Current music:	el bombero - metropolis ost
Entry tags:	char: darkseid, char: lex luthor, char: ra's al ghul, creator: ed benes, creator: marco rudy, creator: paul cornell, publisher: dc comics, title: action comics

So this week gives us the 13th Action Comics Annual, and it's just as much about Lex Luthor as the rest of Action Comics is right now.

Rather than serving as an elaboration on The Black Ring, it's what Paul Cornell calls "kind of a Secret Origin continued", showing us Young Lex out of Smallville with a full head of hair.

There're two stories, one drawn by Marco Rudy and one by Ed Benes, chronicling his life and time before prominence and LexCorp; both pit him against some real movers and shakers.



Lex's arrival in that city is heralded by rain and recession-driven suicide; with nothing but one night at the best hotel in town, he hits up a bar and starts knocking up water.

There, he's accosted by a regular named Petey, who figures he's casing the joint.

Which is true; however, such is the scope of Lex's Birthright-esque deductive ability that he's also worked out a few things about Petey:



"I read the papers", indeed!

But what was Lex casing the joint for, you ask?



Perry, who's playing the undercover reporter, is decidedly plussed by Lex:



How an undercover Perry White got an in with Bruno Mannheim is a story waiting to be told, somewhere and somewhen.

But Mannheim's not the menace of this story; no, it's his connection, who comes through a door that only Bruno (and, for this story, Lex) can see.

When Lex opens that door, he's greeted by the only one it can be:



What follows is a confrontation worth buying this for; Cornell and Rudy really wasted no space in this telling.

By the end of it, Lex has a new job:



(funnily enough, the 52 novel had Intergang trying to get Lex to run Oolong Island. Didn't really work out.)

But do you know what happens when you put Lex in a subordinate position on Apokolips, and it isn't Superman: The Dark Side?

A chain of events that lead to this:



And so this story ends as it must, with Darkseid savoring his favorite flavor of defeat and Lex's star in the arc canon and prophecy dictate it must take.

Speaking of stars, there's the second story with Benes on art, with the familiar foe at the start:



They're talking about Algol; clever, huh?

But what's Lex doing with Ra's, you ask?



And why does Ra's trust Lex? Well..



What Lex brings to the table is never actually specified; perhaps his cunning in matters not related to his overlookable failings?

Sadly for both Ra's and Lex, the apprenticeship comes to an end when Lex's cunning leads him to look at something he shouldn't:



And so we head off to this one's conclusion, with the same respect to foreshadowing and canon the last one had.

As stories about Lex Luthor go, these two were definitely great; the Darkseid/Lex stuff that's not shown here is worth a read, though you might chuckle at some of his lines.

The Ra's/Lex is a bit more paint-by-numbers, but the poetic prose might explain why it's so constrained.

Still, though, they're both Luthor-centric stories focusing on both his wits and his personal flaws, and that alone was worth it for me.

Plus, they're not TOO hard to fit into canon.