Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Superman: Birthright, Issue #12 – “The Hero Emerges”! This is it, this is the end of the 12-part limited series! Say your goodbyes, get your yearbooks signed, don’t forget to swap phone numbers to stay in touch! In the previous installment, Luthor has hired an army of goons masquerading as Kryptonian invaders to make a mockery of Superman (and level Metropolis just a little bit too, while they’re at it, for fun). Superman spends a good portion of the issue fighting back kryptonite sickness just to keep these smelly teamsters at bay.

Meanwhile, Lois Lane is tipped off about the kryptonite meteorite in Lex Luthor’s lab. She endeavors to sneak in there to attempt to shut off the magic green sickness machine and steal the rock under Luthor’s nose.

She almost succeeded. But Luthor noticed.

And now “the hero emerges”, as it seems. In this iconic twelfth and final issue, does Superman take a giant Superdump on Lex Luthor’s face and then strangle him with a garbage bag? Or maybe a real hero finally shows up, like Wonder Woman? Hey, she’s got comics! Maybe I should read some Wonder Woman comics.

Superman: Birthright, Issue #12 [September, 2004]
Written by: Mark Waid
“The Hero Emerges”

Superman lies on the cracked ground between the Metropolis Mofos and the Kryptonian Kunts. With the blue and red pajama man currently incapacitated, Jimmy takes the TOUGH GUY helm with his INTIMIDATINGLY CRAGGY-FACED PRESENCE. “You guys weren’t half the threat you pretended to be. We did a lot of this ourselves. But we’re not afraid anymore. Get him.”

lol “get him”. OK, Jim.

“Don’t bother,” fuzzy-chested Superman says, bouncing up onto his feet and punching this Van-Gar guy in the ol’ kisser.

This Van-Gar might be a twerpy douche, but this giant laser-shooting tank is not. That can still really kill people!

“Jimmy? Relax,” hairy-breasted Superman says, grabbing the tank by its tread and lifting the thing above his head like it was a soccer ball.

Looks like Superman’s got this covered! No more kryptonite poisoning; perhaps he’s going to stop being a baby? Works splendidly for me! I can check in with Lois Lane now.

Oh geez, she’s screwed!

“I know you accidentally burned off all your hair in a fire, because I just received my copy of Superman: Birthright, Issue #8 in the mail yesterday!”

Lois Lane knows a lot, sir, and now the rest of the city will know what she knows too because the pen is mightier than the sword! You’re not going to decapitate this journalist! Not today!

So she starts talking. He already grabbed the kryptonite from her hand, but she’s talking anyway. A lot of talking. She knows these photographs are real, but from thousands of years ago, as indicated by the differences in modern starcharts! She also knows that, by removing the kryptonite from his power grid, this whole “invasion” is smoke and mirrors and lies and deceit and acting and scheming! What else? Oh yeah, and now Superman is beating up the bad guys as they speak! She knows that too. She knows it all the way deep into her fallopian tubes.

Pfft, whatever, sister. The Lexcorp Army is 100% real, vicious, and feral, and they’ll make short work of Superman and all those dumbshit citizens of Metropolis out there. Jimmy Olsen? Do you think he’s any match for a round of military bullets to the fucking face? Puh-lease.

A big boom reverberates through the building. One of the Lexcorp Army drones radios Lex Luthor to whine about a problem, which Luthor doesn’t want to hear one word about.

Oh, you’re going to say words anyway? *huff* Fine. They can’t leave the building! Someone threw a very large laser-shooting tank in front of the door.

Luthor tells them to find a way out anyway! Meanwhile, Lois is hitting everything she sees in the lab with a wrench, which is some good stuff right there.

Van-Gar doesn’t look very intimidating anymore. “Looks like your boss has cut you loose,” observes Superman while feeding him a mouthful of fist and chips! Right to the teeth.

No way. Lex Luthor is loyal, he would never leave Van-Gar out to dry like this!

“You don’t know him like I do. For instance, did you know that he burned all of his hair off in a fire? Check out Superman: Birthright, Issue #8!”

Superman punches Van-Gar’s lights out, cracks his face mask wide open, and reveals a normal-looking dude. Just some unconscious loser with long eyelashes.

