Anno Joe Hunter
I’m sometimes delighted by an unexpected line of dialogue, even though my editor-brain would register that same line as “out of character” and in need of adjustment or removal. It happened recently with Tim Taylor’s postapocalyptic DCeased, where Lex Luthor shows an unexpected flash of modesty in the middle of presenting his arguments to leave Earth. Intellectually, I feel like that line doesn’t really suit Lex’s usually unbreakable megalomania, but I laughed anyway. I have a similar feeling about the last spoken line in this strip: it’s not quite right for Syr’Nj, but nothing else would be as funny to me.
Gah’ri’s rather brief tenure with the team may have been an early attempt by Daniel or Kaye to join up with the group. I note with some amusement that he’s been rotated into the spot sometimes occupied by Bandit, sometimes by Best.
If you like what you see here, Joe Hunter has been most active on Twitter lately. In fact, his last post there is an hour old as I write this.
You got to remember that while megalomaniac, Luther is (supposed to be) genius. He knows when fact is fact, even if he’d hate to admit it. Also he needs to play on his crowd on this one, so just saying “I’m smart, do what me say.” will get him a lot less further than “I smart, but not smart like your friend you know smart, but I smart too, so do what me say.” shows the others this isn’t (again supposedly) just his megalomania talking, that “Of course I know better.”, but that he has genuinely thought of the thing and even on angles that don’t please him, so they probably should listen too.
And Syr’Nj? Well, she probably has just seen too many pre-teens talking about this curious concept of “Yo-mamma” in the gameworld and just picked up some of the slang while at it. :D
Both Batman and Luthor strike me as the kind of “internet genius” that don’t actually end up making good decisions.
Yes, the Canon is that the misanthropic billionnaire is right, but that seems like an obvious bit of agitprop.
Why does anyone buy into that, in this day and age?
I don’t think the dominant reading of Batman is “billionaire knows best because his inherited wealth makes him so smart, don’t raise taxes” so much as “do you feel helpless in a violent world? Imagine you had the money and the will to make yourself a human tool to stop all crime.” It’s an escapist power fantasy, but we need those sometimes. (There has been a push to make him less misanthropic for a decade or so, as well.) The Joker film does its best to have it both ways, though I worry its ultimate effect will be to demonize the less fortunate.
And, um, Luthor often isn’t right: his story is usually a story of incredible mental gifts twisted to selfish, destructive, and ultimately self-destructive ends. It’s just that in certain extreme situations like the one shown here, he can be the right person at the right time.
Wealth is often just a springboard to propel a protagonist into an exciting adventure: I can’t remember the last time WayneTech, StarkTech, or LuthorCorp’s policies or stock prices mattered to a story in any way other than continuing to supply their namesakes with enough cash to keep fighting crime and/or Superman. However, there have been popular characters in comics who were more defined by their wealth than enabled by it, and I think those characters have lost steam in the modern era. Or do we even remember Daddy Warbucks? Richie Rich?
Scrooge McDuck has only escaped similar obscurity because the message of his character (named for one of literature’s best-known plutocrats) is actually the opposite. Time and again, DuckTales emphasizes the follies of worshipping wealth for its own sake, celebrating instead Scrooge’s can-do spirit and “human” connections and contrasting him with others who lack at least one of those two things…
But whew, that’s quite a rabbit hole I went down for a bit. To sum up, I think protagonists can get away with being wealthy as long as their wealth isn’t presented as the interesting thing about them. To my mind, none of that contradicts any of the concerns that inform Guilded Age, which is now a couple of chapters away from really starting to focus on its caste of entitled neo-feudal lords.
I’d also say that Luthor under normal circumstances would likely be in denial of, or at least unwilling to publicly admit his thoughts on, the idea that anyone else would be smarter than him.
In the wake of the death of that person, and the apparent seriousness of the situation in those two panels, he’s got little reason to keep to that. A brief bit of actual humility that doesn’t actually tweak his ego because either way, NOW he’s the smartest person on the planet.
I like how casual Byron is about this. His & Syr’Nj’s reaction make me think she’s about to piece Gah’Ri back together duct tape (Nodwick style).
It only now occurs to me that said spot in the group seems to be akin to the position of Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. Get trisected by axes, get sucked into an interdimensional portal or get shredded by a dire llama.
(He might have had a slim chance if he had whipped its ass.)
Just another ‘Red Shirt’.