I’m not really an idea man, so when the notion of Lex Luthor taking Superboy to civil court occurred to me, I got excited. While I have my own opinion on it, I tried mightily to be fair in the proceedings. Any comics fan with a law degree, no doubt, could call me out on a number of omissions that would have been brought out in a genuine civil trial. Particularly in terms of witnesses, for both sides, that weren’t called to the stand.
I know that. When I sketched out how the trial would progress, I realised that including every element and witness and motion that would have arisen, had it been a genuine civil trial, would have extended the article past the limits of my audience’s attention span---á la “The Trial of the Flash”. So I trimmed away everything but the most critical components, the ones that were necessary to establish the gist of both sides’ arguments. (And even with that, I still couldn’t keep it under six parts.)
So those of you out there who might be wondering, say, why didn’t I have a sequence that showed Luthor’s parents testifying, that’s why.
Also in the interests of playing fair with my readers, I intended to keep strictly to information which had been presented in the comic-book stories themselves. I wasn’t going to throw in any fabricated events, like a hitherto-never-seen witness to the fire in Lex’s lab or an exchange of dialogue that hadn’t actually taken place in a story. In order for me to use it, it had to be on a printed page in some comic.
I didn’t have much of a cast list for my fictionalised court proceeding, but I wanted those characters to come from earlier stories, as well. Of course, Superboy and Luthor were no problem, but I experienced more trouble with some of the other players than I thought I would.
In my effort to tie things in to preëxisting canon, I got a little deeper into the woods than I had intended to. I knew the die-hard Superman fans out there---guys like the Silver Age Fogey and Philip Portelli---would enjoy tracking down where the in-references came from. But I hadn’t really thought about the folks who didn’t have the time or the resources to figure out who came from where. Anyway, not until Fraser Sherman mentioned that he hoped I would provide all those elusive details myself.
And to that, I say . . . sure.
SUPPORTING CAST
My search for the necessary folks to make up a trial sequence---the two lawyers and a judge---got a big boost when I remembered that DC had already done a story in which Superboy was the subject of a lawsuit. In “The Trial of Superboy”, from Superboy # 63 (Mar., 1958), the Boy of Steel is sued by a man named Fenton, who claims that his house was destroyed by a fragment from the wreckage of the rocket which carried the youth to Earth as a baby.
Fenton is represented by lawyer Thomas Aldrich, “the best in the country”. So I figured Aldrich would be the logical candidate to square off against Superboy in court again by representing Lex Luthor and his family. I also took the unnamed judge from the same tale. I didn’t need a name for the judge, but the many visuals of him would come in handy as art for my article.
Unfortunately for my courtroom saga, the Boy of Steel acted as his own counsel in “The Trial of Superboy”, so my search was on for an appropriate defence attorney. I finally found him---not in the pages of a Superboy story, but rather, in a two-part Superman adventure from late in the Silver Age.
In “Superman . . . Guilty of Homicide”, from Action Comics # 358 (Jan., 1968), the Man of Steel is charged with killing Ron Noble, a wealthy financier and one of Metropolis’ more notable philanthropists, during an exhibition boxing match for charity. The next issue, # 359, features “The Case of the People Against Superman”, which depicts the trial which follows Our Hero’s indictment.
Both halves together provide an intricate story, with enough twists and turns to make a suitable episode of Perry Mason. It also gave me a defence attorney for my case. In “. . . the People Against Superman”, the Man of Steel is represented by Earl Barton, an elderly, wheelchair-bound lawyer. Barton offers his services as an old friend of Superman.
True, Barton was one of those convenient “old friends” in fiction, one who was never seen before and will not be seen after, but serves the plot of this particular tale. But it was enough to justify my use of him in “Luthor v. Superboy”. One could extrapolate that their friendship began when Superman was a boy and Barton defended him in court against Luthor’s lawsuit.
The one snag would be finding suitable depictions of Barton for the art with my piece; there was just no way to not show Superboy’s lawyer. I was afraid I was going to have to take panels of the elderly Barton and use the “Paint” function of my computer to somehow erase his wrinkles and darken his hair. Instead, “The Trial of Superboy” came to my rescue, again; one of its principal characters bore a strong resemblance to what Barton would have looked like as a young man. So I performed a little artistic sleight-of-hand.
