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Correct me if I'm wrong, but...aren't we basically back at the Pre-Crisis Luthor these days? He's a wanted criminal running around in his old-scool battle armor, openly attacking the JLA and leading Injustice Leagues and the like.

I was thinking the same thing.

I think that he means Luthor won't succeed as the Pre-Crisis version in the minds of the public, given the popularity of stuff like Smallville and the new Superman film. Well, relative popularity, comparing the sheer volume of audience for those two media products when compared to the smaller comic readership.

The question remains, why can't J'Onn J'Onzz (my favorite DC character) keep his own series? I liked the Ostrander/ Mandrake series from a few years back, but it didn't sell all that well.

I think most comic fans don't have a clear idea about who J'Onn is. Giffen & DeMatteis established him as the "straight man" in their comedic Justice League sdtories (although J'Onn got off quite a few jokes), and built him up as a caring, thoughtful, haunted character. J'Onn was just another character throughout most of Morrison's JLA run (the book most people know J'Onn from), although he got some great moments ("Joker STOP!") during Rock of Ages being my favorite.

Ostrander balanced the compassionate side with the power, and wrote a very good Martian Manhunter comic (even if the first few issues after #0 and the One Million special weren't all that great). Unfortunately, subsequent Martian Manhunter stories have been uneven, at best, and the last MM mini-series was considered terrible. (I haven't read it) J'Onn has an identity crisis that's strangling the character, and that may be the greatest weakness of his storytelling engine.

Of course, it doesn't help that his name and looks are on the goofy side.

You lose all credibility when you say "suave, corporate Luthor" is more interesting than the Silver Age version. Certainly, there are times he is, but there are also many, many times he isn't. It all depends on the author and the story.

Purely as a concept, though...really...take out the Luthor part (IE, the "bald guy who hates Superman" part) and what's more interesting? A mad scientist or a corrupt businessman? Don't be daft.

Not just that, but suave, corrupt businessman Luthor is basically just Kingpin on Slim-Fast and not really Lex Luthor.

I would also add that corporate Luthor is a storytelling engine nightmare, an status quo that can only work for a limited amount of time who due to popularity among readers was stretched for so long he end up hurting Superman concept in the proccess.

The problem with Corporate Luthor is that it's just as clichéd now as the "mad scientist" tropes ever were, and across all realms of fiction, where Evil Businessmen greatly, greatly outnumber Non-Evil Businessmen.

One thing I discovered, too, reading some old Superman Adventures comics with my nephew, is that Corporate Luthor as an all-ages storytelling engine is... awkward, at best. Try explaining sometime why Superman doesn't put Luthor in jail at the end of a typical story to a five-year-old....

I think Luthor as *EX* Corporate Villain works really well, though. And not coincidentally, done first on the animated Lex, who's finally and very satisfyingly brought down by Superman and the Justice League. Add a few cups of crazy, and he's on that criminal mad science road again, but it actually has more freshness to it now.

Agreed, Ms. Denim.

i think i like the first Martian Manhunter storytelling engine better than the second one. I know that i probably never would have heard of the MM if he hadn't joined the JLA, but i think a Martian posing as a human Detective is a good concept that should be revisited.

I think that there are a two reasons why a Martian Manhunter series has not lasted.

The first, and I don't mean to bash anyone's favorite character, is that some characters aren't meant to carry a book. How many times has DC tried to launch a MM comic, or Aquaman, or Hawkman, or Spectre with the same inevitable result? There are more ways to keep a character in the comic-reading public's consciousness than going the monthly title route; of course, some titles don't deserve to be monthly, but would be served as a bi-monthly, and I'm not just talking about chronically late books. Anyway, I think frequent cancellations of a character's book eventually begin to hurt the next attempt as people think, "Why bother? It'll be cancelled in a year."

Second, and this is something that Dan Didio--who I think is dangerously close to becoming the most reviled person in the Internet comic-book community--understands, "exciting," "new" takes on a character all too often stray from the basic concept until the character in print resembles the original in name only. We all appreciate the value of recognizable trademarks, but there comes a time when the character presented under the familiar name so little meets the expectations the name conjures up, that it is almost a case of bait and switch. When this happens, most of the time, the comic is cancelled because buyers stop buying.

