Forever Evil's Prisoner Revealed

The issue's been out for days and the reveal's been all over the internet but, because I'm a nice guy, be aware that if you click the read more link below, there be spoilers ahead.

The prisoner the Crime Syndicate brought with them from Earth-3 has been revealed to be Alexander Luthor as I guessed it would be a couple of months back. However, I didn't see the twist coming - this Luthor is Earth-3's wielder of the magic lightning, here called Mazahs.

The original Alexander Luthor was the good guy in the old Earth-3 universe: the Crime Syndicate were the bad versions of the Justice League and Luthor was the only hero to stand against them. This Luthor appears to be as bad as the Crime Syndicate - he kills Johnny Quick and, as you can see in the picture above, proclaims that he's going to kill "every single one of you"

Now, does he mean the rest of the Crime Syndicate or does he mean everyone else that he can see? Either way, the fact that he's planning to kill again and again doesn't exactly make him a hero in anyone's book . . . except maybe Geoff Johns's. He, after all, is planning to make our Lex Luthor head of the Justice League (and if you want to know in detail why that's a bad idea, go check out Slay, Monstrobot... here)

The cool thing about Earth-3 was that it was a reverse-world, that the heroes were villains and vice-versa, that Abe Lincoln shot President John Wilkes Booth, that Columbus discovered Europe and so on. To rob Earth-3 of it's only hero and turn him into something even worse than the Crime Syndicate just seems such a waste of a character and concept. Even Grant Morrison's excellent Earth-2 retained Luthor as the hero, albeit as arrogant and conceited as the one on our Earth.

Even if it turns out that Alexander Luthor of Earth-3 only kills bad guys, if he was just confused from the change and assumed all the people in the room are part of a bigger Crime Syndicate when he said he was going to kill everyone, the fact that he kills shows he's not a hero.

I used to enjoy Geoff Johns's work, particularly his JSA stuff - that showed good, clean cut heroes who weren't embarrassed by doing good deeds. This latest story where the bad guys are the ones we're supposed to be rooting for? Where the ones who are saving the world do this:

and this:

These are the people we want saving our world? "But they're bad guys," you might say, "they're meant to do bad things."

Agreed - but would it be so terrible to see good guys doing good things to save us?