PART ONE
1. Superboy awarded the status of an adult. This was the basis for my case’s judge tossing out Mr. Aldrich’s pre-trial motion to require Superboy to disclose his secret identity and produce his foster-parents. A juvenile-court judge, indeed, ruled the Boy of Steel to be an adult, in the story “Superboy’s New Parents”, from Adventure Comics # 281 (Feb., 1961).
2. “Gentlemen of the jury . . . .” It’ll probably come as a surprise to some of you youngsters out there, but for most of our nation’s history, up into my own lifetime and those of my fellow greybeards here at the Comics Round Table, women were actively excluded from serving on juries.
The Constitution of the United States guarantees the right to a jury trial in criminal (Sixth Amendment) and civil (Seventh Amendment) proceedings. However, the method for determining how those juries are empanelled is left to the individual states. (And before someone brings it up, no, there is no requirement for, or even a mention of, a “jury of one’s peers” in the Constitution.)
From the beginning, some states, in establishing their jury processes, specifically prohibited females from serving as jurors. Many others simply provided an opening for such prohibitions to occur by permitting local jurisdictions to follow juror-selection practices which banned women from serving. As America entered the twentieth century, those laws began to fall and women began taking a greater place on juries. But even as late as 1950, nine states still had laws preventing female jury duty.
But while the laws prohibiting feminine participation on juries fell away, they were replaced by laws making jury duty optional for women . Moreover, it was common for jurisdictions to administratively excuse women from trials involving rape and child abuse, under the premise that a female would be embarrassed at hearing the graphic testimony or discussing it in the jury room.
Even without overt bias, the usual methods for establishing the jury pools tended to omit women or reduce their numbers as available jurors. Sourcing jurors from a list of registered voters would have no women serving on juries until the 1920’s, when they received the right to vote. Other jurisdictions filled their jury pools from lists of property owners, which for most of America’s history, tended to be male. And still other jurisdictions relied upon the “key men” method for jury membership. That is, instead of a reasonably random criterion for picking jurors, these jurisdictions filled their juries from a list of citizens identified as being “of recognized intelligence and probity”, i.e., key figures in the community. And these persons were usually male.
Things remained pretty much this way until the mid-1960’s. In 1968, Congress passed the Jury Selection and Service Act, which required states and local jurisdictions to draw their jury pools from sources which represented a fair cross-section of the community. That did away with “key man” juries and any other methods of jury selection that weren’t random.
But it wasn’t until 1975 that the last of the state laws prohibiting women from serving on juries was struck down. In Taylor v. Louisiana, the United States Supreme Court ruled that women could not be excluded from juries by law. And then four years later, in Duren v. Missouri, the Supreme Court ruled optional jury service for women as unconstitutional.
Since at the time of Superman’s boyhood, all-male juries were the standard, I followed that practise.
3. Witness testimony. I probably don’t have to mention this, but for that one guy who always seems to be out of the room whenever stuff gets brought up, all of the events to which Superboy and Lex Luthor testify were shown in “How Luthor Met Superboy”, from Adventure Comics # 271 (Apr., 1960).
4. Alexis “Lex” Luthor. As I mentioned in one of my posts, this is the one item that I took from a post-Silver-Age story. It was established in “Luthor’s Day of Reckoning”, from Action Comics # 512 (Oct., 1980)---at Lex’s wedding, no less---that his actual forename was “Alexis”.
PART TWO
5. The weather towers and the super-growth seeds. As shown in “How Luthor Met Superboy”, following the incident which resulted in the loss of his hair, Luthor actually made two attempts at benevolence by contributing those two inventions to the welfare of Smallville. Unfortunately, the public admiration Luthor hoped to receive turned to scorn and ridicule when both of his contributions endangered the town, due to design flaws which Lex carelessly overlooked.
PART THREE
6. Fire Chief Hogan. This was another retrofit. Hogan actually appeared as chief of the Metropolis Fire Department, in “Clark Kent---Fireman of Steel”, from Superman # 129 (May, 1959). In this tale, Clark Kent joins the Metropolis Fire Department in order to write an “I Was a Fireman for a Week” article for the Daily Planet. Kent suffers the twin headaches of having to conceal his super-powers under deadly conditions and dealing with Chief Hogan, who resents having the reporter thrust upon him.
In order to have a fitting representative of the fire department, I backed up Hogan about fifteen years in his career, making him a fire captain for the M.F.D. I also provided an excuse to make him available to the Smallville Fire Department. This was necessary because of . . . .