This is different from replacing an earlier character with a newer version with the same name. I think in that case, people are willing to give the comic more of a chance. If a writer has an idea that requires screwing with MM's, for example, basic character, then don't use MM, but create a new character with those attributes. If you don't want to give your idea to DC, then self-publish it, but don't warp a character needlessly into something that is not going to last. Yes, I'm looking at you, Winick.

I've always liked MM, but his human-leaning JJ name has always bothered me, as the correct phonetic interpretation SHOULD be John Johns, which of course sounds ridiculous. To effect Jones as the surname, it should have been spelled J'Ohnzz -- which, ironically, contains the word 'John.'

I'd say the biggest problem with J'onn has been the need to undo character evolution. Over the years, Giffen & Co developed him, evolved him, got rid of the incredibly dumb fire immunity. Gaiman used him in Sandamn, for @##@! sakes!. Then Morrison comes along, and suddenly some guy with a bic can stop him. That's worse than yellow or wood for a weakness.
Plus, he constantly has to be demoted because no one can be better than Superman tm.

The later day concept of the "trilogy" has sapped a number of the B level heroes of the oomf that they got post-Crisis. Black Canary went from being a JLA founder to just some chick who hung around and banged Green Arrow. J'onn has gone from being the most powerful of the heroes, to being the guy cowering when someone lights a cigerette.

You lose all credibility when you say “suave, corporate Luthor” is more interesting than the Silver Age version.

Except for the fact that he's right, as pretty much every version of Superman bears out. Even in the comics, he goes through periods of not being a businessman before eventually returning to...being a businessman.

I think Luthor as *EX* Corporate Villain works really well, though. And not coincidentally, done first on the animated Lex, who’s finally and very satisfyingly brought down by Superman and the Justice League. Add a few cups of crazy, and he’s on that criminal mad science road again, but it actually has more freshness to it now.

Agreed, I really like where Lex is at right now. Which is not to say, once the freshness of it eventually wears off, he won't be trading his battle armor back in for his power suit.

Paul said:

Purely as a concept, though…really…take out the Luthor part (IE, the “bald guy who hates Superman” part) and what’s more interesting? A mad scientist or a corrupt businessman? Don’t be daft.

But that's the genius of post-Crisis Luthor. He's a corrupt businessman who is also a mad scientist. And which is more interesting--a mad scientist, or a mad scientist who also happens to be a brilliant corporate raider?

Plus, it gives the writer a chance to give Luthor successes. Villains who always lose eventually lose their ability to be threatening, which is always bad for them as characters. But they can't "win" in the sense of killing the hero or achieving world domination. So the best solution, as exemplified by villains like Doom and post-Crisis Luthor, is make them already-powerful people who want more. So they lose a lot, but even when Luthor loses, he slinks back to his billion-dollar mansion and sleeps with his three trophy girlfriends while drinking $900 champagne. And when he loses LexCorp (like he did in the 90s), he gets to have a storyline where he "wins", getting back his company and showing everyone he's a force to be reckoned with. Which makes him seem like a more credible threat. Pre-Crisis Luthor had to have "imaginary stories" for that.

(Although he was pretty impressively evil in those. I mean, anyone who cures cancer just to trick Superman into thinking he's reformed, well...that's pretty danged evil.)

I'm sort of surprised no one has made the obvious point about the Martian Manhunter: that he's an unfortunate case of a character whose nitial soft sci-fi background has since been demolished by reality, whose influences are themselves so dated now that anyone writing him has to put real effort into workarounds and the like.

He's from Mars, and he's a green-skinned, 50s B-movie alien. The former is risible by current mainstream scientific -- even pop-scientific -- standards, and the latter codes as sheer kitsch. So we get writers retconning in the idea that the Martian race is long dead, or migrated away at some point, and that J'onn was teleported through time as well as space; you get J'onn's xenomorphic and xenocultural side being pushed to the point that his humaoid appearance has to be rationalized away; eventually, you'll get some take on the character in which he's somehow "not really from Mars" or somesuch.

That's not a storytelling engine issue, precisely, but it does seem to end up impacting the way his more recent storytelling engines have been built.

But that’s the genius of post-Crisis Luthor. He’s a corrupt businessman who is also a mad scientist. And which is more interesting–a mad scientist, or a mad scientist who also happens to be a brilliant corporate raider?

