Post by Dawn on Dec 20, 2009 2:50:51 GMT -5
First Name: Alexander
Last Name: Luthor
Alias or Nick-name: "Lex"
Age: 45 (appears to be in his mid to late 30s, thanks to being a clone)
Height/Weight: 5' 10" 200 lbs
Eyes: Green
Hair: Bald (formerly red)
Persuasion: Evil
Powers/Weapons: Lex Luthor is financially the most powerful person in the world. He can command space stations, a private security force that can rival any army and a public relations machine that God would be proud of. Luthor can do anything he want, to anybody and he will always be able to escape blame or conviction. Only Superman and organizations like the Justice League are able to stand up against him.
History: Alexander Joseph "Lex" Luthor was born in the Suicide Slum district of Metropolis. In his younger years, Lex grew up in a household where his cruel and short-tempered father abused Lex's mother and belittled his son's dreams of leaving the Suicide Slum district for a better life. His only friend was Perry White, who encouraged Lex's dreams of making something of himself.
In his early teens, Lex cultivated relationships with criminals in Suicide Slum, who were impressed and amused by his intelligence. Two boys who bullied Lex were themselves savagely beaten by Lex's adult criminal friends who were rumoured to be well paid by the boy to do so. Later, Lex took out a large insurance policy on his parents without their knowledge and sabotaged their car's brakes, killing them. These details were uncovered decades later by a down-on-his-luck writer named Peter Sands while researching a potential book titled Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography and confirmed by Lex himself, before he had Sands killed and his research destroyed.
Lex was put into a foster home while he waited until he became of legal age to collect the insurance money. However, Lex found that his foster parents were even worse than his biological parents. Greedy and manipulative, they schemed to find out the location of Lex's money and steal it from him. Shortly after Lex turned the age in which he could have access to his money, he secretly put it in a savings account with the explicit instruction that only he be allowed to make withdrawals. When his foster parents found bank documents Lex had hidden from them, Lex's foster father confronted his daughter Lena and demanded that she seduce Lex (who had fallen in love with Lena) into giving her parents the money under the lie that they would use the money to pay for their daughter's college education, which they had no plans on doing.
Lena, who had feelings for Lex, refused and for her trouble was beaten to death by her father. Lex was absent from the home at the time, having been talked into going to a football game by his friend Perry. When Lex returned home, he was heartbroken to find Lena murdered by her father. This event would serve as the turning point for Lex Luthor, who vowed to do whatever it took to gain power and to destroy anyone who got in his way. Later in life, on the day Lex's daughter was born, he arranged for his foster father to assassinate the mayor of Metropolis, in a new bid for power, then later, as payment, murdered his foster father himself. He named his daughter Lena.
Perry White was the first target of Lex's turn to evil. Lex blamed Perry for keeping him from being at the house when Lena died and got his revenge by seducing Perry's wife shortly after their marriage and getting her pregnant with Lex's child. The offspring Jerry White, would later learn of his true parentage during his late teens before being killed by a local street gang that Jerry had associated with. Years later, Lex would on several occasions purchase ownership of the Daily Planet, much to Perry's shock, and attempt to kill the newspaper out of complete spite for Perry.
Lex used his money and natural genius to create a multi-national corporation known as "LexCorp" that would ultimately come to dominate the city of Metropolis. One of his earliest projects was an experimental airplane and other similar technology themed enterprises would be the hallmark of LexCorp's output.
Lex became the most powerful man in Metropolis, both financially and in the world of organized crime. Lex would flood the streets with weapons to arm gangs of Metropolis and use his primarily female staff of underlings to keep blackmail files on all of the major organized crime groups in the city, so that Lex could use them to further any schemes he had planned. However, this all ended with the arrival of Superman.
Several months after Superman first appeared on the scene, terrorists attacked a society gala aboard Lex Luthor's yacht. Luthor observed Superman in action and then tried to hire him out after Superman dispatched the gunmen. But when Luthor admitted that he'd not only anticipated the attack but also had arranged for it to occur in order to lure Superman out, Mayor Berkowitz deputized Superman to arrest Luthor for reckless endangerment.
