Lex Luthor’s Reign as DC’s Most Powerful Villain is OVER

Spoilers for Hell Arisen below!

Lex Luthor has been dethroned as the DC Universe’s most powerful villain. Superman’s nemesis defeated the Justice League, showed humanity their diabolical destiny, and doomed the multiverse in the Year of the Villain event. But even when transformed into a superhuman monster, Lex made the wrong enemy and fell apart. In the new issue Year of the Villain: Hell Arisen #4, the ultimate Lex was revealed to be nothing at all by a perversion of a hero who turned out to be much more evil than he is.

Over the past year, Lex Luthor has been terrorizing the DC Universe as “Apex Lex”, a neo-human creature with Martian superpowers. He offered a host of supervillains power upgrades in exchange for joining his army, then used the new Legion of Doom to awake an ancient god named Perpetua to destroy the multiverse and remake it as a world where humans are completely individualistic predators like him. But in Hell Arisen, the new Lex found one last enemy in his way: The Batman Who Laughs. Being a Jokerized Batman from the “Dark Multiverse” of timelines too edgy and tragic to even exist, the leather-clad maniac created a team of corrupted heroes with the intent of fending off Lex’s multiversal doom so that BWL could ruin it himself.

Batman Must Kill Superman (Whether He Wants To Or Not)

In Hell Arisen #4, Apex Lex defeats The Batman Who Laughs and brought him before Perpetua himself, proudly charging the visored villain as the source of the Dark Multiverse’s taint on his Earth. But The Batman Who Laughs wouldn’t be a Batman unless everything was part of his grand plan. So the cackling Bruce looks up at Perpetua and reveals that he manipulated Lex into awakening her and used Lex as a pawn to get to the present moment. He claims that Lex is too myopic to really accept her schemes because everything he does is for his own glory, not to serve Perpetua’s purpose. He then demonstrates his value to her with concrete intelligence on the whereabouts of the Justice League.

The Batman Who Laughs’s sales pitch works. Lex tries to coerce Perpetua into destroying the dark Batman, but given the choice of the two as her general, she depowers Lex and casts him aside. Filled with rage and hubris, Lex says “I don’t need your powers to kill you! I don’t need anything from you!” and charges her. Perpetua promptly puts him in a crater back on Earth.

Lex Luthor is once again a normal human being. Furthermore, he is out of resources, having betrayed his villainous allies to Perpetua, spent his fortune on his disastrous “doom” venture, and even blown up his own corporate headquarters to cement that the Lex humanity knew was dead. Once again, Lex betrayed the ideals he claimed to possess for the sake of power, and in doing so destroyed himself.

Did he deserve to lose the title to The Batman Who Laughs? On several levels, yes. Lex’s hubris was setting him up for downfall from the moment he sold his humanity to a dark god. And while Lex Luthor has a sizeable fanbase, the fusion of Batman and Joker is DC’s most popular villain of 2019, a guaranteed ticket to the main antagonist role in just about every line-wide event of the foreseeable future. On the bright side, fans of Lex Luthor get to watch him crawl back up from the bottom, something the on-again-off-again billionaire never fails to accomplish.

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