Look, luminaries, learned linguists and leading logicians alike have labored over those letters and their lexicological leanings. Let it go.
I don’t know if it’s the stupidest…but it’s WAY up there. The Armageddon 2001 bit where D.C. decided to teach the fans a lesson for figuring out their big mystery after one or two issues by killing Dove probably edges it out. 1-800-SNUF-ROBIN is pretty high on the list too.
Anyway, from what I understand, the next 2 months of the Superman titles may wrap everything up. And boy! Won’t that be fun! yawns
Other than the obvious stupidity of the idea, the bigger problem is: How do they resolve it? Impeach Luthor? Ruins the whole idiot Byrne-wanted-to-write-Kingpin-but-only-Luthor-was-available thing: If he goes to jail or is impeached, he loses his respectable image (although, somehow blowing up Metropolis while admiting what he was doing live on the air didn’t seem to do much damage to his rep: he was elected president a few years later. If he’d flown airplanes into the World Trade Center or shot up a busload of nuns and orphans apparently DC’s populace would have made him Emperor. :rolleyes: ) and that respectiblity is the whole point of the idiotic Luthor-as-Kingpin gimmick.
Let him resign? That’d be a satisfactory ending. Maybe we could have congressional hearings! :rolleyes: That’d have all the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping.
Assassinate him? yawn He’ll be back, so who cares?
Let him finish his term? And he gets away with everything again? Dull and unsatisfying.
I don’t see a way to end the storyline satisfactorily. Unless their intent is to end the idiot Luthor-as-Kingpin gimmick once and for all, the ending is gonna suck worse than the beginning.
Fenris
Well, there was a moment on Smallville when there was a ‘vision’ of Luther’s future life…in the vision it was quite clear that Lex does become President and it is implied that his hand is amputated. Also, he must kill people, because, like, blood rains from the sky. I’m not at all familiar with the comics (I hide my head in shame). It was the absolute best two minutes of the series so far. I mean, you get all this hokey villain-of-the-week stuff with Clark and his bestest friend Lexy (He’s So Sexy!) and then completely without warning you get this reminder that Lex becomes truly evil. Cool.
I don’t remember that episode ending with a Presidential angle, or a hand-chopping. I just remember Lex standing calmly, if not proudly, on a field of devasation. I guess I’ll have to start taping the episodes.
I normally despise shows with psychics, but that was a cool ending.
Oh man, I need some drugs again. So…Luthor got elected president? Was it a Ross Perot kinda thing, or was a major political party involved? And also, now the Superman comic is Tackling The Serious Issue of gun control? Whut’n’th’hell??? Are there some storylines about abortion and racial profiling on the burner?
In the beginning he’s standing in the Oval Offive or somesuch - there’s a shot of the Presidential seal. And he wears a black glove on one hand only (okay, I said it was implied).
But, see the thing is, like you pointed out the other stories on the list could at least possibly come to some kind of satisfactory conclusion. Unless it features the triumphant return of Prez, there is no chance that anybody is going to derive entertainment from this storyline.
A) Prez had a triumphant return, by Neil Gaiman, no less. Roughly Sandman #58.
B) Fair enough on the 1-800-SNUF-ROB, but Armageddon 2001, once they decided to punish the fans for figuring out the least complex mystery in history is still screwing things up nearly 15(?) years later, unresolved.
For those of you who don’t know the storyline: in the far-future year of 2001 (cough), a evil dictator with the creative name of “Monarch” ruled the world. He first showed up in 198x when he killed every other super-hero. The only thing known was that he himself had once been a super-hero before becoming a control freak. A (boring) character named Waverider went back in time. He had the power to touch people and see their possible futures. Each annual that year, he touched someone in hopes of finding out which one became Monarch.
Well, because DC was subtle as a brick to the face, everyone figured out that it had to be Captain Atom. And, y’know what? If they’d just shrugged and said “Hey, you figured it out. No big deal. Just go along for the ride, it’ll be fun anyway” it would have been a fondly remembered, decent series 'cause it made sense.
Nope.
Instead they decided to teach the fans a lesson, so they snuffed Dove (of the stunningly good Hawk and Dove series by Karl Kessel: if you don’t have it, get the back-issues. One of the best series of the '80s) and made Hawk become Monarch. Hawk. A just-barely-super-powered athelete, who’s idea of strategy is to “scream and leap” and who’s an avitar of the forces of Chaos became Monarch, the uber-powerful strategist who would be able to easily snuff Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, etc?
And to make matters worse, Waverider had already touched Hawk and determined that he wasn’t Monarch. But hey: they had to show the fans for figuring it out!
And the character (now named Extant, for some ghastly reason) is still running around: He just showed up in JSA. So the idiotic storyline is oozing on, more than 10 years later.
I suspect Luthor-As-President will be forgotten in 6 months.
Fenris
I don’t know.
It was moronic, but c’mon we’re talking about DC here. Plus there were a couple entertaining moments in the “Alternate Futures” bit of the Armageddon 2001 Storyline, including goofily enough, a Superman issue Action Comics Annual #3 where Superman ends up as President of the USA after an assassin . . . um. . . injures Pete Ross.
I also liked the JLA Annual, but mostly for the Giffen era goodness.
Besides, if Captain Atom had been Monarch then we never could have had Living Assault Weapons. C’mon L.A.W.? It’s a million times better than Hawk and Dove and Watchmen put together, right?
Er. . . maybe not.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGH!!
I’d managed to block the painful memories of L.A.W.
By bringing it back you have refreshed my traumatic memories of that comic-book shaped rectal-probe. Now I’ll have to relive the trauma all over again!
You shall be hearing from my lawyer.
Fenris
Nah, Extant was killed off at the end of that JSA storyline by Atom-Smasher and Metron.
