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![[Quarter Bin Recycling Bin]](../img/rblogo.jpg)
![[Luthor, in one of his post-Byrne forms.]](../img/rb2301.jpg)
Around the time of Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC had a number of mustering and moldy comics concepts that, though ultimately serviceable, nonetheless required some maintenance. The necessary work involved more than slapping on a new coat of paint - hence, for the most part, DC did not attempt to repackage its old heroes in new costumes with no other changes and hope that readers would fall for the bait-and-switch.
In general, DC wanted something more: It wanted its core concepts recast to fit under a Marvel Comics editorial standard. A large talent exodus from Marvel had helped this process considerably.
If, in his day as DC's publisher, Carmine Infantino would set in stone a policy which required DC to maintain its own, distinct identity, rather than attempt to retrofit itself with Marvel's, the years around Crisis on Infinite Earths would see a reversal in this standard. Not only Marvel styles but Marvel talent. Figures like Marv Wolfman, Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, and George Perez, who had done much to make Marvel what it became in the late sixties to the early seventies, became movers and shakers across the aisle.
DC's reinvention involved large-scale grafting of the Marvel style and editorial model to pieces that had, in some cases, survived a quarter of a century of publication before anyone had begun to notice the incroachment of Marvel Comics into the superhero market. Such redefinition of self, it seems, did not always confine itself to the how of Marvel; occasional pieces suggest that the what of Marvel would also begin to populate DC books.
In some ways, DC most needed reworking for those franchises that had gone on the longest and made it the most money over the previous decades. While one can see the obvious strategy of taking the cash cows to the veterinarian rather than bring in new stock, one can also note that a cow does not live, or produce, forever. Nonetheless, DC much hoped to restore some or all of the earning potential of key franchises, and the Superman franchise stood foremost among its key titles.
Conflicting editorial policies, by the 1980s, had begun colliding in the Superman books. First, the absurdist Superman model of the sixties, which might include giant gorillas and Turtle Olsens and 30 wonderful flavors of Kryptonite, all of which remained as the legacy of the youth-oriented comics of the Weisinger era, did not fit well with the more adult approach typical of post-Marvel superhero comics. The comics reader of 1980 might actually resent content that seemed to insult his maturity or failed to take his real-world experience too seriously. Readers therefore saw a seventies in which DC both attempted to constrain its properties within a continuity/shared universe model appropriated from Marvel's editorial vision and in which DC dared not refer to Superman's immediate past in the fanciful sixties.
Rather than continue to dodge the embarrassing subject, DC chose, across-the-board, to an editorial housecleaning whereby it could dispense with troublesome character histories and (hopefully) forge a coherent historical model. They hoped to write new versions of strained characters on this clean canvas.
Superman, though, seemed most salvageable among the entire cast of the Superman mythos. Other characters would vanish altogether (although many returned later in new forms: Supergirl, Superboy, Bizarro, the Superman robots, Krypto, the City of Kandor). A few, in-between figures would become the material of the Marvelization of Superman at the hands of John Byrne, who brought considerable Marvel credentials with him.
Excepting the very first incarnation of Luthor - as the red-haired schemer who came to a very early Superman story, ultimately to become something altogether different by the time he found a role as a regular player in Superman stories - previous incarnations of Lex Luthor wouldn't meet a post-Crisis standard.
The boisterous but conservatively dressed Luthor of the Wayne Boring era fit a too-juvenile, too-Code compliant model. Mainly he boasted a lot a panel or two before his master plan failed and he went to jail. Nor, in turn, would the Swan-and-Schaffenberger version in the gray prison uniform pertain well; he best fit formulaic stories that began with him plotting his escape and vengeance and ended with him, back in the same cell, cursing Superman for the failure of his last project.
The Disco Collar Luthor, in the horrendous green-and-purple costume (a scheme that had failed for years to do anything for the Incredible Hulk), belonged as a piece with the version in the prison uniform, except that he wore a jet pack and didn't end up in jail as much, plus he seemed angrier and more arrogant. The Battle Armor version that appeared in the early eighties, in turn, just grafted a war suit and a more extreme revenge motif on the character.
Byrne, when he thought about what to do with Luthor, must have recognized the mad scientist, however you might dress him, owed much to the pulps of the thirties and didn't properly represent a bogeyman of a more modern day.
Byrne therefore fished for an archetype that would seem thoroughly menacing and loathsome to the modern reader, and he dredged up something - presumably from his piece of the collective unconscious of modern man - that much resembled Oliver Stone's view of a venture capitalist. The new Luthor Byrne fabricated still retained the ruthlessness, the relentlessness, and the scientific genius, but now enjoyed the benefits one would expect to accompany these traits if merely applied with a logical plan. So Luthor put aside his ridiculous outfits, took to stylish hand-tailored suits, and somewhat submerged his identity as a scientist among competing roles of white-collar criminal and criminal overlord.
Byrne now had an enemy worthy both of Superman as a villain and as a concept in a post-Marvel version of DC. Imagine a brilliant, scheming mind put to the task of accumulating wealth and power, and in the process, destroying a heroic figure in red and blue. Imagine cold and merciless eyes blazing out behind the brow of a hairless skull. Imagine a figure who could shield his crimes with an army of underlings who could do the jail time while he retained his status within his city. And, furthermore, imagine a criminal genius with no particular moral qualms against dealing with obstructions with extreme prejudice.
