Luthor wasn't Superman's first recurring foe; that honor falls to the Ultra-Humanite. Yet Luthor was Superman's most unrelenting foe. His career with Superman spanned at least 1940 to 1984.

Notice I say, "at least". The story that gave Luthor's "origin", saying that he moved into Smallville, and lost his hair and his greatest scientific creation---artificial life---when Superboy put out a fire in a lab he built for Lex, who had been his greatest fan up till then---was not written by Siegel, but by Robert Bernstein. It depends wholly on the idea of Superboy's identity being publicly known, of Superboy having a super-career back then, ideas I have repudiated.

On the other hand, Siegel wrote several stories, such as "The Army of Living Kryptonite Men" and "The Face Behind the Lead Mask" that portrays Luthor as a teenage genuis of breathtaking proportions, who already had a mad-on for Superboy. Who could send lifelike, functioning robots a thousand years in the future...while a boy at the turn of the century. Both stories depend on Luthor knowing about kryptonite and its effect on Superman, yet Siegel wrote the first kryptonite story (never published) in which Superman encountered it as an adult.

The Superboy stories aren't even consistent about this. One has Luthor as an adult called "Amazing-Man" who encounters Superboy for the first time, in Smallville. Another story shows young Lex Luthor as a tot in Smallville, dressed up as a pirate at a Halloween gathering---when Clark was a Superbaby---even though Bernstein's origin depicted him as first moving into Smallville when he was a teenager. (Did his parents move from Smallville and then move back? You think he would have mentioned it...)

In the first Superman story where the name Luthor first appeared, where Siegel wrote mostly free from editorial control and the burden of thousands of other stories and their continuity, Superman acted as if he had never heard of Luthor before, or at least that it was a mystery to him.

There is only one way to reconcile all this. Luthor's appearances as a teenage criminal mastermind are fictional. Perhaps "Army of Kryptonite Men" and "The Man in the Lead Mask" are plots against Superman that the adult Luthor perpetuated, and which Siegel decided to move back to Superman's teenage years to fill a slot in the publishing schedule, changing the details and the setting to Superboy's millieu. (Note that "Urthlo", the robot sent to the Legion's future in their first solo story, looked like an adult Luthor, a valuable hint that Siegel was giving us.) The "Army of Kryptonite Men" taught Luthor that there was a Legion of Super-Heroes in the future, and a follow-up story, "The Legion of Super-Villains", also written by Siegel, allowed him to contact the adult Legion of Super-Villains and confront the adult Legion of Super-Heroes. Doubtless Luthor's understanding of super-science took a quantum leap upon examining the 30th century technology the Legion of Super-Villains had. After that, on one of his escapes, he sent the robot "Urthlo" to try to destroy the Legion, using 30th century technology to send it to the far-future.

With that same 30th century technology, he built a time machine and tried to hide out in Washington in the 1860s. It was there that he did encounter the teen-aged Superboy, who had travelled in his Legion time-bubble to that same time---to complete "The Impossible Mission", also written by Siegel. Luthor managed to freeze "Superboy"---an uncostumed and without glasses Clark Kent, yet obviously from his abilities, his old foe as a boy---and thus unknowingly kept young Clark Kent from stopping the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Clark's real mission there. One doesn't know whether to hate or thank Luthor for that---it convinced young Clark not to meddle in history, and who knows what future would have resulted from his meddling with time? Still, it seems a shame that Clark wasn't permitted to save Lincoln...even Luthor felt remorse, that it was the "worst of his many crimes" that he had unknowingly kept the young Superboy from stopping Booth.

At any case, if it seems that Luthor has technology centuries ahead of its time---he did. 30th century technology. (Also aided by his alliance with the alien computer Brainiac from the planet Colu, and the alien technology he gained from examination of Brianiac's machines, and later the ancient technology of the planet Lexor...Luthor took advantage of every contact with advanced technology he could.)

Luthor and Superman met for the first time during the Talon-Galonia war. However, in deference to the stories that indicate they're the same age, I'm putting Luthor's birthdate around 1894. (And given his later tendencies, he probably spent a lot of time in reform school.) Since he didn't have the thousand-year-lifespan of a Kryptonian, he showed his years much more than Superman did, until he received an immortality treatment from...but you'll see.

