Written by Paul Cornell
Illustrated by Marco Rudy (“Father Box”) and Ed Benes (“The Father’s Box”)While present-day Lex Luthor is busy fighting an array of the DCU’s most vile foes over in ACTION COMICS, this annual takes a look back at two formative encounters Luthor had before he became the bald mad genius we know and love (to hate) today! Marco Rudy illustrates a story of young Lex and Darkseid, while Ed Benes tackles a tale starring Luthor and Batman foe Ra’s al Ghul!
We’ve all been HUGE fans of Paul Cornell’s work on Action Comics, but this story stands alone from the rest. Cornell has been putting Luthor up against villains way out of his own league, so how does Luthor stand against one of Superman’s most powerful villains, and one of Batman’s most clever? Find out after the jump.
Paul Cornell is without a doubt one of the best new DC writers. His work on Knight and Squire is nothing short of fantastic (with only two issues to it), and Action Comics quickly rose from “book probably worth dropping” to “the best Superman book that doesn’t even have Superman.” With a clever concept to it’s arc and endearing/sassy writing that only a Brit like Cornell could put out, the comic has taken everyone by storm after a “love it or hate it” run through New Krypton.
The Annual, however, is the first issue of the entire run that hasn’t been a stand-out Luthor story, if only because both stories contained within the issue seem rather out of place. To be honest, each story has it’s own off putting elements, and while the issue is generally good, it’s not great.
The first story, “Father Box”, features Darkseid, an absolute top tier villain for DC. You can’t get much more evil than he, as he is literally the embodiment of evil. The story features Luthor working as a mob intern under Bruno Manheim, a villain not seen for sometime. Through a bit of trickery, Luthor finds himself on Apokolips due to an apparent “test” from Darkseid to see if Luthor could fulfill a prophecy. While that prophecy element is intriguing and will hopefully play out in Action Comics (and perhaps bring Darkseid back), it’s Cornell’s writing of Darkseid that seems particularly off-putting. The last time we saw Darkseid, he was being written by Grant Morrison in Final Crisis as this completely sinister and terrifying villain that could cause shivers just through reading the story. In this, Darkseid seems almost comical. For some reason, Darkseid had to end every sentence with an exclamation mark, as if he was shouting rather excitedly at Luthor. I suppose this could fit in to the older style of comics with Jack Kirby and the New God stories from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, but as far as the modern interpretations of Darkseid as a very stoic and colossal being of evil, Cornell’s writing of Darkseid just seemed… off.
Then there was Marco Rudy’s art. The last time we saw Marco Rudy’s art, it was in Superman/Batman #76 by Judd Winick, dealing with the aftermath of Batman’s death and Superman’s reaction to it. This time around, the art doesn’t play as well. Rudy has a very intriguing style where he attempts to use every element of the page to tell the story, and his ingenuity towards story telling is almost up there with JH Williams III (if only a little under, to be honest). In this issue, however, his use of pages gets a tad chaotic, to the point where I had to re-read one page multiple times to understand who was saying what (when Perry White and Luthor first meet). Rudy has a very good style to his panel layouts, but the book suffers when it comes to the display of characters, as it can tend to be uneven (in the case of Darkseid, who looks like he’s joking around in some panels (which, admittedly, coincides with how Cornell is writing him)), and the look of White and Luthor can be uneven to the point of confusion.
Continued belowWhile I would have imagined I would adore everything about this story, by the time I finished reading I can’t help but admit a slight disappointment. It ultimately does feel like it fits with the larger story Cornell is doing with Luthor, but it feels a tad out of place as far as quality goes.
In the second story, Cornell takes a more storybook approach to the writing to give it a classical feel. It fits well with the presentation, but while the Darkseid story seems like it fits in with the overall tale of Luthor, I can’t really place where this is supposed to happen. Darkseid’s story “makes sense,” whereas the Ra’s Al Ghul story feels out of place for Luthor, Ra’s, and the general time period of Luthor stories. Comics generally have loose timelines, but even this doesn’t feel 100% right. It lines up with the Darkseid story well enough, but overall it just doesn’t feel …. right. I can imagine Luthor might want to learn from Ra’s at some point, but the vain characteristics that Cornell has instilled into Luthor so well in other stories don’t fit in here at all.
Ed Benes takes the art department for this story, and again the art ultimately feels lacking. It could have more to do with the colors attached to the artist (by Jason Wright), but this doesn’t really look like Ed Benes normally looks. His lines are often a lot more sleek, and his characters are often easily recognizable for his artistic style. Just see the first three issues of the recently relaunched Birds of Prey series – Ed Benes has a style of art that easily pops out as eye grabbing towards his work. While this is by no means bad in anyway, I wouldn’t have known it was Benes if it didn’t say. Again, this isn’t to say the art was bad. It wasn’t. The same statements about Rudy’s section apply here, in that I’ve seen Benes do much better, but it was a lot more smooth than I am used to from Benes.
In general, the issue isn’t bad at all. It fits nice enough into the collection of stories Cornell has done so far, even if the Ra’s Al Ghul one is a tad bit odd. I suppose some of my disappointment in the issue comes from the high standard I have put to Cornell due to consistently great output as well as my life of New God stories. It’s an issue that was worth the buy, and I’m hoping that the Darkseid story has a further payoff, but for the most part the regular storyline about the Black Rings was, has been, and assumedly will continue to be a better Luthor story than this was.
Final Verdict: 7.2 – Buy