Jimmy tells Superman that it’s cool that he’s feeling better even he does freak him the fuck out. He hands Superman his missing ‘S’ patch, which gets seamlessly sewn back on with laser eyeballs.

“Superman’s own people will tell me how to stop him,” Luthor triumphantly decrees while smacking Lois Lane to the floor! He can just set up one of his time travel Zoom meetings and ask “how do I kill you guys?” to whichever decadently dressed dork he comes across first.

“Using a wormhole to scan Krypton’s past was always only the first step,” says Luthor, doing a lot of talking of his very own, “The true goal was to transmit as well as receive. To establish a dialogue.”

Why, so he can try to get a mail-order Kryptonian bride? Whisk her away from the past and into his waiting arms?

Luthor found out another cool thing you can do with kryptonite. You can make a bomb out of it! You just need a little kryptonite, gasoline, and styrofoam. And honey. And bull semen, certainly. Anyway, he’s got himself a little troop of suicide bombers. Why? Who knows! And who cares! But he’s gonna press this button here: *boop*. Now these bombs are going to go off on a timer. Also, shut up Lois. Out the window with you!

I’m beginning to think that Lois Lane is the most gravity-prone human being on Earth.

Lex Luthor gets bored of Lois Lane’s nonsense and shoves her out of the skyscraper. While his kamikaze mannequins are blowing up the city, Superman will be too busy dealing with that to deal with her! Plus, she’ll probably hit the ground in roughly fourteen seconds. Do you think Superman can catch a falling woman within fourteen seconds? That’s a short amount of time! 1…2…3… and so on. Goes by quick.

One of Luthor’s Army explodes on the street. Everyone’s freaking out, man. That’s some crazy shit. Fake Van-Gar starts glowing green and panics. “Nooooo! It’s trying to detonate! Get it off me get it OFF– I DON’T WANT TO DIE!” he screams like a little baby. A little dying baby.

Superman scoops this miserable sack up and tells him to quit his whining. His kryptonite bomb is beeping like crazy. Lois Lane still falls.

Superman rips the bomb off of Fake Van-Gar’s chest and, presumably, launches it safely away somewhere else in the sky. It might have killed a bird or a blimp or another superhero, maybe, but we’ll never know. The explosion is too big to see what, if anything, died. But I’m sure something died!

Lois’ head is less than five inches from the ground before he catches her. “Hi,” he smiles while she has a fucking heart attack. There’s a full-page spread of Superman holding her safely. His erection is so intense you can see it vibrating right in your face on the paper.

This bald dumbass probably thinks everything’s going to plan. He probably thinks Lois died and all his suicide bombers died and Superman is dead. He’s trying to contact Krypton through his portal again. He’s probably going to explode fire in his own face again just like in Superman: Birthright, Issue #8! I’m not sure if I mentioned that yet.

Does anyone out there know how I can flip this PDF? PLEASE?!

“Come in! COME IN! This is Lex Luthor from the Planet Earth! My world is in dire peril!” Luthor yells into the swirling green void. He gets a lot of broken-up responses from disembodied voices, nothing in any real context, but Luthor keeps desperately yelling and asking for someone to talk to him.

Superman stands a few feet behind Lex, looking at him with pity. He remembers what he said before, what he told his parents back in Kansas about teenage Lex. The teenage Lex who holed himself up in the science lab, or tried to give the mayor his ideas for making Smallville a better place.

“I think he just wants someone to talk to.”

Good for Lex. I’m not entirely sure why he would want this. A guy like Lex Luthor should be smart enough to not need anyone to talk to.

Lex Luthor needs weapons! And ammo! And some Baked Lays! There’s a shortage of Baked Lays! Please help!

Superman grabs this douche by the scruff and drags him away. “Luthor, stop grasping at straws! It’s over!”

And Lex turns his head, looking like he just aged six thousand years in the last couple of minutes. He tries to punch and get away from Superman while the disembodied Kryptonian voices phase in and out, wondering if the whiny bald voice that they’re hearing on their end is even fucking real. Lex Luthor is like “it is TOO real, I’m real! WHY DO YOU THINK I’M NOT REAL? Is it my stupid bald face??”

