Week Forty


If you came looking for a fight, you came to the right place. Natasha, as we saw last week, is in trouble at Luthor Tower, and her uncle, John Henry Irons, knows about it. And he’s none too pleased. This week, he suits up (for the first time since, what, week five?) and takes the fight straight to Luthor, with the aid of the Teen Titans. He makes short (and highly bad-ass) work of a few Infinity Inc. members, beats down Mercy with a backhand punch, and snaps that Everyman prick’s hand open. From there, the shape-shifter falls many, many stories down to his death. Good riddance.
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The main fight takes place between Steel and Luthor, obviously, as Steel shows the billionaire that it’s not about having superpowers that makes you heroic; it’s about having a cause worth fighting for. This may be one of the most bad-ass fights we’ve seen in “52” so far, as Luthor just metes out the punishment and Steel keeps standing to fight back, even after breaking several ribs and rupturing his appendix. The fight ends when Natasha figures a way to jam the artificial exo-gene with a close-range electronic pulse from Steel’s hammer. Luthor loses his powers, and Steel beats him within an inch of his life, just before knocking that big “L” from the cover off the side of the building. The issue closes with shots from Kahndaq, where it’s been raining a week, everything and everybody’s dying, and Osiris asks Sobek to accompany him to the Rock of Eternity, for a new family.

I don’t have to tell you how awesome it was to finally see Steel beat the holy hell out of Lex Luthor. It’s been a long time coming, and they aced it. Very exciting issue. That may be the last we see of Luthor and company, and, if that’s the case, they did a fine job tying that storyline up. I’m not sure how it fits in with everything else that’s going on in “52,” but, then again, I’m not sure that it has to. It was some good old fashioned good guy vs. bad guy entertainment, and it paid off in spades.

See ya in seven.