Look, I'm not looking for a fight and I am not especially proud of that last crack, as it is a bit juvenile. Okay, more than "a bit." Chalk it up to too much time on my hands (and a frustrating inability to use my kitchen sink, for a few days); but I got a bit rankled there.

I just feel, at times, that there is a bit of reading things into the story that were not intended by the creators and suspicions of agendas without material facts. Every reader/observer brings their own biases to artistic works (regardless of the level of quality of the particular work) As such, they see things that the artist may never have considered or intended.

I have a bias about Jim Shooter's work, based on his actions as editor-in-in chief and statements he has made. As such, I have never undertaken reviews of his work, though I enjoy some of it. Quite a bit, actually; but, if I did, could I separate the individual work from my perception of Shooter's personality and character, as I understand it, through second hand accounts? I don't think I am that objective.

I have just read some things, here and in the Batman Family thread, that suggest agendas in the editors or someone else, that I don't see in the work and I have never heard raised before. It's a different perception of the material. Maybe it's a matter of taste, maybe it's a variation of when I saw the work and others, maybe it's the context of the work, maybe it's a generational thing, maybe it's my own blindness. Ultimately, it is a matter of perception.

So, again, not intending to cause offense and I apologize for the juvenile crack.

I have no problem with that, but I am a bit biased.

Something else from that Panic in the Sky tpb which might be of interest - one of The Super-Office's charts.  I don't think there are any major spoilers here - almost all of it predates and goes up to Panic - though it does peek ahead just a bit (nothing which won't be spoiled in a few issues anyway, I believe).

Action Comics #676 (April 1992)



"Man of the Hour"

Script: Roger Stern
Pencils: Butch Guice
Inks: Denis Rodier
Colors: Glenn Whitmore
Letters: Bill Oakley

Grade: A-

When you have a generic action cover and an editor's caption vageuly promising that there is some new threat to Metropolis in this issue, you have to suspect that they had nothing planned at the time of the cover deadline. Sure enough, while I really did enjoy this issue, that cover only barely applies to Superman's five-second battle with The Helgramite, and nothing is going especially wrong in Metropolis either. If anything, the point of this story is that things in Metropolis are going very right...and it's all thanks to Lex Luthor II.

I'd long argued back during the Byrne era that Lex Luthor wasn't utilized correctly. The shrewd businessman who has everyone conned shouldn't be undone so easily--shouldn't so readily drop the facade and display his true nature with multiple witnesses around to see it--and it's beginning to feel like the entire point of Lex Luthor II is for the creative teams to finally implement the true villain of this series as he should have been done from the start. Thus Lex II not only does a far more successful job of masking his intentions from the public; he's just as successful at masking them from the reader too.

Thanks to a regrettable decision to have Lex II reveal far too much far too suddenly back in Action Comics #672, we know that Lex is playing everyone,



but we still don't understand anything beyond the fact that we are being lied to. Take, for example, a moment we are given between Lex II and his "mother", Dr. Gretchen Kelly in this issue. This is our first opportunity to see Lex in a private moment with someone who presumably knows all of his secrets, and it raises more questions than it answers:



So he really isn't the original Lex in a new body? Or he is, but Dr. Kelly doesn't know this? So he actually has some tenderness/affection/humanity beneath his facade? Or is this also an act for Dr. Kelly's benefit? This villain is already so much more compelling than Byrne's Luthor ever was, and I'm such a sucker for slow-burn mysteries...provided the payoff makes sense at the end. This guy can't be exactly what we've been told he is, and he apparently isn't Lex I, so where the hell is this going? As always, please don't spoil it for me!

Anyway, what better way for the creative teams to show off how much better this guy is than his predecessor than by putting him in the exact same situation Lex I was in when Superman first saw through his facade and publicly humiliated him waaaaay back in Man of Steel #4 (not to be confused with the more recent Superman, The Man of Steel #4):



Once again, there is an attempt on a Luthor's life (though this time it wasn't staged...or was it?), but he comes through unscathed. Ironically, near the end of the story, we learn that this Luthor still wants and cannot have the same two things that the previous Luthor was pursuing aboard that same yacht all those issues earlier, namely Lois and Superman:



but the story then goes on to show us the trump card this Luthor has that sets him even further apart from his predecessor:



Once again, Luthor knows far more than the reader, and thus the issue ends leaving us (intentionally) utterly bewildered. Is that Matrix or someone else? If she came from Krypton, then how do she and Luthor already have a relationship? If she is Matrix, why is she so disoriented after a short trip from Warworld, and how do she and Luthor even know each other (Matrix hasn't been on Earth since before Lex I died)? Why did she believe she had lost Lex forever?  Is he controlling/manipulating her? How? So many reasons to anxiously await the next issue!