…'course, there are no pearly gates in comic book heaven, only revolving doors…
Here’s how out of the loop I am. Is President Luthor the Lex Luthor clone that was grown after the original succumbed to kryptonite poisoning?
It’s even more complicated that that…
They saved Luthor’s brain. (No, really…there’s even a TPB out there called “They Saved Luthor’s Brain!” in big, horror-film type letters.) Luthor intentionally faked his death, wrecking a plane but allowing himself to be rescued by Project: Cadmus. Luthor’s brain, eyes, and some loose nerves were left in a jar; his new body was grown around it.
Luthor spent a few years posing as his own, red-haired Australian son (the mother was said to be Dr. Kelley, Luthor’s physician) and heir to the Luthor empire. (Metropolis’ economy began to tank following Luthor’s supposed death, so people were pretty thrilled.) Eventually, all clones from Cadmus began to suffer from a degeneration, conveniently causing all of Luthor’s hair to fall out and Lex to go nuts. I forget exactly why, but he declared war on Metropolis and was exposed for the rat bastard he was. He also fell into a permanent coma.
…permanent as far as comics go, anyway. Luthor sold his soul to Neron in exchange for a healthy body…forgetting to ask for hair, of course.
Lex was largely redeemed in the public’s eyes during the “Final Night” crisis, when he aided in saving the world from the Sun-Eater. (In reality, he didn’t do squat: Parallax did it.) At Luthor’s subsequent trial, the whole thing was blamed on a clone of Luthor who took over Lexcorp and went insane. The public loved it. :rolleye:
Wha…?
I’ll just stick to Archie, thanks.
Yeah, I knew about the whole “starting to degenerate” storyline but stopped reading comics around the time it was going on. This all raises a fascinating constitutional question as to whether Lex is qualified to be elected. Is a brain harvested from a natural-born U.S. citizen, implanted in a clone body that is replaced/reconstituted by a mystical being qualified for the office under Article II section 1?
OK, I’ll go quietly now.
Lex had his hand chopped off? Is this related in any way to the chopped off hands of Star Wars characters?
Cite? Do you have any evidence to support the claim that DC changed the intended outcome of the crossover?
Yes, there was a lot of evidence pointing to Captain Atom. I have always assumed that this represented a red herring. Even the first few pages of the last comic in the crossover (Armageddon 2001 #2) point to Captain Atom, and they must have known how the comic was going to end at that point.
Regarding the Hawk and Dove annual, at the end, Waverider says something like “As long as Hawk and Dove stay together, neither one of them will become Monarch.” Shortly thereafter, the final issue of the Hawk and Dove monthly shows Hawk and Dove going their separate ways. And in the other annuals (especially the three Superman annuals and the two Batman annuals), it is made clear that many possible futures exist, and that Waverider has not seen most of them.
Don’t have a cite, 'cause I don’t keep back issues of CBG, but in it, there was a discussion in the letter cols between several creators (IIRC, Kessel was one) discussing the the ending had changed 'cause fans had universally figured it out.
And when it comes down to it, Hawk, a chaotic glorified athelete who’s entire approach to strategy is “Get 'em!” makes no sense, but Captain Atom, a trained military mind, very order-oriented and (at the time) one of the big 5 in terms of toughness makes TONS of sense. Plus, IIRC, one of the early annuals gave it away. I don’t remember which, but I’d swear you saw a glimpse of Captain Atom’s arm or hand or…something.
Fenris
Fenris
Well, Fenris, I guess I will have to take your word for it.
However, considering the long lead time for comic book story, artwork, lettering, etc., it is still hard for me to see how fans could have read enough of the story to figure it out, DC to have heard enough from the fans to realize the cat was out of the bag, DC to have decided to change the ending, and much of Armageddon 2001 #2 to have been rewritten and redrawn, all without significantly delaying the release of Armageddon 2001 #2. (Actually, I did not start collecting comics until 1993, so I don’t know if Armageddon 2001 #2 was delayed or not.) And considering that it was Kessel’s series that had to end to make Hawk the villian, I am not sure that I would accept Kessel as an unbiased witness.
If I were to complain about Armageddon 2001, I would complain about how they shoehorned the origin of the Team Titans into Armageddon 2001 with complete disregard for the “rules” set in all the other annuals. In the New Titans annual, Waverider decided that, unlike every other trip to a possible future that he had taken, that trip was to an “alternate reality” which really existed and from which characters could come to the present and continue to exist even after that future was prevented. (IIRC, that problem also occurred when Lord Chaos was finally defeated.)
IIRC, the annuals were spread over like a 3/4 month period, IIRC: The first one came out at the beginning of summer and the last one in late summer/early fall (I’m not with my comics, so I can’t check the cover dates). That gives, say…2 months lead-time to change things.
Hawk and Dove, like Captain Atom was being cancelled anyway due to poor sales IIRC. Hawk was chosen 'cause Hawk and Dove was the only other book being cancelled at the right time (Captain Atom’s being the other one: they were both cancelled with the War of the Gods crossover issue) so they didn’t have a lot of choice of victims.
At some point I’ll try to dig through the annuals and figure out the screw-up that showed it was Captain Atom. But even if I can’t, Hawk still makes no sense as a choice. It’s like a murder mystery where the hinges on the fact that the murderer had to do a tap-dance to trigger the murder, but at the end it turns out that the murderer is a parapalegic and it’s never explained.
Captain Atom fits all the clues planted in Armageddon 2001, Hawk fits none and it’s never explained satisfactorally why not.
Fenris
PS: Ha! I found a few cites! Never underestimate the power of a Google search! 
here! Independant verification!, here, here and here! Plus a quote by the Kessels about it here