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!

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.