Lex Luthor is Dead (& I Think His Ending is Absolutely Perfect)

Lex Luthor is one of the most enduring and iconic villains in all of comics. He is the ultimate antithesis to Superman, being a normal human who wishes nothing more than to fully detach himself from his humanity. Where Superman cherishes the connections that make him who he is, Lex rejects them and attempts to place himself above everyone else.

He is the ultimate intelligence with the selfishness of a petty child, while Superman is unlimited power who only uses it for selfless reasons. If you could describe Lex Luthor in a few words, they would be narcissistic, egotistical, and evil. And yet, despite everything, Lex Luthor just sacrificed himself to save Superman’s life, and it was the perfect end to his character.



How Did Lex Luthor Die?It all went down in the DC Black Label series Superman: The Last Days of Lex Luthor, written by Mark Waid and drawn by Bryan Hitch. The story details how Lex Luthor was experimenting with kryptonite, only to accidentally infect himself with an incurable disease that is very quickly killing him. With only a few days left to live and unable to find a cure himself, Lex swallows his massive pride and requests the help of the only person he is sure will not turn him away; Superman.

Being Superman, Clark naturally promises to do everything he can to help save Lex’s life, even when Lex livestreams Superman agreeing to help him to turn the public against the Man of Steel. After all, Lex is one of the world’s worst supervillains, so of course the public wants to see him go. But Superman’s never decided what he does based on public opinion.

Superman takes Lex everywhere he can think of to try and find a cure, calling in every favor he can. He tries the bottled city of Candor, the Legion of Super-Heroes’ Brainiac 5, the island paradise of Themyscira, and even visits his ex-girlfriend Lori the mermaid in the underwater city of Tritonis. Everywhere he goes, people question why he is struggling so hard to save his worst enemy, before they remember that he is Superman, and he helps everyone.

In the end, no one can save Lex, but in the final hours he has left to live, Superman realizes he getting weaker and weaker.RELATED: I Think This Scrapped Plan for Superman Would Have Changed Comics ForeverIt is then that Brainiac reveals himself as the mastermind behind everything. He caused the lab accident that gave Lex his cellular decay, knowing he would turn to Superman for help.

In turn, Lex would be next to Superman long enough for the specific way his cells responded to sap Superman’s solar energy, leaving him powerless, and letting Brainiac invade the earth unimpeded.In the end, Lex spends his last bit of time constructing a machine that will transfer Superman’s solar energy back to him, but kill Lex in the process. He tells Superman that in order to save the eight billion lives on earth, he has to take one.

He says that this is Superman’s sacrifice, and Superman agrees. Superman fires up the machine, but instead of killing Lex, Superman makes a last minute adjustment to transfer his full powers to the evil genius. He effectively makes Lex a full kryptonian, and in the process cures Lex of his disease, and makes himself fully human.

The two team up and bring down Brainiac. However, he is unwilling to go down alone, and his body self-destructs in a red-sun explosion. Lex sacrifices himself to get the powerless Superman to safety, ordering him to tell nobody what he did.

Why Did Lex Sacrifice Himself for His Worst Enemy?Lex and Superman weren’t always bitter rivals. When they were still kids in Smallville, they were the closest thing either had to a friend. Their relationship would fall apart when Lex thought Clark looked down on Lex for his attempt to contact alien life, unaware that Clark was just having a bad reaction to Kryptonite.

The resulting explosion left Lex permanently bald, and he disappeared from Smallville forever. Lex tried to forget Clark, but Clark could never forget Lex.In the present day, Superman tried his best to save his first ever friend.

All the while, Lex sees what Superman means to people, how many people he’s helped and what lengths he goes to for even the chance to save a single life. In Tritonis he even eats a fruit that forces him to feel how powerfully everyone there respects Superman. Right before Brainiac attacks, Clark reveals his secret identity to Lex, who comes to understand how Superman really is just a good person for the first time.

Then, when Superman risks everything by giving Lex his superpowers, it gets through to Lex how much Superman cares.At the end of the day, Lex Luthor kept reaching out to alien life and trying to destroy Superman because he wanted a place to belong. He thought he could find a place among extraterrestrials, but that didn’t work, so he shifted his goal to making his mark on history by killing the one person who challenged everything he thought about the world.

It may have taken him his entire life, but he finally realized he had that place of belonging beside Superman. Thus, when the Man of Steel was in danger, Lex sacrificed everything to save his only friend. It was the perfect end to his arc, and really showed how important Superman and his viewpoint is.

Superman wants everyone to feel at home, and for just one moment, he made Lex feel that way, and he became the man Clark always knew he could be. This story is beautiful and an instant, must-read classic.Superman: The Last Days of Lex Luthor is on sale now!The post Lex Luthor is Dead (& I Think His Ending is Absolutely Perfect) appeared first on ComicBook.

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