Luthor's (temporary) incarceration left him seething, and he swore to make Superman pay for the humiliation. He has since devoted much time and energy to that goal.
Luthor's motive for hating Superman varies over time. Contemporary stories portray Luthor as a man who sees himself as a hero, and Superman as the threat. He was a man driven to succeed on his own, coming from nothing in a harsh environment; Conversely, Superman was granted power by random fate. While Luthor lacks the compassion or nobility to be a hero, he has a cunning and cruel mind. Superman has survived subsequent attempts Luthor made on his life, but had never been able to prove Luthor's role in the attacks. While on paper, Luthor remains spotless, Superman sees him as a cancer on Metropolis and pursues him with utmost vigilance. For his part, Luthor has begun to tire of the world of business and has focused his energies on Superman to an obsessive degree, to the point where his reality seemingly revolves around the hero.
Luthor soon acquired the only sample of kryptonite on Earth from the Kryptonite-powered cyborg Metallo, whom LexCorp abducted just before Metallo could succeed in killing Superman. Fashioning a ring from the alien ore deadly to Superman, Luthor relished being untouchable even to the man of steel, and began wearing it constantly to ward off his enemy. Unfortunately, Luthor suffered from a severe cancer in the 1990s, caused by long-term radiation exposure to his kryptonite ring.
Luthor's hand required amputation to prevent the cancer's spread, but by then it had already metastasized; it was eventually determined that the disease was terminal. Luthor faked his own death shortly afterward by taking his personally designed jet, the Lexwing, on a proposed trip around the world and crashing it in some mountains, using this as cover for the transplant of his brain into a healthy clone of himself which he then passed off as his hitherto unknown, illegitimate Australian son and heir, Lex Luthor II; his deception helped by his new body having a full head of red hair and a beard.
Luthor continued to masquerade as his own son to seduce Supergirl and continue to torment Superman. However his plan began to quickly fell apart, as Luthor's new clone body began to deteriorate and age at a rapid rate (his being one of many clones that were becoming ill at the time). Meanwhile, Lois Lane discovered proof that Lex Luthor had years earlier murdered a female LexCorp employee and framed an innocent man for the murder. This led Lois to the truth regarding Lex's faked death and false new identity. In retaliation, Luthor set out to systematically destroy Lois' life and have her fired from the Daily Planet. At the same time Luthor instigated a battle against Project Cadmus, when it was discovered that the cloned hero, the Guardian, was the only one not affected by the clone malady and sought to create a cure from him.
Lois fought back and, with help from Superman, exposed the truth about Lex Luthor's faked death and criminal activities to the public. Horrified by the fact that his employer would go to jail, one of his workers attempted to stop the two from battling, only to have Luthor kill him, but his death caused him to hit a button that activated a failsafe that was to destroy Metropolis during an alien invasion. The failsafe, which consisted of a barrage of missiles, a collection of robots, hallucinagens, and, finallly, Superman's discarded Kryptonian Battlesuit, causing nearly the entire city to be leveled and killing thousands. Luthor became a permanent prisoner in his cloned body, unable to even blink, and swearing vengence on Superman.
However, aid would come in the form of the demon Neron; Luthor promptly sold his soul in exchange for Neron restoring his body to perfect health. Returning to a rebuilt Metropolis, Luthor turned himself over to the police and was put on trial, where he was acquitted of all crimes when Luthor claimed to have been kidnapped by renegade scientists who replaced him with a clone, who was responsible for all the crimes he was charged with.
Lex Luthor had cultivated a popular image as a great philanthropist. He had been instrumental in reverse-engineering alien technology for use in general consumer goods, upgrading Metropolis into a true "city of tomorrow." Luthor also played an instrumental role in assisting the Justice League in recharging the sun during the Final Night storyline. Later, when Gotham City was destroyed by an earthquake and then abandoned by the American government in the early 2000s, it was LexCorp that took up the massive task of rebuilding the city. Unbeknownst to the populace, Luthor also took the opportunity to destroy property records so he could seize any land he wanted. By gaining a foothold in Gotham, Luthor made a public enemy in Bruce Wayne, who did not hesitate to publicly denounce him on certain occasions.