This issue also spends some time on The Helgramite and on Husque, but as nothing particularly noteworthy happens in either instance, I won't bother discussing them here. This is a Lex II story through and through.



Important Details:

1. Hard to say whether this is the first appearance of a new Supergirl or something else entirely. Either way, we learn here that Luthor appears to control her (or is at least manipulating her romantically).



Minor Details:


1. Butch Guise's art is really getting to me. He draws with an impressively realistic style, but so many of his poses are downright awkward, like this one in which Lex should be talking to Clark and Lois directly.



and why does Clark look annoyed?


2. God these panels made me uncomfortable:




3. Yet another way in which this Lex is superior to the original: whereas Lex I took stupid risks all the time (including one that ultimately killed him), Lex II and his people use the kind of common sense precautions so often missing in comic book stories:




4. "Damages were pretty much kept to a minimum"?



I guess that means the artists didn't feel like drawing a battered and broken Metropolis backdrop each issue, because we were shown and told pretty much the exact opposite back in Superman, The Man of Steel #9, before the worst of the damage during Panic in the Sky had even taken place:






5. There is an absurd amount of re-hashing of already known information in this issue. For example, we already know all this from just a few issues back:



and we get over a page of recap from Man of Steel #4:



Now, to be fair, that story was six years old by this point, but it's still uncharacteristic of this office to provide a lengthy flashback as a means of bringing the reader up to speed when a few lines of dialogue would have given us the basics. It seems like the Superman Office was playing to new readers, expecting the same boost in sales with Panic in the Sky that they got with their more successful 1990 and 1991 crossovers, before Marvel took more than 50% of the market, and new publishers rose up to take most of the rest. Again, I don't have sales numbers on these issues specificially, but I do have these figures from the May 1992 issues of Wizard Magazine:


Percentage shares of the comic book market

Marvel: 57.1%
DC: 17.6%
Dark Horse: 5.6%
Malibu: 2.7%
Valiant: 1.6%
Other: 12.2%

So it would seem that DC's sales weren't experiencing any kind of significant boost in response to Panic in The Sky. It's going to take something a lot more sensational than a simple multi-part crossover to win readers back to the Superman titles at this point, and I suspect the Superman office is just now beginning to realize this. It would take, what, probably six months to properly organize a massive event in response to this new information that requires clearance from way up top and rewrites the entire direction of the franchise for the next year? So I wonder if the Superman Office ends up doing anything interesting in November or December of 1992...

Lex Luthor's post-Crisis trajectory made sense to me for the most part up until now.  Why was he a businessman come 1986?  Well, that's what powerful men were in the 80's.  Why did he have to get cancer and lose his hand?  Otherwise, Byrne would have to explain why Luthor wasn't wearing that ring 24/7.  Why did Luthor die and his son come on board?  Well... that I can't figure out.  I guess that's why the reveal that he's a bad guy which you pointed out was made so early on - so that a new status quo could be established where not only did Metropolis think that this Luthor was a good guy, but Superman as well (or at least reserve judgement on that score).  

I would have liked to have that surprise not to have been spoiled so quickly, but perhaps the Super-Team wanted readers to worry for their hero more than they wanted them to wonder about Luthor II.  Still, he hasn't really done anything evil yet, has he?

I think the initial plan was to make "1991" largely about Lex I's absense and the subsequent rise of Lex II, except things got blown way off course by a number of last minute decisions from up above (not the least being the addition of a fourth monthly title and creative team), so I figure at some point, the following conversation must have happened:

"So, 1991 is almost over. Shouldn't we maybe do something with Lex Luthor II already?"

"Wait, we didn't spend months and months, building trust in him before finally cruelly revealing to the reader his true origin and plans?"

"No. We spent that time chronicling Ma and Pa Kent's cruise with the Whites over many, many issues, introduced a mysterious terrorist organization over even more issues that no one actually cares about, and also spent some time on Superman losing his memory and making out with hot foreign chicks."

"Time well spent!"

"But now Lex Luthor II..."

"F*** I dunno. Just skip past all that other stuff and reveal he's evil at the end or something."

"But he hasn't actually done anything wrong."

"So he can still be like 'mwahaha I'm evil' or something."

"I guess."

"Man, I'm on a role with these ideas. Next, let's have Brainiac attack Earth for no particular reason."

"Okay..."

"and then let's kill Superman."

...

"It would be cool, right?"

"...what the hell did they put in your Big Belly Burger?"