Infinite Crisis and the Two Luthors



After seven months of labeled build-up (and a couple of years of less obvious stage-setting) DC’s next big event, Infinite Crisis is here. I have only one thing to say:

Wha-huh???

A little background. The direct Infinite Crisis tie-ins began with the cryptically titled Countdown to Infinite Crisis. In this book Blue Beetle discovered that Max Lord had remade the secret organization Checkmate into his own personal tool for fighting metahumans. Beetle’s first clue? That would be when Lord fatally shot Beetle in the head.



From there the story split into four miniseries.

In The Rann-Thangarian War, interstellar war breaks out due to the events of Adam Strange: Planet Heist. The Thangarian demon Ominar Sinn tried to take advantage of the situation, but was defeated. As the series ends the war is still going strong. How this will tie into what’s going on earthside is not clear, but it will keep the Green Lantern Corps and all the Hawkperson heroes pretty busy.

In Day of Vengeance the new Eclipso, actually the insane Jean Loring from Identity Crisis, convinces the Spectre to destroy all magic in the universe. A small cadre of magical heroes stop him, but the wizard Shazam is apparently killed and the Rock of Ages is destroyed over Gotham City.

In The OMAC Project Max Lord continues his war against anybody with superpowers using Brother I, an artificial intelligent spy satellite he commandeered from Batman, and strange nanotech powered sleeper agents called OMACs. In the related Sacrifice crossover (which ran through Superman and Wonder Woman) we learn that Lord can control Superman. Superman goes on a near-homicidal rampage while under Lord’s control, but Wonder Woman incapacitates Big Blue and kills Lord to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Finally the OMACs are all activated, though most of them are destroyed, and Brother I takes his revenge on Wonder Woman by publicly airing Lord’s death for the whole world to see.


So Wonder Woman opened a chiropractic practice, what the big deal?

In Villains United we see Lex Luthor form the Society, the newest attempt to organize super villains into a force that will far less vulnerable to superheroes. The main difference this time it seems to be working. However, a mysterious figure calling himself Mockingbird organizes the Secret Six, a group of super villains who oppose the Society.

All this came to a head last week with the release of the last issue of Villains United and the first issue of Infinite Crisis. Spoilers follow.

In Villains United #6 it was revealed that the Society’s Lex Luthor was secretly holding Pariah captive. Pariah was a character from 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, the original all-universe crossover DC used to simplify their labyrinthine continuity. Pariah, who I didn’t know was still around after Crisis, is drawn to scenes of great destruction. Luthor tortures Pariah to find out what the immortal being knows about the upcoming crisis, and Pariah reveals that there is another Lex Luthor.Luthor says, yes, I know that because I’m him, and kills Pariah. (Hey, I thought he was immortal!) In the face of this shocking revelation it isn’t tough to figure out what happens next. Mockingbird is the other (original?) Lex Luthor.



Infinite Crisis #1also had a big reveal at the end. As the DC Universe goes to hell in a hand basket (magic disrupted, alien races at war, villains united, and the three central heroes all pissed at each other) the situation is discussed by unseen people. At the end of the issue those people are revealed: The Superman of Earth-2, his wife Lois, Alexander Luthor (the only survivor of Earth-3 and the son of that Earth’s Lex Luthor), and the Superboy of Earth-Prime. All these characters disappeared at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earth, shunted off to a paradise of Alexander Luthor’s making that we were told they could never return from. Basically, these characters coming back cements something that was suspected but until now not confirmed: Infinite Crisis is a direct sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths.



First let’s deal with the two Luthors in Villains United. From the dialogue we get the sense that the Luthor who formed the Society is the out-of-place one (I’ll call him Luthor-GQ, because he seems to prefer polo shirts) and the one in hiding and calling himself Mockingbird (we’ll call him Luthor-PA for the “classic” purple and green power armor he wears) is the original. This is rather confusing, because the idea that Luthor was replaced would make a lot more sense if Luthor-GQ was the original. For years Luthor has been very low key in his villainy, becoming so respected that he even managed to get elected President of the United States back in 2000. However his administration ended in 2003 when he suddenly started shooting up Kryptonite steroids and decided it would be a good idea to play super-powered Rochambeau with Superman. (All this happened in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies.) Yet apparently Luthor-PA is the one who was elected President, and Luthor-GQ started the Society while Luthor-PA was in hiding after Superman kicked his power-armored butt.