Lex Luthor has been married eight times, though the first seven marriages occurred off-panel in Luthor's past. While his previous seven marriages were hinted to have been based on love (or as close to the concept of love as Lex Luthor understands it) Luthor's eighth marriage to Contessa Erica Alexandra Del Portenza (or "The Contessa" as the characters call her) was a marriage that was based on mutual manipulation and greed.
The Contessa had bought controlling interest in LexCorp after Luthor was exposed as evil, forcing Lex into a marriage with her in order to regain control over the company. The marriage was doomed from the beginning as the two fought constantly and never loved each other. The Contessa quickly became pregnant with Lex's child and began using the unborn child to dominate Lex into doing her bidding. Luthor's response to the Contessa's actions was to use her desire to be unconscious during childbirth to lock her in the basement of his corporate headquarters in a permanently drugged unconscious state.
Luthor took over as a single father to his daughter (named Lena after his childhood sweetheart) and vowed never to marry again, stating that he wanted to never have to share his daughter's love with anyone else. The Contessa later escaped, but Luthor had her killed with a barrage of missiles. However, the Contessa's body was never found...
Lex became the president of the United States in 2000, winning the election on a platform of promoting technological progress (his first action as president was to take a proposed moratorium on fossil-based fuels to U.S. Congress in hopes of putting "a flying car in every garage").
Despite Luthor's more villainous traits, he was assisted by the extreme unpopularity of the previous administration due to its mishandling of the Gotham City earthquake crisis. Ironically, Batman would ultimately learn that Luthor was involved in the mishandling of the entire Gotham City rebuilding process, resulting with Bruce Wayne severing all military contract ties between the U.S. government and his company Wayne Enterprises in protest of Lex Luthor's election as President. Luthor responded in kind by ordering the murder of Wayne's lover Vesper Fairchild and framing Bruce Wayne for the murder (although the frame was only truly successful due to Luthor hiring, by sheer coincidence, the assassin David Cain, who was aware of Batman's true identity and thus made it appear to the Bat-family that Wayne had murdered Fairchild after she had discovered he was Batman).
An early triumph of his political career was the Our Worlds At War crisis, in which he coordinated the U.S. Army, Earth's superheroes and a number of untrustworthy alien forces to battle the story's villain, Imperiex. However, as it would later be revealed, Lex knew about the alien invasion in advance and did nothing to alert Earth's heroes to it.
Lex Luthor finally figured out Superman's secret identity in 2002, when a lowly scientist was able to get a meeting with Lex and reveal top secret government documents showing the rocket containing baby Superman crashing near the farm of Martha and Jonathan Kent (Ironically, one of Luthor's employees had once managed to work out that Clark Kent and Superman were the same person shortly after their vendetta began, but Luthor rejected it at the time because he believed that someone as powerful as Superman would never pretend to be someone as insignificant as Clark). Killing the scientist, Lex surprisingly decided to keep the knowledge a secret even as Clark Kent took the fall for Lois publishing proof that Lex Luthor knew of the alien invasion of "Our Worlds At War" but had opted not to make any defensive plans to save the people of Kansas from attack. In the end, the villain Manchester Black erased all knowledge that Clark Kent was Superman from Lex's mind in revenge for Lex helping Superman defeat him.
In 2004, Luthor once again overplayed his hand, as his success at framing Bruce Wayne for the murder of Vesper Fairchild caused him to get arrogant. In an attempt to blame Superman for a kryptonite meteor approaching the Earth, he instead raised questions about himself as Superman and Batman uncovered a plot of Luthor's to further torment Batman that involved tricking Batman into thinking that the Superman villain Metallo was the man who killed Batman's parents. In desperation, he used a variant combination of the "super-steroid" Venom (a steroid mainly used by Batman villain Bane), liquid synthetic green kryptonite, and an Apokaliptian battlesuit to battle Superman directly. Unfortunately, the madness that is a side effect of Venom took hold, and he revealed his true colors during the battle. Superman and Batman were able to gain evidence by Luthor, via a mad confession during the battle on recorded to video, that Lex had traded arms with Darkseid on Apokolips, giving them the creature Doomsday in return for his aid during the "Our Worlds At War" crisis. The final straw was the revelation that Talia Head, the acting CEO of LexCorp, had sold all the company assets to the Wayne Foundation. He has since gone underground, leaving the presidency to his vice president, Pete Ross. Ross later resigned, however, leaving the presidency to a man named Jonathan Horne.
