By the Fifties , Superman was one of many few superheroes nonetheless in publication. Nevertheless, he’d moved far away from the New Deal social justice crusader who Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had first created. Underneath the pen of Otto Binder, Superman embraced outlandish fantasy and childlike marvel.
Brainiac is emblematic of Binder’s Superman. In his first look, Brainiac is an archetypal B-movie alien invader: a bit of inexperienced man in a flying saucer from the planet Colu. His residence plant had been decimated by a plague, so Brainiac tried to bottle Earth cities to repopulate the world. Invading Brainiac’s ship, Superman found the Kryptonian metropolis Kandor amongst his assortment. Unable to revive it, Superman took Kandor and its folks again to his Fortress of Solitude.
That wasn’t the final Superman noticed of Brainiac. In “Superman” #167, it was revealed Brainiac was not a real Coluan however an android. (There had been a pc equipment known as “Brainiac” available on the market since 1956, and “in deference” to that product predating their character, DC altered Brainiac right into a residing pc.) Since then, most Brainiac tales have depicted him as robotic. Within the Eighties, Brainiac even acquired a brand new look as a skull-faced android (designed by Ed Hannigan).
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Many later variations of Brainiac are a midway level between that and his unique green-skinned look. Some tales, like the 2006 “Superman: Brainiac” arc by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, depict the “true” Brainiac as a green-skinned cyborg that makes use of skull-faced drones to increase his will.
1996’s “Superman: The Animated Sequence” tied Kal-El and Brainiac nearer collectively than ever. This Brainiac (Corey Burton) was a Kryptonian synthetic intelligence gone rogue. Brainiac had sensed Krypton was going to blow up, however selected to not inform the folks, as a substitute saving itself and recordsdata of Krypton’s historical past.
Brainiac advanced and went from world to world, “preserving” data after which exterminating the folks it got here from. (Brainiac’s behavior of actually preserving cities in bottles was excised, although.) The hunt ultimately introduced him to Earth the place he confronted the Final Son of Krypton.
This revised backstory, the work of co-creator Alan Burnett, was a wise transfer. As a Kryptonian creation, Brainiac was not an evil alien or robotic; he now had a inbuilt historical past with Superman. The brand new animated sequence “My Adventures with Superman” additionally used the Kryptonian AI backstory for its Brainiac (Michael Emerson), solely this Brainiac actively destroyed Krypton out of concern his masters would discover him out of date.