Now, take this villain out of late-sixties Amazing Spider-Man comics, improve his wardrobe a bit, slim him down considerably, and change his name to Lex Luthor, and you have what Byrne created.
![[Kingpin as the excellent post-Ditko Spider-Man villain.]](../img/rb2302.jpg)
Those fortunate enough to have read the original four years of Amazing Spider-Man might notice the book's shifting of scope at the end of creator Steve Ditko's tenure on the book. While together Lee and Ditko had planted the concept firmly on a heroic scale so that the superheroic might appear more amazing by simple parallax, this would change when the Lee-Romita era of the title began.
Ditko's view of both virtuous and corrupt humanity had helped him define the scale of villains, particularly where such figures engaged in the more mundane types of crime. Therefore, in his gangster-type criminals, though these might appear with the requisite amount of comic-book flash, at a deeper level the characters tended to remain losers, unexceptional men who turned to crime because character weaknesses and simple lack of abilities forced them into a role unneeded by productive men. A criminal, by this model, foredoomed himself to failure by the same tendencies that inclined him to crime in the first place; and, if the recollections and analyses of a generation later hold any truth, Ditko had something of the sort in mind even for Spider-Man's most potent early villain, the exceptionally successful Green Goblin.
While one might argue the validity of Ditko's concept of villainy - particularly as it relates to the social responsibility of cartoonists, who may have ethical qualms against glorifying armed robbers to a market hypothetically composed of youngish readers - we might note, with out too much dispute, that this provided a fundamental limitation of real-criminal type villains to a scope somewhat smaller than that of Marvel's heroes.
To the point of this digression, though: Ditko's unfortunate departure from Spider-Man made another type of villain possible, whose properties best see light in the post-Ditko creation the Kingpin, a gangster overlord blown up to a superheroic scale. Fiendishly strong, clever, motivated, and amoral, the Kingpin represented most of the heroic virtues placed in a man without the underlying morality to make him a hero; in him you might see Professor Moriarty's brain as it would have developed in a wrestler's body.
The Kingpin represented an excellent nemesis for Spider-Man, and would, with varying success, play the role for other, more urban heroes, like Daredevil and the Punisher. He stood with one foot planted in the organized crime of the real world and the other planted in the context of superhero comics where costumed men might throw automobiles at each other.
Kingpin, at the same time, moved on Spider-Man's scale and within the criminal milieu of the metropolis of the post-World War II twentieth century. As such, he served as an anchor point between the real world and the Marvel universe.
Superman, by 1985, much needed some kind of similar anchor point to control the decades-old problem of scale that had forced several attempts to redefine the character. Where Superman became too godlike, his stories had to enter channels of a similarly fantastic character. His connection with humanity had mostly to do with ethos and very little to do with day-to-day reality; everyday nuisances and menaces, such as traffic accidents or winter colds could never mean anything to a being of his nature.
Like Spider-Man in his third year, but many times more so, Superman could use a villain who could connect him back to something like a real world, both to establish his humanity and to throw his remarkable properties into relief.
Byrne chose an old villain, rather than creating a new one, for this. So he took Lex Luthor, that much-remade figure with not a little of the ridiculous attaching to him from the decades in which he had vied against Superman, and rebuilt him.
The Luthor of the seventies spent much time in simple, predictable, and hopeless physical contests with Superman, aided by various gadgets and supplemental devices often of his own manufacture. But this ignored key questions about the character.
For instance: If we grant that Luthor hated Superman with a monomaniacal passion and directed his first-level intellect to the end of Superman's destruction, why did he use the methods he did? Furthermore, why did he never direct his intelligence toward staying out of trouble long enough to build himself some financial, social, and political infrastructure? Could an inventor of his caliber actually have failed to consider the possibilities inherent in the residuals that return from a few good patents?
Byrne approached Luthor as if the man could have planned his life the way adults do in the real world. The revision of Superboy out of the Superman mythos did much to make this credible, in that Luthor no longer had to spend his entire youth incarcerated between escapes and revenge attempts over an affront he could have solved with a simple toupee. Without the Superboy sub-mythos to define Luthor's life from his teens forward - but retaining the fundamental depravity of character that defined him increasingly from the seventies onward - Byrne created the Luthor that would have come from a world that did not do much to resist him in the form of jails and Kryptonians.
The result, from the beginning, enjoyed a strong resemblance for the Kingpin. The arrogant, amoral bald man who drove the crime in his city, supported occasionally by clever personal devices that frequently provided his escape or an early defeat for the heroes who confronted him, appeared first as Marvel's Wilson Fisk. Those differences that continued to exist between the two villains would tend to decrease over the years, particularly after Luthor "died" and continued in a cloned body that allowed him to become a real physical scrapper even without supporting hardware. What mostly separates the two villains these days rests mainly in Luthor's role as an innovative techno-capitalist and in the Kingpin's deviations from the physical bell curve.
Perhaps the likely uses of a bald man with no respect for community standards remain fairly limited even within the domains of comics. Given that Luthor would not have fared particularly well as a 300-pound female impersonator - as much as a cult classic as Superman and related books would have become if Superman had to fight Divine every other month - the remaining channels to follow in his development might have all converged somewhere very much like the Luthor-Kingpin synthesis that serves as the modern Luthor.
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ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.
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