Lex Luthor went into hiding, preparing to activate a mind control program planted inside the brain of the current Superboy Conner Kent (created with 50% of Lex's and 50% of Superman's DNA) to help him gain revenge against Earth's mightiest heroes. Luthor has also been carefully surveiling the new Supergirl, but his attempt to split her personalities using Black Kryptonite backfired when the "evil" incarnation of Kara Zor-El rebelled against Luthor and nearly killed him.
Alexander Luthor, Jr., the son of Earth-Three's Lex Luthor, returned to the DC Universe along with other survivours from the Crisis on Infinite Earths as part of a scheme to create a perfect Earth, under the pretense of restoring Earth-Two. To this end, he assumed Lex Luthor's identity and created a new Secret Society of Super Villains.
The real Lex Luthor took on the identity of Mockingbird and formed a super-villain version of the Secret Six, whose purpose was to subvert the new Secret Society created by Alexander. Lex swore vengeance against the impostor for taking his place.
In Infinite Crisis Lex confronted Alex Luthor after tailing him for several months. Alex's identity was exposed to Lex during the following fight. He and Superboy-Prime managed to destroy his battlesuit, but Lex escaped via short-range teleporter.
Luthor then visited Conner Kent (in recovery at Titans Tower). Lex gave words of vengeance against Alex Luthor and Superboy-Prime, and slipped onto Conner's person a crystal shard (collected during his fight with Alex) showing the location of Alexander's Arctic Fortress. Conner later went to Nightwing and the two agreed to stop Alexander. At the end of Infinite Crisis #7, Lex Luthor oversees the Joker's execution of Alexander.
Luthor has shown an unusual compassion for Conner Kent; it seems that by watching Superboy throughout the course of his short life, Lex came to see Conner as his son. When Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman informed Luthor of Conner's death, he goes berserk and tries to kill the three heroes in a fit of rage over the fact that the three heroes were not present to prevent Conner from dying. Later, Luthor is shown visiting a memorial statue of Superboy in Metropolis and placed flowers there.
In 52 Week Three, the Gotham City Police Department find a body in an alley that looks like Lex Luthor. John Henry Irons examines the body at S.T.A.R. Labs and notices that contact lenses were inserted post-mortem to make the blue eyes appear green, like Lex's. Lex Luthor barges in with a throng of reporters, claiming that the body is that of an impostor from another Earth, the man truly responsible for his various crimes. Though Alexander's body had a missing finger and a different genetic make-up from Lex's, 52 editor Stephen Wacker has confirmed that the body found in Gotham is indeed Alex, and that Luthor had it altered before the police discovered it.
Lex publicly continues to rebuild his fallen reputation. In various news broadcasts throughout the country, he claims to have engineered a way to make meta-humans out of ordinary citizens, saying that everyone should have a right to have powers, not just a select few. However, during the autopsy of Alex Luthor, Lex secretly exposes John to the chemicals involved in his creating his new army of super-heroes, turning him into a literal man of steel. When approached by John's niece Natasha Irons, he gladly allows her to be one of his first test subjects. Thanks to Luthor, Natasha now has super-powers similar to those of Superman, after undergoing a treatment he called "the full package" and acts as a spokesperson his new meta-gene treatment. Also, using Natasha and several other test subjects, Luthor has formed his own team of superpowered "heroes" which are now being called a new Infinity Inc.. In week #21, this new Infinity Inc. were battling a new Blockbuster, which Luthor had created as well, when he demonstrated that he could shut off their powers and had his speedster, Trajectory, killed.
One year after the events of Infinite Crisis, Luthor has just been cleared from over 120 criminal counts ranging from malfeasance to first-degree murder, only to find that he's now unpopular with the public and, thanks to the machinations of Doctor Sivana, is being bought out of LexCorp. He blames Clark Kent for writing articles chronicling his downfall, and pledges vengeance on Metropolis.
