Action Comics 23.3
Special “Villains Month” Title: Lex Luthor 1
Charles Soule, Raymund Bermudez
Forever Evil Crossover
Spoiler alert! You have been warned!
The Action Comics tie-in to Villains Month and Forever Evil this week features a character even the most pop culture deprived minds on the planet will recognize: The ultimate super-villain, Lex Luthor. Quality writing from Charles Soule and decent (albeit somewhat rushed in appearance) pencils by artist Raymund Bermudez make this yet another hit from DC Comics.
The story is very simplistic, which is my first big gripe of the book. It’s not enough to show Luthor doing something evil, you have to make him justify the atrocity. This book never does so. It just says “Hey, look at him doing bad guy stuff. Isn’t he a bad ass?” and doesn’t give us any real insight into why he is the way he is or how he sees himself. The beauty of such a great villain is that, at times, given the proper motivation, he’s actually quite believable as a hero. But not here. Not one bit. He’s a murdering sociopath with an unquenchable thirst for power. Which is fine, but combine the lack of humanity with a less-than-stellar first few pages of artwork and it’s off to a rough start. That being said, it’s still a quality read and even though the ending doesn’t really have the desired “OMG! Heart palpatations!” effect it’s going for (because seriously, you knew he was going to kill her the second she hesitated when weighing what’s right and what’s profitable).
So all in all, it’s still a book that is significantly better than most of the books on the shelves these days and it’s even a pretty good read for the line of quality we’ve come to expect from DC Comics over the last few years especially. So go ahead and buy the regular cover, save the buck, and read it with an open mind. Lex is a little uncharacteristically evil in this issue, but that’s okay. Because you know what? As much as I do like him, he is still, very much, a bad guy.
My Rating: 4/5
