In his first appearance in the Superman comics, Lex Luthor looks kinda like Thomas Edison. I wonder if that was intentional. He did, however, have bald-headed minions. Wikipedia credits a newspaper mistake with making Lex bald. I don’t know if it was a mistake or the more imposing sight of that bald underling (Thomas Edison didn’t look very frightening), but they soon switched to the Bald-Headed geek appearance. In fact, in some Superman strips from the 1940s he appears to have pointed fangs. By the 1950s he was a normal bald guy, although some artists made him fat (the same thing that happened with other bald-headed nemesis, Elmer Fudd). Fortunately, “fat” Luthor disappeared, and by the time the Silver Age came around, he was bald and fit and evil, reveling in his Museum of Evil headquarters in the heart of Metropolis.
(I never did care for Plump Industrialist Lex Luthor, rather than Mad Scientist Luthor. And none of his movie incarnations looks right to me. I prefer to think that the Real Lex Luthor retired to Lexor – which never was destroyed – with Ardora. Lexor | DC Database | Fandom. The fat industrialist is an opportunistic cad who took over the name. )
Yes! I came across some of the strips rather late in my life, having broken away from steady comics buying for the second time… and I couldn’t believe how much he looked like he was about to bite someone!
It seems to me that he was consistently fat through the '50’s. “Bald, fat fiend” is an exact snippet of a self-quote from the all-villains issue of Amazing World of DC Comics in-house fanzine. But he was supposed to be a rather stereotypical middle-aged man, with the baldness fitting in. There was even an early Superboy story where he was already an adult.
In 1960 it was decided that he was only a bit older than what Clark was supposed to be, and he was given the alliterative first name Lex. The extra weight (as an adult) was downplayed, and I will never forget the cover showing him clobbering Supie in a boxing ring under a red sun-- That was one of the few non-misleading covers of that era. Superman saved the day, and no doubt his life, by finally letting loose instead of pulling his punches from habit. The fact that he had long observed Batman no doubt helped him turn the tide.
This adult Luthor version was clearly “chunky” but not without some considerable musculature thrown in.
It was only with the large-scale revamping around the power-suit that he “… lost [the remaining excess] weight and improved [his] image as the world’s greatest super-villain!” to continue the self-quote in AWoDCComics.
Gotta disagree with you there. Throughout the 1960s, Lex was pretty fit-looking, noit chunky. That cover with him and Superman duking it out on Lexor has him shirtless, IIRC. Lots of other comics from the 1960s show him similarly svelte. He was in good shape LONG before “Power Suit” Luthor.
I forgot about those. They’re gravity-nullifying boots that Superman (that model of Fair Play) gave Luthor so that they’d be on an even “footing” on the high-gravity planet of Lexor.
The story in this issue was written by Golden Age SF author Edmond Hamilton, and apparently lifts quite a bit from one of his own stories. The concept of the once-high-tech people now living a subsistence existence, unable to operate their old tech must’ve appealed to Hamilton, who (very interestingly) has Luthor take pity on them and get their technology running again.
My favourite: Professor Branestawm, hero of the series of children’s books by the British author Norman Hunter, published between 1933 and 1983. The Professor lives in an English village, and is extremely absent-minded, and mind-bogglingly inventive and erudite (he is fluent in something like 654 languages, twenty-seven of which are known to nobody on earth except himself). IMO gentle, and marvellously crazy, nonsense.