All Star Superman: In Retrospect

[paulpogue]

I think it's safe to say that All Star Superman, despite the most unfortunate acronym in comics, has also emerged as one of the best Superman stories in decades, if not one of the best all-out superhero stories in the post-1980s era, period.
Morrison stories always take on a new flair on second and third reading, and a full macro view of the series makes one question in more depth what was originally just a Willy Wonka scientist: Who is Leo Quintum, anyway?

neilshyminsky.blogspot.com/2008/09/leo-quintum-is-lex-luthor.htm

The logic is, to be perfectly honest, damn near airtight, right down to the Miltonian "In Quintum Novembris" poem, and Superman's monkey from an earlier issue.

[jasonlatta]

Oh, that's a nice theory.

I haven't re-read the entire series in one sitting yet, but I'll be looking for this next time I do.

[jessebaker]

If Lex was Leo, Morrison would have overtly said it. ESPECIALLY with the cliffhanger ending being less "Lex and Leo are the same person" and more "Leo's going to clone Superman!!!".

I think, given the constant lampshading in the last couple of issues about how Lex's "I could cure cancer, AIDS, and all sorts of goody-goody science stuff if Superman wasn't around!" tirades were him being full of shit as far as trying to justify himself and his vendetta, that Leo exists within the framework of the story to serve as Lex's counterpart as far as showing a scientist who didn't go insane with jealousy over Superman and who actually worked WITH Superman instead of trying to kill him all of the time.

[paulpogue]

"If Lex was Leo, Morrison would have overtly said it."

Are you sure we're talking about the same Morrison here? This guy REVELS in secondary sub-rosa plotting that never gets overtly explained. There are people to this day who still don't fully understand what the hell was going on with Sublime in New X-Men, and even Marvel editorial didn't grasp how Xorn had healing powers if he was Magneto all along. (All of Xorn's "healing" tricks were magnetism based -- killing the sentinel virus, gluing Xavier's spine back together with the nanosentinels -- but this is never directly stated in the comic.)

And that's Morrison Mainstream. The Invisibles requires a doctorate in metaphysical storytelling to properly untangle all its plotlines, and even then most of them have two or three different answers. Morrison loves doing things without overtly saying them.

Plus, there's a solid in-story reason for never saying it overtly -- it isn't NECESSARILY the case, while it is simultaneously ABSOLUTELY the case. Morrison DOES very overtly use as a plot point how quantum physics allows one person to exist in two states at once, and Leo's name itself evokes quantum theory. He's Lex, and he's Anti-Lex, and he's both at the same time. Schroedinger's Cat. Overtly explaining it would be like opening the cat box -- as long as the final answer hasn't been openly stated, both possibilities are equally true.

[Anders]

I enjoyed ASS (laugh it up) though I think the first few issues had much more wow-factor. I'll re-read the whole thing sometime but I don't feel any hurry to do it: it was a good story, certainly one of the better Superman stories I've read (though I'm no afficiando), but if there were hidden levels they are too far down for me to bother digging them up.

I hadn't even considered that Lex and Leo could be the same person, but I remember finding it a bit strange that a character I had never heard of before got so much space in a story that seemed to lean heavily on established characters, which makes me lean more towards it being true.

[Mario Di Giacomo]

I'm not so sure about the Leo=Lex thing. If there was a hint somewhere that Lex had a time machine, that would be different, but without that throwaway hint, you have to make too many assumptions.

I prefer to think of Leo as Lex's "dark mirror". What he could have been, had he chosen to live up to his potential, rather than wasting time trying to kill Superman.

[jasonlatta]

There's another reason to suspect Leo is Lex.

Recall how in Mark Millar's "Red Son" story, the conclusion showed that Superman was in fact a descendant of Lex Luthor's. We know Morrison gave that idea to Millar, and in some interview or another Morrison basically lamented the fact he had done so, because he'd have to come up with something better to top it when he got to do HIS Superman story.

I can't say that this Leo/Lex thing tops the Superman being Luthor's future offspring idea, but it sure feels like something that evolved from the same Morrisonian headspace, like an evolution of the same thought.

Probably the greatest thing about it is, you can't definitively say whether or not it's true, and so (Morrison might think) fans will be debating this one for years.

[michaelpaciocco]

you know what else is interesting?

If it's true, it means that Luthor gets to eat his cake (Kill Superman) and have it too, but only at the cost of his ego.

Consider, if Leo doesn't try to go to the Sun, than Superman wouldn't have been exposed to the lethal levels of solar radiation that would both "kill" him and give him the power necessary to fix the sun, so it's a Moebius loop, which fits with Morrison's established M.O.

Michael

[paulpogue]

Sept 27, 2008 11:42:13 GMT -8 Mario Di Giacomo said:

I'm not so sure about the Leo=Lex thing. If there was a hint somewhere that Lex had a time machine, that would be different, but without that throwaway hint, you have to make too many assumptions.

Yeah, but it's not like you have to write an entirely new script or wildly jump out of character to reach the conclusion of "LEX LUTHOR is capable of building a time machine."

Hell, there's enough time travelers actually wandering around the series that I wouldn't be surprised if a very close examination indicated a point at which Lex could have swiped a time machine or get a good view as to how one works. (And prison wouldn't stop him; #6 indicated that he would wander in and out of jail any time he chose.) Come to think of it, doesn't Supes have a time machine in the Morrison version of the Fortress -- which Lex successfully infiltrated in order to steal the single most dangerous chemical Superman has ever designed? And then COPY IT HIMSELF?

[temporis]

Regarding that unfortunate acronym: I could see my LCS proprietor taking great glee if my pull one week was All-Star Superman, Death of the New Gods, and Hawaiian Dick.

He gets enough joy out of my great love for Hawaiian Dick, anyway.

[michaelpaciocco]

Just re-read the whole run with the John Williams score accompaniment (only way to read it , really).

Yes, the best issues are still #6,5, and 10 (in that order, IMO)

Leo and Lex - yeah, it's definitely possible, as everything Leo was working on was in someway related to what Luthor saw or wanted to achieve. Consider:

-Leo's research into the Underverse - would be derived from his final look into the structure of the universe
-creating a new superman - Lex's superserum, and of course, creating "a world without a superman" is the definition of Lex.
-Giant space explorers and micro-men - another parallel of superman, with his superman robots and the micro-Kandorians.

It's a very real possibility, at least.

But does it read well as a cohesive whole? Yes.

Michael