Superman is, surprisingly, struggling to keep Luthor at bay. He huffs and puffs and tells him he lost and to give it up and pull the plug on your portal doohickey. “You lost! Ask Lois! Ask Van-Gar! Ask everyone who reads tomorrow’s news who started this nightmare, and who stopped it!”

Conveniently enough, it’s at this point the the portal is showing visions of Jor-El and Lara making arrangements to catapult their baby into space. The Last Son of Krypton and all that. Superman watches and grasps at the screen dramatically, all like “Mumsy?! Poppy?! Father?! Mommy?! Wah! Hello?! Wah!”

In the matter of seventeen seconds, he learns that he’s Kal-El from Krypton. Oh boy, how cool is that shit? The planet is gone and you’ve been Clark Kent for 25 years. Who cares?

Nice to meet you. My name is Bleep Blorp of Bloopton.

Oh, I see now. Lex Luthor is in an even match right now because he fisting a shard of kryptonite. “Last of your race. Which makes this genocide,” Lex says, punching Superman with a handful of scary, glowing, green rock, “I’m doing you a favor, Superman. It’s agony being alone in this world.”

Superman punches this doofus right back! Fist to the face style, the old-fashioned way! “You weren’t always, Lex. You made your choice. And so have I.”

Jor-El and Lara keep talking about their decision to launch their baby into almost-the-sun, wondering if they’re making the right choice, and Superman flails at the portal trying to get his parents to hear him. It doesn’t work. He doesn’t get through. Then the portal disappears. lmao

“The multinational conglomerate mogul was ‘visibly pooping his pants’, per many eyewitness accounts on the scene.”

The next day, the Daily Planet’s front page feature, written by strapping young go-getters Lois Lane and Clark Kent, exposes Lex Luthor for his attempts to terrorize the city through means a fake alien invasion. Nice try, punk! Oldest trick in the book!

It’s nice to see that the official Daily Planet website looks even shittier than my dumpheap of a blog. That’s 2004 for you.

Perry White buddies up with his two favorite reporters! Lois Lane is already salty. Luthor’s doctors are already blaming his actions on something akin to “insanity by radiation poisoning”, so this bastard is going to beat the charges. That doesn’t kill White’s buzz one bit. Until that happens, good work! Maybe you can try again next time!

Clark Kent laid the finishing blow! A confession out of Van-Gar, or should he say, John Hargerfort! I knew it all along!

“Thanks for talking me up,” Clark says to Lois after White goes back to his office for a couple shots of whiskey and a nice pud tug, “probably why I still have a job.”
“No. You still have a job because I cadged your crybaby resignation letter before Perry found it,” replies Lois, waving the sheet of paper in Clark’s face.

Well there you go. Looks like this nerd is here to stay. Clark tries to ask her out, but she calls him a crybaby again and tells him to go screw.

“Would it help if I were able to leap tall buildings in a single bound,” Clark asks her with the shittiest of shit-eating grins. And Lois flounders like a real fish about this. A real floppy fish. “I– that’s– n-no! What are you implying? That I have some sort of lame crush on Superman?”

“What are your sources? Did he say something?” she asks him, perking up, getting moist in the loins.
“What, to me?” replies Clark, coy as the dickens, “Come on, you ever see us together?”
“So noted.”

Clark tells Lois to be careful. People still don’t trust that Superfellow. Lois thinks the public will come around. Only a matter of time.

We end back at Krypton, where Superman’s message to his parents actually made it through. Jor-El and Lara watch the screen.

“Mother… Father… …I made it.”

Then, to celebrate the success of their mission and the continued life of their baby, they kiss and fuck.

Final Thoughts

All right, Mark Waid, you certainly redeemed yourself here. After your war crime that was the first seven issues of Captain America from the late nineties, this limited-run Superman origin story has won me over on both YOU, you fat nerd, and Superman in general. As a character. As a man. Etc.

So what does this mean for me? More Superman? Sure, perhaps I’ll stick to this early-’00s era! That way I can possibly see Clark Kent try to unsuccessfully uninstall Bonzi Buddy on some Gateway computer with Windows ME before watching episodes of Becker.