Just Stay at Home

Action Comics #900 comes out tomorrow. That's quite the milestone.

In the end, of course, it comes down to Superman and Lex Luthor. We should have figured out long ago that he was the one behind the "Reign of Doomsday." After all, it always seems to come down to the two of them.

It didn't start out that way, of course. Lex Luthor wasn't one of Superman's first villains. And the Luthor we know today bears very little resemblance to the one who first appeared (but then, the same could be said for Superman).

Sometimes things just coalesce in a certain way. As time went on, the Superman story became about pairs of things. Lois and Clark. Earth and Krypton. Luthor and Superman. That last one is the trickiest, of course. It's about two incredibly powerful forces stacked up against each other.

One of them is pure, undiluted human greed, cruelty, and ambition. It's the mind that dreamed the atom bomb and the voice that launched the Holocaust. It's the great gifts of humanity turned in the service of unmitigated evil.

And the other one? That's the mind that cured disease, the voice that called out against oppression. It's everything good in humanity taking a stand against evil. That has never changed, even if the story has. Whether it's a megalomaniacal space-god or a man beating his wife, good will take a stand against its evil. And it will win.

It's a bird, It's a plane... It's Superman.