My research indicates that Alexander Joseph Luthor, the billionaire and founder of Lexcorp and Tomorrow Party presidential candidate....is the first Luthor's illigitimate son, and that the first Luthor died in the "Crisis". (It is of course not true that Lex (Joseph) Luthor won the presidency, a fictionalization by the writers to make things more "interesting" for Superman.)

Alexander Joseph Luthor's mother's maiden name was Fisk, and her nephew was Wilson Fisk, sometimes called the Kingpin, whom the second Luthor resembled somewhat---both physically and in manner.

Nor is that Luthor the only such offspring of the first Luthor. In over forty years---part of it which he was rejuvenated by scientific means---Lex Luthor had many children.

In an article called "The Lethal Luthors" it was asserted that Luthor was the son of John Clay (half-brother to Professor Moriarity and Fu Manchu, who share some character traits with Luthor) and Sally Finn, granddaughter of Harry "Huckleberry" Finn. I'm accepting that, for now, although I don't neccessarily believe in the "identical quadruplets" or in whom are identified as Luthor's brothers. A stimulating article, but obviously I don't believe in the Luthor/Zarkon identification, either.

My own research indicates that Sally Finn's mother was a French-Canadian woman named Mercedes Dantes, descended from that Frenchman, Edmond Dantes who was wrongly imprisoned, who escaped, and for years pursued a melodramatic vengeance as the Count of Monte Christo. Like Dantes, Luthor learned how to hate and was adept at escaping from prison, and hatching schemes of vengenace. Unlike Dantes, though, Luthor never learned the value of forgiveness. Edwina was his granddaughter, and really had no claim to the name Dantes, her mother being the illigitimate issue of a courtesan whom Monte Chriso bedded, yet they took it anyway.

Still---Luthor's amazing facility for invention, his masterful brain, cries out for his inclusion in the Wold Newton Family. Luthor was born about 1894....the same year that Superman came to Earth.

One of his first affairs was with a woman named Caulder. Their son together was named Niles Caulder, born around 1923. This red-haired genuis of breathtaking skill, ranging from medical to biological methods, developed a serum of immortality in the mid to late forties, under a mysterious sponsor....who was a man who called himself "General Immortus", an eons-old man who had run out of ways to prolong his life and was looking for more.

Niles, who found out his intentions, was determined to hide the serum from his "sponsor"....yet a bomb was surgically implanted in him by his sponsor. He was "killed", technically dead, while a robot he designed operated on him. Unfortunately, the robot took too long, and he lost the use of his legs.

It was doubtless from Niles Caulder that Lex Luthor, his father, got a lifeprolonging serum that allowed him to fight Superman for decades---although if Niles had known what a criminal his father was, he would have never done it. Niles was overcome at meeting his long-lost father, and didn't check Luthor out as much as he would have done others.

Niles Caulder, in later years, would organize the Doom Patrol, including Cliff Steele, the second Robotman---a human brain placed in a robot body by a surgeon of incredible skill---Caulder himself. His story was originally told by Arnold Drake and Bruno Permegiani.

Grant Morrison, who continued the story of the Patrol, at the end asserted that Niles Caulder--the Chief, as he was known---himself caused all the accidents that resulted in his teammates. If true, he was acting more like his father---but quite frankly, I think such claims were delusional. The Chief, perhaps, was suffering from side-effects of long-term exposure to his own immortality formula. If he had been out to humiliate and torture his teammates, he could have done it in dozens of ways in the sixties--- which he didn't.

Another affair Luthor had was with a Greek immigrant to the United States named Theodora Kojak. This was in the late thirties or early forties, and their son, Theo Kojak, became, suprisingly, a tough police inspector in NYC. His story was made the subject of a TV series in the seventies, and his part was played by Telly Seveles.

Theo Kojak had none of Luthor's scientific genuis, but like his father, he lost his hair while young and strongly resembled his father. Evidently Kojak knew something about his father, and decided to become a policeman to make up for the criminal escapades of his father.

When Luthor was fighting Superman in the forties, there was a period where he derived great strength and electrical powers from a special treatment. He worked with a female researcher named Dillon at the time.

Anybody else would have been satisfied with tremendous strength and electrical abilities (which would repel bullets, shock others, render him invigorated by the electric chair) but since it didn't quite equal Superman's power, it wasn't enough for Luthor. It formed only a passing phase of his quest for power, but it left one inheritor...