Comic character is from: DC comics, primarily Superman
Last Name: Luthor
Alias or Nick-name: "Lex"
Age: 45 (appears to be in his mid to late 30s, thanks to being a clone)
Height/Weight: 5' 10" 200 lbs
Eyes: Green
Hair: Bald (formerly red)
Persuasion: Evil
Powers/Weapons: Lex Luthor is financially the most powerful person in the world. He can command space stations, a private security force that can rival any army and a public relations machine that God would be proud of. Luthor can do anything he want, to anybody and he will always be able to escape blame or conviction. Only Superman and organizations like the Justice League are able to stand up against him.
History: Alexander Joseph "Lex" Luthor was born in the Suicide Slum district of Metropolis. In his younger years, Lex grew up in a household where his cruel and short-tempered father abused Lex's mother and belittled his son's dreams of leaving the Suicide Slum district for a better life. His only friend was Perry White, who encouraged Lex's dreams of making something of himself.
In his early teens, Lex cultivated relationships with criminals in Suicide Slum, who were impressed and amused by his intelligence. Two boys who bullied Lex were themselves savagely beaten by Lex's adult criminal friends who were rumoured to be well paid by the boy to do so. Later, Lex took out a large insurance policy on his parents without their knowledge and sabotaged their car's brakes, killing them. These details were uncovered decades later by a down-on-his-luck writer named Peter Sands while researching a potential book titled Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography and confirmed by Lex himself, before he had Sands killed and his research destroyed.
Lex was put into a foster home while he waited until he became of legal age to collect the insurance money. However, Lex found that his foster parents were even worse than his biological parents. Greedy and manipulative, they schemed to find out the location of Lex's money and steal it from him. Shortly after Lex turned the age in which he could have access to his money, he secretly put it in a savings account with the explicit instruction that only he be allowed to make withdrawals. When his foster parents found bank documents Lex had hidden from them, Lex's foster father confronted his daughter Lena and demanded that she seduce Lex (who had fallen in love with Lena) into giving her parents the money under the lie that they would use the money to pay for their daughter's college education, which they had no plans on doing.
Lena, who had feelings for Lex, refused and for her trouble was beaten to death by her father. Lex was absent from the home at the time, having been talked into going to a football game by his friend Perry. When Lex returned home, he was heartbroken to find Lena murdered by her father. This event would serve as the turning point for Lex Luthor, who vowed to do whatever it took to gain power and to destroy anyone who got in his way. Later in life, on the day Lex's daughter was born, he arranged for his foster father to assassinate the mayor of Metropolis, in a new bid for power, then later, as payment, murdered his foster father himself. He named his daughter Lena.
Perry White was the first target of Lex's turn to evil. Lex blamed Perry for keeping him from being at the house when Lena died and got his revenge by seducing Perry's wife shortly after their marriage and getting her pregnant with Lex's child. The offspring Jerry White, would later learn of his true parentage during his late teens before being killed by a local street gang that Jerry had associated with. Years later, Lex would on several occasions purchase ownership of the Daily Planet, much to Perry's shock, and attempt to kill the newspaper out of complete spite for Perry.
Lex used his money and natural genius to create a multi-national corporation known as "LexCorp" that would ultimately come to dominate the city of Metropolis. One of his earliest projects was an experimental airplane and other similar technology themed enterprises would be the hallmark of LexCorp's output.
Lex became the most powerful man in Metropolis, both financially and in the world of organized crime. Lex would flood the streets with weapons to arm gangs of Metropolis and use his primarily female staff of underlings to keep blackmail files on all of the major organized crime groups in the city, so that Lex could use them to further any schemes he had planned. However, this all ended with the arrival of Superman.
Several months after Superman first appeared on the scene, terrorists attacked a society gala aboard Lex Luthor's yacht. Luthor observed Superman in action and then tried to hire him out after Superman dispatched the gunmen. But when Luthor admitted that he'd not only anticipated the attack but also had arranged for it to occur in order to lure Superman out, Mayor Berkowitz deputized Superman to arrest Luthor for reckless endangerment.
Luthor's (temporary) incarceration left him seething, and he swore to make Superman pay for the humiliation. He has since devoted much time and energy to that goal.
