‘Superman: The Last Days of Lex Luthor #1’ is made all the more real by its bottle narrative

A story that unearths, examines, and builds upon the bedrock of its characters.

July 25, 2023

Sometimes it seems like the best DC stories are those self-contained bottle stories that are single-mindedly divorced from the rough-hewn continuity of the DC Universe. Not to undersell the compelling ongoing work happening during this Dawn of DC era, which has been dropping quite a few bangers, of course. But this ability to explore alternative, self-reliant narratives is one of the things DC holds over its major competition, which only occasionally – and with great fanfare – steps outside its largely unaltered 60+ year opus.

DC’s Black Label seems almost directly engineered for this purpose, establishing a mind-blowing line of alternate (and dystopian) futures for Wonder Woman, Catwoman, and Swamp Thing. Likewise (as is the case in Superman: The Last Days of Lex Luthor), they examine and contextualize the basic tropes of their characters in ways that only minorly deviate from the contemporary continuity.

Listen to the latest episode of our weekly comics podcast!

In its first issue, The Last Days of Lex Luthor goes to work examining its central characters not within the extremes of a dying universe, but in the simple harsh light of mortality. Lex, recently irradiated in your typical kryptonite experiment, is facing rapid cellular disintegration; Superman, in all his unending altruism, sets himself to save his archenemy by any super-scientific, extraterrestrial means possible.

This isn’t an overly unique premise – Lex has faced K-poisoning before, and Superman has been driven to aid his enemies – but what makes The Last Days of Lex Luthor excel is the compelling ways the central conceit is used to examine Clark and Lex; by contrasting them against one another, the story hopes to highlight their most central truths. It doesn’t attempt to redefine the parameters of a Clark/Lex story, it hopes to refine it.

The book hops between the current-day struggle for Lex’s life and the character’s shared boyhood in Smallville, and it’s these Smallville moments that do the most work in defining them. Lex, driven by his frustratingly advanced intellect, struggles against the grain of Smallville’s rural simplicity. Clark, hiding his own extraordinary self, chafes in a similar – if wholly unique – way.

Early on in the story, young Clark thinks to himself, “My eyes could find colors there were no names for.” In dropping this quiet bombshell of Clark’s casual ‘otherness’, while maintaining his deep-felt, generous humanity, the story only contrasts Lex’s own otherness, which seems all-the-more inhuman for his coldness and eventual disregard for life.

Writer Mark Waid has always been able to see to the heart of the great characters of comics; his current run on Batman / Superman: World’s Finest alone illustrates his adeptness at telling almost prototypical stories with legends, stories which unearth, examine, and build upon bedrock. It’s no wonder, then, that The Last Days of Lex Luthor feels like the seed from which modern-day Superman stories might spring.

Utilizing Byran Hitch and Kevin Nowlan on this book likewise confers its own concrete standing – Hitch’s barely-abstracted world-building and Nowlan’s perfect understanding of light contrasting dense shadow makes the book feel rooted somewhere like reality, somehow more true than your average story. Even the unreal moments – colored in sci-fi purples and greens – are made believable by David Baron’s more grounded, real-world colors giving them context.

The Last Days of Lex Luthor, then, seems to be a perfect distillation of the characters, one made undeniably meaningful in its construction. I can’t wait to see how insightful the rest of the series will be.