7. “. . . the circumstances behind the previous fire chief.” I spent a considerable amount of time looking for a Superboy story with any mention of a Smallville fire chief. I finally found one, in “The Monster That Stalked Smallville”, from Adventure Comics # 274 (Jul., 1960). The timing was perfect, only three issues after the “How Luthor Met Superboy” tale. Much to my irritation, though, I couldn’t use this particular fire chief for my civil trial.
You see, he was actually an escaped murderer from the planet Zaron.
Yeah, you read that right. There was no way to work around this particular detail. As the events of the story made clear, the alien killer wasn’t posing as the Smallville fire chief; he was the Smallville fire chief, having passed himself off as an Earthman for the last five years. (Hence Chief Hogan’s remark about the town council making an intensive background check on the applicants this time.) And then, there was the niggling detail that, at the story’s conclusion, he was brought to justice by a Zaronian executioner.
PART FOUR
8. Superboy’s friendship with Lex Luthor. Over the course of the Silver Age, there were a handful of Superboy tales set in the days before Luthor lost his hair, when he and the Boy of Steel were still good pals. Superboy’s testimony makes reference to two of these stories.
After discovering, in “The Fate of the Future Superman”, from Superboy # 120 (Apr., 1965), that his thirty-fifth-century descendant will turn rogue and be executed as a mass-murderer, Superboy turns to his buddy Lex for advice on how to live with the shame. As it develops, the Boy of Steel’s visit to his pal’s lab turns out to be more constructive than he had expected.
The hirsute-headed Luthor’s near-demise at the hands of his own Gas X occurs in “The Town That Hated Superboy”, from Superboy # 139 (Jun., 1967). As related in the Smallville Sensation’s own testimony, he saves Lex by blowing the deadly gas out a window and into the atmosphere with his super-breath.
Shortly thereafter, grotesque monsters materialise to threaten the town whenever Superboy uses his super-vision. Fearing for their lives, the citizenry of Smallville are ready to tar and feather Superboy---until Luthor discovers the cause of the Boy of Steel’s “monster-vision” and helps him put an end to it.
PART FIVE
9. Thad Becker, Smallville postmaster. Surprisingly enough, it was a fairly simple matter to run down the postmaster for Smallville. Thad Becker appeared in “The Good Samaritan of Smallville”, from Adventure Comics # 227 (Aug., 1956).
10. Ned Barnes, burn victim. The story of Ned Barnes was told in “The Man Who Stole Superman’s Secret Life”, from Superman # 169 (May, 1964). The events of Ned’s life, told in flashback in this tale, provided the basis for some of Superboy’s testimony during his cross-examination by Mr. Aldrich.
As a teen-ager, Ned lived in Smallville during Superboy’s time and he was an ardent admirer of the Boy of Steel. One fateful day, his house caught on fire. Superboy was able to rescue Ned from the blaze, but not before the flames had left the youngster with disfiguring burns. Fortunately, plastic surgery would be able to restore his features, but Ned wanted something more---he wanted the face of his idol, Superboy.
Tragically, wearing Superboy’s face would bring only unhappiness to Ned, the boy, and also Ned, the man.
PART SIX
11. The Superboy flag. As first shown in “The Boy with Ultra-Powers”, from Superboy # 98 (Jul., 1962), an ordinary resident of Smallville (i.e., someone other than Chief Parker or Professor Lang) who needed Superboy’s help could summon him by hoisting a Superboy flag. Editor Mort Weisinger codified this as part of the Superman mythos by including it as an item in the two-page text piece, “The Superboy Legend”, that first appeared in Superboy # 113 (Jun., 1964).
Replies
There's GOT to be a way to collect this series of columns into a book ... there's just GOT to ... any ideas, anybody?
The picture of Superboy with pre-bald Lex raised a question in my mind.
As shown, Lex orginally had brown hair. When did they change it to red?
The Golden Age Luthor initially had a good head of red hair. The look didn't last very long. Within a couple of years he was portrayed as bald, but his look still varied: sometimes he was heavy-set and robust, sometimes thin, sometimes very elderly, at least once he was mostly bald with some white hair. But the red-haired look was picked up for the depiction of Earth Two Luthor in the 70s. Earth Three Luthor and his son had red hair too. Post-Crisis, businessman Luthor was introduced in Man of Steel #4 as balding but not yet bald, with red hair. You can see him on the cover. That was supposed to be near the start of Superman's career, so he was bald subsequently.