Luthor's motive for hating Superman varies over time. Contemporary stories portray Luthor as a man who sees himself as a hero, and Superman as the threat. He was a man driven to succeed on his own, coming from nothing in a harsh environment; Conversely, Superman was granted power by random fate. While Luthor lacks the compassion or nobility to be a hero, he has a cunning and cruel mind. Superman has survived subsequent attempts Luthor made on his life, but had never been able to prove Luthor's role in the attacks. While on paper, Luthor remains spotless, Superman sees him as a cancer on Metropolis and pursues him with utmost vigilance. For his part, Luthor has begun to tire of the world of business and has focused his energies on Superman to an obsessive degree, to the point where his reality seemingly revolves around the hero.
Luthor soon acquired the only sample of kryptonite on Earth from the Kryptonite-powered cyborg Metallo, whom LexCorp abducted just before Metallo could succeed in killing Superman. Fashioning a ring from the alien ore deadly to Superman, Luthor relished being untouchable even to the man of steel, and began wearing it constantly to ward off his enemy. Unfortunately, Luthor suffered from a severe cancer in the 1990s, caused by long-term radiation exposure to his kryptonite ring.
Luthor's hand required amputation to prevent the cancer's spread, but by then it had already metastasized; it was eventually determined that the disease was terminal. Luthor faked his own death shortly afterward by taking his personally designed jet, the Lexwing, on a proposed trip around the world and crashing it in some mountains, using this as cover for the transplant of his brain into a healthy clone of himself which he then passed off as his hitherto unknown, illegitimate Australian son and heir, Lex Luthor II; his deception helped by his new body having a full head of red hair and a beard.
Luthor continued to masquerade as his own son to seduce Supergirl and continue to torment Superman. However his plan began to quickly fell apart, as Luthor's new clone body began to deteriorate and age at a rapid rate (his being one of many clones that were becoming ill at the time). Meanwhile, Lois Lane discovered proof that Lex Luthor had years earlier murdered a female LexCorp employee and framed an innocent man for the murder. This led Lois to the truth regarding Lex's faked death and false new identity. In retaliation, Luthor set out to systematically destroy Lois' life and have her fired from the Daily Planet. At the same time Luthor instigated a battle against Project Cadmus, when it was discovered that the cloned hero, the Guardian, was the only one not affected by the clone malady and sought to create a cure from him.
Lois fought back and, with help from Superman, exposed the truth about Lex Luthor's faked death and criminal activities to the public. Horrified by the fact that his employer would go to jail, one of his workers attempted to stop the two from battling, only to have Luthor kill him, but his death caused him to hit a button that activated a failsafe that was to destroy Metropolis during an alien invasion. The failsafe, which consisted of a barrage of missiles, a collection of robots, hallucinagens, and, finallly, Superman's discarded Kryptonian Battlesuit, causing nearly the entire city to be leveled and killing thousands. Luthor became a permanent prisoner in his cloned body, unable to even blink, and swearing vengence on Superman.
However, aid would come in the form of the demon Neron; Luthor promptly sold his soul in exchange for Neron restoring his body to perfect health. Returning to a rebuilt Metropolis, Luthor turned himself over to the police and was put on trial, where he was acquitted of all crimes when Luthor claimed to have been kidnapped by renegade scientists who replaced him with a clone, who was responsible for all the crimes he was charged with.
Lex Luthor had cultivated a popular image as a great philanthropist. He had been instrumental in reverse-engineering alien technology for use in general consumer goods, upgrading Metropolis into a true "city of tomorrow." Luthor also played an instrumental role in assisting the Justice League in recharging the sun during the Final Night storyline. Later, when Gotham City was destroyed by an earthquake and then abandoned by the American government in the early 2000s, it was LexCorp that took up the massive task of rebuilding the city. Unbeknownst to the populace, Luthor also took the opportunity to destroy property records so he could seize any land he wanted. By gaining a foothold in Gotham, Luthor made a public enemy in Bruce Wayne, who did not hesitate to publicly denounce him on certain occasions.
