Luthor is a bad guy, that's for sure. But just making him bad for the sake of it isn't interesting. Any experienced writer will tell you, to make a compelling villain you have to give him a real motivation for his actions, make him as fully developed as your hero, and perhaps even have some sympathy for his plight. Just having them do evil stuff doesn't ground their personality in anything real. So, Lex is at his best when he's the guy who genuinely thinks the world is a worse place for Superman being in it even if that's rooted in his jealousy at his rival's power. That fuels his attempts to take the Man Of Steel down at all cost, and sometimes there's collateral damage. It doesn't explain him being a total misogynist. And yet that was one of his main character traits for a period in the comics. In 1993's Superman Annual #5 he choked his female fencing instructor to death cos he lost to her, he had female subordinate Mercy killed, had Clark Kent's ex Lana Lang kidnapped and beaten so he could get info on Superman, and coerced an employ into sleeping with him. Gross. None of that nowadays, quite thank you.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