Thank you. The vast majority of these are new to me, so this is much appreciated.
I remember Clark's stint as a fireman, one of several stories giving Clark a different career for an issue.
Come to think of it, "alien killer who's really a legal executioner" as in the Zaron story is a trick they played at least once more, in a Supergirl story.
ITEM: In the Golden Age (i.e., Earth-2), Lex Luthor started with red hair. The bald villain was the Ultra-Humanite. Of course, the U-H switched his brain around to different bodies, so hair color was kind of hard to pin down, and Luthor became the bald villain. Unless my memory fails me, Luthor of Earth-2 simply hated Superman because he was a villain. You know, back in the good ol' days when being a bad guy was enough reason to be a bad guy.
ITEM: I believe in DC Comics Presents Annual #1, it was also established that Earth-2's Luthor (still with red hair - !!!) was named Alexis. Probably enough validation to assume that Luthor of Earth-1 was named Alexis... although the Earth-3 Luthor was Alexander. So maybe that's still a little vague.
ITEM: Commander, your story was fascinating, and this reference was excellent. But we've never yet heard what YOUR decision would have been on this trial. Care to enlighten us? No one is more intimate with this story than you, quite obviously.
As I recall, DC Comics Presents Annual #1 established the Earth-2 Luthor's name as "Alexei".
The first to establish Luthor 2's name was Superman Family, in the Mr. and Mrs. Superman series (about the Earth 2 Superman and Lois, of course).
Late Bronze-Age information always gives me fits. Oh, I have all of the necessary issues to research a question. But my memory for things of that time isn't as comprehensive as it is of the Silver Age or early Bronze Age. So I don't have my recollexions to guide me to exactly what I need.
In this case, I had to dig out the issues and go through them.
The Baron is, of course, correct about the Earth-Two Luthor's actual forename being Alexei. We discussed that 'way back in the discussion replies to the first part of my "Luthor v. Superboy" entry.
And Mr. Sherman is correct about the first time the readership learnt that. The Earth-Two Luthor's first modern-day appearance was a brief one---two panels at the end of "The Man Who Discovered Kryptonite"---an entry in the "Mr. & Mrs. Superman" series, from Superman Family # 202 (Aug., 1980). In the second of the two panels, Luthor gives his name as "Alexei Luthor".
A follow-on tale---"Catch a Falling Star", from Superman Family # 205 (Feb., 1981)---establishes that the figure calling himself Alexei Luthor in the last panel of the earlier story is, indeed, the Earth-Two version of Superman's arch enemy.
And both stories were printed before DC Comics Presents Annual # 1, which came out in 1982. (The Earth-Two Luthor's formal first name was given as Alexei in that issue, too.)
Good catch, Mr. Sherman!
And, Fogey, as to your question about my opinion in "Luthor v. Superboy": unfortunately, I'm short on time right now. But look for it soon. In the morning, most likely.
I was reminded of this delightful series of columns when I was searching for something else. Links to the whole collection are below:
Deck Log Entry # 166 You Be the Jury! Luthor v. Superboy (Part One)
Deck Log Entry # 168 You Be the Jury! Luthor v. Superboy (Part Two)
Deck Log Entry # 169 You Be the Jury! Luthor v. Superboy (Part Three)
Deck Log Entry # 170 You Be the Jury! Luthor v. Superboy (Part Four)
Deck Log Entry # 171 You Be the Jury! Luthor v. Superboy (Part Five)
Deck Log Entry # 172 You Be the Jury! Luthor v. Superboy (Part Six)
Deck Log Entry # 172 Supplemental: Luthor v. Superboy Reference Key
As noted over here, one thing we were lacking was the opportunity to read the story from which these events are drawn: "When Luthor Met Superboy!", in Adventure Comics #271 (April 1960), written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Al Plastino. I mentioned that I wanted to link to the story, which was posted on the wonderful Superman Through the Ages fansite -- but at the time, the site was down because it was festooned with viruses and the webmaster was in the painstaking process of rebuilding it from scratch.
I say this to say that the story is once again available, here: "How Luthor Met Superboy!" However, it should be said that a jury, in its deliberations, is supposed to consider only the testimony and evidence presented in court ... as we did when we read these columns.
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