Lex Luthor has been married eight times, though the first seven marriages occurred off-panel in Luthor's past. While his previous seven marriages were hinted to have been based on love (or as close to the concept of love as Lex Luthor understands it) Luthor's eighth marriage to Contessa Erica Alexandra Del Portenza (or "The Contessa" as the characters call her) was a marriage that was based on mutual manipulation and greed.
The Contessa had bought controlling interest in LexCorp after Luthor was exposed as evil, forcing Lex into a marriage with her in order to regain control over the company. The marriage was doomed from the beginning as the two fought constantly and never loved each other. The Contessa quickly became pregnant with Lex's child and began using the unborn child to dominate Lex into doing her bidding. Luthor's response to the Contessa's actions was to use her desire to be unconscious during childbirth to lock her in the basement of his corporate headquarters in a permanently drugged unconscious state.
Luthor took over as a single father to his daughter (named Lena after his childhood sweetheart) and vowed never to marry again, stating that he wanted to never have to share his daughter's love with anyone else. The Contessa later escaped, but Luthor had her killed with a barrage of missiles. However, the Contessa's body was never found...
Lex became the president of the United States in 2000, winning the election on a platform of promoting technological progress (his first action as president was to take a proposed moratorium on fossil-based fuels to U.S. Congress in hopes of putting "a flying car in every garage").
Despite Luthor's more villainous traits, he was assisted by the extreme unpopularity of the previous administration due to its mishandling of the Gotham City earthquake crisis. Ironically, Batman would ultimately learn that Luthor was involved in the mishandling of the entire Gotham City rebuilding process, resulting with Bruce Wayne severing all military contract ties between the U.S. government and his company Wayne Enterprises in protest of Lex Luthor's election as President. Luthor responded in kind by ordering the murder of Wayne's lover Vesper Fairchild and framing Bruce Wayne for the murder (although the frame was only truly successful due to Luthor hiring, by sheer coincidence, the assassin David Cain, who was aware of Batman's true identity and thus made it appear to the Bat-family that Wayne had murdered Fairchild after she had discovered he was Batman).
An early triumph of his political career was the Our Worlds At War crisis, in which he coordinated the U.S. Army, Earth's superheroes and a number of untrustworthy alien forces to battle the story's villain, Imperiex. However, as it would later be revealed, Lex knew about the alien invasion in advance and did nothing to alert Earth's heroes to it.
Lex Luthor finally figured out Superman's secret identity in 2002, when a lowly scientist was able to get a meeting with Lex and reveal top secret government documents showing the rocket containing baby Superman crashing near the farm of Martha and Jonathan Kent (Ironically, one of Luthor's employees had once managed to work out that Clark Kent and Superman were the same person shortly after their vendetta began, but Luthor rejected it at the time because he believed that someone as powerful as Superman would never pretend to be someone as insignificant as Clark). Killing the scientist, Lex surprisingly decided to keep the knowledge a secret even as Clark Kent took the fall for Lois publishing proof that Lex Luthor knew of the alien invasion of "Our Worlds At War" but had opted not to make any defensive plans to save the people of Kansas from attack. In the end, the villain Manchester Black erased all knowledge that Clark Kent was Superman from Lex's mind in revenge for Lex helping Superman defeat him.
In 2004, Luthor once again overplayed his hand, as his success at framing Bruce Wayne for the murder of Vesper Fairchild caused him to get arrogant. In an attempt to blame Superman for a kryptonite meteor approaching the Earth, he instead raised questions about himself as Superman and Batman uncovered a plot of Luthor's to further torment Batman that involved tricking Batman into thinking that the Superman villain Metallo was the man who killed Batman's parents. In desperation, he used a variant combination of the "super-steroid" Venom (a steroid mainly used by Batman villain Bane), liquid synthetic green kryptonite, and an Apokaliptian battlesuit to battle Superman directly. Unfortunately, the madness that is a side effect of Venom took hold, and he revealed his true colors during the battle. Superman and Batman were able to gain evidence by Luthor, via a mad confession during the battle on recorded to video, that Lex had traded arms with Darkseid on Apokolips, giving them the creature Doomsday in return for his aid during the "Our Worlds At War" crisis. The final straw was the revelation that Talia Head, the acting CEO of LexCorp, had sold all the company assets to the Wayne Foundation. He has since gone underground, leaving the presidency to his vice president, Pete Ross. Ross later resigned, however, leaving the presidency to a man named Jonathan Horne.