Their child, Max Dillon, suffered side-effects from the electrical treatment they underwent. He didn't gain the Thing-level strength that Luthor had after each electrical treatment, nor did he inherit his father's genuis. He became an ordinary electrical lineman, albeit a greedy and heartless one who wouldn't act unless he was paid for it. Lightning struck him when he was grasping electrical lines, and he ended up with electrical powers, which he could use, even "throwing" lightning bolts.

Max Dillon called himself Electro, and fought Spider-Man and the second Daredevil.

There have been many women in the original Lex Luthor's ninety years, a trait he shared with his son, the founder of Lexcorp. Yet there was only one he married.

The "Lexor" series of stories were told by Edmond Hamilton, but the germ of them was actually suggested by Siegel to the editor, Weisinger, who in turn gave it to Hamilton to write. Hamilton was always at his best on Luthor stories, but since he thought it was entirely fictional, he changed numerous details.

Luthor was anxious for a final battle with Superman. Using 30th century/Coluian technology, he developed a faster-than-light ship and taunted Superman to follow him to a high-gravitydesert world under a red sun, very much like Krypton. Luthor thought it fitting that Supeman die on a world similar to the one on which he was born. Of course, the red sun and high gravity--just one and a half times' Earth's gravity---would not keep Superman from having super-powers there, no matter what Hamilton said. Siegel made it clear that Kryptonians had super-strength on Krypton, in his newspaper strip. Yet even in their first encounter, Luthor had used a "green ray" that had sapped Superman's strength to near-normal levels. A more advanced version of the same, focused on Superman when he landed in a starcraft supplied by the JLA, did the same---only its effect wouldn't wear off for days.

So at long last, they were physically equal. Yet when they were seperated by a sandstorm, Luthor found the last remnents of a great civilization of humanlike inhabitants. Indeed, as we will later find out, they could crossbreed with us, meaning that they were descended from humans from Earth, just as the Kryptonians were. See my article, "Hall of Worlds".

Luthor, for the first time in his life, felt the urge to help a people, who were dying from lack of water. At the end, he deliberately "threw" the fight, and both Superman and Luthor, with their starcraft, maneuvered great masses of frozen ice asteroids to fall on deserted parts of the planet, giving them seas and a better ecosystem. They credited Luthor, whom they thought was a hero, with the miraculous recovery, and renamed their world after him---Lexor.

He returned several times, and one of the times married a female admirer, whose names were given variously as Tharla and Ardora.

On one of his visits, he unknowingly left her pregnant. In the late seventies or early eighties, he revisited, to find he had a fine boy who was just a few years old. He resolved to stay on Lexor, on a world where he was a hero---but hate for Superman corrupted him, and he laid plans that used a warsuit from the ancient Lexorian civilization to perform crimes against the Lexorians---but would lay a perfect trap for Superman.

Superman journeyed to Lexor---not under his own power, of course, no matter what the comics said--- but this time accompanied by his fellow JLAer, Green Lantern, who stayed in the atmosphere, ready to snatch Superman if something went wrong. The powers of the Lexorian warsuit, now worn by Luthor, were too much for Superman, but the revelation that Luthor had been the mysterious Marauder robbed him of the respect of his people---but then a stray blast struck a special rod that had been there to protect Lexor---and Lexor, like Krypton, blew up, killing Ardora and young Lex Jr. along with the millions of other Lexorians.

Green Lantern snatched Superman out of that inferno and they sadly travelled back to Earth.

Yet Luthor survived, and blamed Superman for the destruction of the one world in the universe which had loved him, of his son and his wife. (And if anyone else thinks it's kind of creepy that both his wife and his greatest enemy are aliens from red-sunned high-gravity worlds---I guess love and hate are pretty close in some ways, at that.)

Later he took partial command of the gathering of superhuman criminals that happened in Crisis, and was one of those who died, facing Krona.

Yet his evil lives on in at least one of his sons---the founder of Lexcorp. Who really isn't the President, honest...unless the writers are trying to tell us something about George W. Bush....

PARTIAL LIST OF SOURCES:

Of course, TARZAN ALIVE and DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE by Philip Jose Farmer.

The "Lethal Luthors" was a stimulating article, and I have adapted what I can. It seems to contradict Gray's account of Oliver---not David---"Warbucks"' origin in several points, though.

Those interested with comments, suggestions, things I have forgotten, things I messed up, contact me at...
E-Mail:al.schroeder@nashville.com

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Speculations Copyright © Al Schroeder. Superman is owned by DC Comics, Warner Communications, and the Siegels. All other characters copyrighted by their respective owners.