Except that the idea that he's both is fairly recent; the Byrne/Wolfman version tended to emphasize Luthor's wealth and connections, and left the mad science to underlings and hirelings. Byrne ended up creating Thaddeus Killgrave, a sort of Sivana-lite, almost as compensation. More to the point, Lex doesn't really make power plays in his corporate phase; he succumbs to paranoia and envy, manipulates people for the simpyl pleasure of it, and redresses disproportionately small grudges, but he does remarkably little to gain, say, direct political power or even more wealth.

You really do have to hang in until the mid-1990s "Fall of Luthor" material before you get back uber-genius Lex, who tosses off theorems and devises brilliant technology on the fly. Once he'd been restored (and, I'll note, rejuvenated and slimmed down from the staunchly middle-aged, portly version we'd had for most of the post-Crisis era), only then was he both mad scientist and robber baron. And it's really only after this cycle plays out once or twice that Luthor actually becomes interested in being more than a tycoon reveling in his given sphere of wealth and influence while worrying about threats from within it.

Though, in fairness, I suspect what most people really have nostalgia for is Elliot S! Maggin's Bronze Age Luthor, a man of tragic qualities and sharply-defined megalomania. (And Maggin, of course, rather liked the idea of a semi- or genuinely legitemate Luthor, with his "Thunder Corporation" in Miracle Monday and glimpses of alternate futures wherein Luthor had gone straight and made billions with his genius.)

I like the idea of a Luthor who makes climbs back into legitemacy, but falls into public disdain as well; I just tend to like him in the "fallen" part of the cycle, because it's there that he has more solid reasons for his villainous ploys and his paranoid resentments. The corporate fat cat Luthor is less about his ambitions to greater power than about his security in his extant power and petty jealousy of Superman. Once Superman's knocked him down in terms of worldly status, his jealousy and paranoia are no longer sheer pettiness.

Pre-Crisis Luthor had to have “imaginary stories” for that.

I take it the Superman Showcase books aren't at the Lexxor stories yet? Basically, it was a storytelling device to do EXACTLY what you describe in your above post.

Purely as a concept, though…really…take out the Luthor part (IE, the “bald guy who hates Superman” part) and what’s more interesting? A mad scientist or a corrupt businessman? Don’t be daft.

Don't worry, I would never crib your style.

Corrupt businessman is more interesting, without a doubt. Lots of room for complexity and multiple interpretations. Mad scientist is one-note. Why does he do the things he does? Because he's craaaazyyyy and eeeeeevillllll.

BOOOOOOOORING.

A corrupt businessman is the exact opposite of Superman in everyway, and so it works if that's who his nemesis is.
Also more stories to tell with a businessman - it gives him room to move in terms of what he can throw at superman - he can still invent stuff, hire people, by the daily planet etc.

Alls I'm sayin is, I've been in several boardrooms...and they are mostly lame with boring old guys talking about dumb stuff that makes me sleep. But one time, I was in a science lab and I touched a human brain. That was way better.

People who hate science are stupid. You guys are stupid.

Haw haw haw.

Seriously, though, I'm not saying there's no room for good stories with a businessman Luthor...there have been plenty of good ones, and there will be plenty more, I'm sure.

But, Dan, a crazy person is one-note? Do you know many crazy people? You're pretty crazy yourself, am I right? Do you consider yourself one-note? Why do you do the things you do? Because "you're crazy?" Is anything that simple? Luthor was never super-crazy anyway. A scientist can have as many motivations and as much complexity as a businessman.

But all that said, I would like a Luthor who could do it all. I agree with people who say they like where Luthor is at conceptually right now. He hasn't been in too many great comics (has he?), but I like him as a dethroned underdog. It would be nice if he could go away for a while and pop back up when Superman least expects it.

It would be nice if he could go away for a while and pop back up when Superman least expects it.

I dunno man, shit like that breaks the internet in half.

I think that the reason that MM can't sustain his own series is because DC is too overly committed to doing a big crossover once per year, and smaller crossovers also about once per year, and MM is too ingrained in the public's minds as a member of the JLA.

Therefore, by the time a book gets launched, the story gets hijacked for the big universe-wide crossover. And, by the time the story gets back under its feet, it is time for the JLA crossover.

I think that MM would work better as a series of limited series that don't have to crossover because the entire story, in character, happens between the crossover stories.

Kinda like how the various Venom limited series didn't have to participate in the Spider-Man crossovers. And, the three Robin mini-series didn't have to participate in the Batman crossovers.

Theno