Lex Luthor went into hiding, preparing to activate a mind control program planted inside the brain of the current Superboy Conner Kent (created with 50% of Lex's and 50% of Superman's DNA) to help him gain revenge against Earth's mightiest heroes. Luthor has also been carefully surveiling the new Supergirl, but his attempt to split her personalities using Black Kryptonite backfired when the "evil" incarnation of Kara Zor-El rebelled against Luthor and nearly killed him.
Alexander Luthor, Jr., the son of Earth-Three's Lex Luthor, returned to the DC Universe along with other survivours from the Crisis on Infinite Earths as part of a scheme to create a perfect Earth, under the pretense of restoring Earth-Two. To this end, he assumed Lex Luthor's identity and created a new Secret Society of Super Villains.
The real Lex Luthor took on the identity of Mockingbird and formed a super-villain version of the Secret Six, whose purpose was to subvert the new Secret Society created by Alexander. Lex swore vengeance against the impostor for taking his place.
In Infinite Crisis Lex confronted Alex Luthor after tailing him for several months. Alex's identity was exposed to Lex during the following fight. He and Superboy-Prime managed to destroy his battlesuit, but Lex escaped via short-range teleporter.
Luthor then visited Conner Kent (in recovery at Titans Tower). Lex gave words of vengeance against Alex Luthor and Superboy-Prime, and slipped onto Conner's person a crystal shard (collected during his fight with Alex) showing the location of Alexander's Arctic Fortress. Conner later went to Nightwing and the two agreed to stop Alexander. At the end of Infinite Crisis #7, Lex Luthor oversees the Joker's execution of Alexander.
Luthor has shown an unusual compassion for Conner Kent; it seems that by watching Superboy throughout the course of his short life, Lex came to see Conner as his son. When Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman informed Luthor of Conner's death, he goes berserk and tries to kill the three heroes in a fit of rage over the fact that the three heroes were not present to prevent Conner from dying. Later, Luthor is shown visiting a memorial statue of Superboy in Metropolis and placed flowers there.
In 52 Week Three, the Gotham City Police Department find a body in an alley that looks like Lex Luthor. John Henry Irons examines the body at S.T.A.R. Labs and notices that contact lenses were inserted post-mortem to make the blue eyes appear green, like Lex's. Lex Luthor barges in with a throng of reporters, claiming that the body is that of an impostor from another Earth, the man truly responsible for his various crimes. Though Alexander's body had a missing finger and a different genetic make-up from Lex's, 52 editor Stephen Wacker has confirmed that the body found in Gotham is indeed Alex, and that Luthor had it altered before the police discovered it.
Lex publicly continues to rebuild his fallen reputation. In various news broadcasts throughout the country, he claims to have engineered a way to make meta-humans out of ordinary citizens, saying that everyone should have a right to have powers, not just a select few. However, during the autopsy of Alex Luthor, Lex secretly exposes John to the chemicals involved in his creating his new army of super-heroes, turning him into a literal man of steel. When approached by John's niece Natasha Irons, he gladly allows her to be one of his first test subjects. Thanks to Luthor, Natasha now has super-powers similar to those of Superman, after undergoing a treatment he called "the full package" and acts as a spokesperson his new meta-gene treatment. Also, using Natasha and several other test subjects, Luthor has formed his own team of superpowered "heroes" which are now being called a new Infinity Inc.. In week #21, this new Infinity Inc. were battling a new Blockbuster, which Luthor had created as well, when he demonstrated that he could shut off their powers and had his speedster, Trajectory, killed.
One year after the events of Infinite Crisis, Luthor has just been cleared from over 120 criminal counts ranging from malfeasance to first-degree murder, only to find that he's now unpopular with the public and, thanks to the machinations of Doctor Sivana, is being bought out of LexCorp. He blames Clark Kent for writing articles chronicling his downfall, and pledges vengeance on Metropolis.
Comic character is from: DC comics, primarily Superman