So how is there a second Luthor? Three possibilities come to mind.

- The second Luthor is a clone that got aspirations to replace the real thing. Luthor has generally been mad for clones. He created the flawed clone of Superman called Bizarro, he cloned himself when he got cancer and pretended to be his own son after he died, and he recently created the hybrid clone of himself and Superman that is the current Superboy.

- The second Luthor is the “Antimatter Universe” version of Lex Luthor that showed up in JLA: Earth-2. The problem with this is that this Mirror, Mirror version of Luthor was good. Maybe that’s changed, or maybe the Antimatter Universe version of Luthor thinks he’s doing good work by forming the Society. Maybe. I should also mention that the JLA recently went back to the Antimatter Universe in JLA: Syndicate Rules and Lex Luthor was conspicuous in his absence.

- The Second Lex Luthor is the pre-Crisis (Earth-1) Luthor. On one had, it really shouldn’t be possible. When the Crisis of Infinite Earths ended the people still living in the newly unified Post-Crisis universe were supposed to be physically the same people who had been there Pre-Crisis. Therefore there should not be a separate Pre- and Post-Crisis Lex Luthor. But (and it’s a pretty big “but”) there has always been an odd disconnect in how things appeared in the last two issues of Crisis on Infinite Earths and how they translated into the actual Post-Crisis DC universe. In issue #11 of Crisis on Infinite Earths, shortly after the universe has been unified, Superman visits Luthor in prison, and Luthor appears to be same old Earth-1 Luthor; slim, megalomaniacal, wearing grey work clothes and clearly used to being in prison. Yet when Luthor was reintroduced to the DC universe a few months later in John Byrne’s seminal The Man of Steel miniseries he was a completely different character; portly, fairly dignified and a respected business man who had never been in trouble with the law. This discrepancy was never explained, though as time has gone by the white collar criminal Luthor has transmogrified into the bald, mad scientist Luthor people are most familiar with.

Now that Infinite Crisis is out, it’s pretty obvious that the correct answer is the third one. A bunch of the discrepancies left over from Crisis on Infinite Earths have been cropping up recently, and Earth-1 Luthor would fit in with that nicely. Perhaps the most important of these, and this ties into the reappearance of the Earth-2 Superman, is Power Girl.

Pre-Crisis Power Girl was Kara Zor-L, the cousin of the Earth-2 Superman and therefore the equivalent of the Earth-1 Supergirl. Post-Crisis it was decided that Superman was the only survivor of Krypton, so Supergirl had never existed (another problem by itself) and Power Girl was given a new origin that involved Atlantis and sorcery. Recently a new Supergirl has shown up, and Power Girl has begun to show signs of being Kryptonian again. This mystery may have been settled last week when JSA Classified #4 comes out, but I haven't read it yet.

At the end of issue #1 of Infinite Crisis someone who isn’t quite identified, but is probably Alexander Luthor, whispers to Earth-2 Superman’s ear that if he intervenes now “you can even save her.” This may be a direct reference to Power Girl. Perhaps all of the crap that’s going down in the DC universe right now is the cosmos trying to wipe out all vestiges of pre-Crisis continuity, and only the Pre-Crisis fugitives like the Earth-2 Superman can stop it. I guess we’ll see over the next seven months.


Oooh, snap!

I also reread the collected Crisis on Infinite Earths recently. I was struck this time by how many of the big DC heroes get shafted. Sure, Superman and the Flash play major roles in the story, but where’s Batman? He gets one scene in the first issue, and then doesn’t get another important line of dialogue until issue #10, where he basically comments on the fact that he’s completely useless. As all the superpowered beings are getting  their collective groins kicked by the Anti-Monitor at the dawn of time, Robin asks Batman, “What can we do?” Batman replies, ”We can lend them our hope.” That’s great pointy-ears, but I’m betting Superman and friends would appreciate it even more if you’d learn to shoot laser beams out of your nose or something. Poor Wonder Woman also gets no good scenes, unless you count the many times when something surprises her and she yells, “Great Hera!” The Green Lanterns are also sidelined constantly, for reasons that are probably only clear if you read the issues of Green Lantern that were being published at the time.

Posted: Thu - November 3, 2005 at      

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