full of cigarette burns and the word “PENIS” carved on his penis with a razor blade.

But, 10 years later, it’s hard to believe Lex is even the same person…

…except for the meteorite. I guess Lex still has the meteorite. Clark always thought Lex lost it in the fire after the explosion…

(woo, suspenseful storytelling here! A real humdinger!)

…but I guess he didn’t…

SO THEY’RE NOT GONNA TALK ABOUT THAT? Come on, that sounds interesting! Ugh…

We end the issue with Lex carrying out a new plan. The bridge debacle worked quite famously, although the risk of losing a precious piece of his kryptonite, or what he calls his “green xenomineral”, was hard to justify at the time. Good thing that the payoff was worth it! Now he confirmed his suspicions that Superman can be affected by glowing green rocks! Prolonged exposure could even likely kill him! Ha ha ha! Funny stuff.

Now Lex has closed all his Echo Park facilities (under the guise of long-term refurbishment) and doubled his employees’ salaries to keep them away while he works.

“As a boy, I stood at this very threshold and–in one bitter moment–was denied the culmination of a lifetime’s dreams and labors,” Lex speaks in front of a green portal of sorts, which I’m guessing is like a Stargate to Krypton. And he’s all salty that he wasn’t allowed to immigrate illegally to the beloved planet of smartypants assholes. Did I get that right?

“It has taken me a full decade to reconstruct my designs and calculations. Now, ten years later, that moment stands before me again…”

Lex turns on the portal and activates a subspace translator. Kryptonian individuals peer out of the portal with looks of contemplative hesitation.

I guess it worked!

Here’s an even greater success: spelling “success” correctly.

Final Thoughts

Lex is an autistic little pain in the ass. Here’s hoping he falls down a mine shaft.

I think something clicked in the last couple of Superman: Birthright issues. Seeing complex, three-dimensional characterizations with both Clark and Lex has helped a lot in my appreciation for this franchise. Lucky for me, there are about 900,000,000 other Superman comic books out there. That’s a lot of chopped-down trees.