The Shattered Prayer

Me am so sad you ask me to rite on Bizarro. Me hate writing on comic books. Comic books am stupid and me know nothing about them. So me not write at all. Hello.
Over on the forums , Che asked me to write about Bizarro and Supergirl and their tumultuous and convoluted history in the DC Universe. Nothing could make me happier. First I’ll tackle Bizarro. Believe it or not, he has the more straightforward history.

Bizarro first appeared in Superboy #68 in 1958. He was an imperfect duplicate of Superboy created from non-organic matter. In other words, Bizarro was a crappy zombie clone made of trash. Bizarro was created by the cleverly named “duplicator ray” from the “duplicator machine.” Or rather, as it turned out, the imperfect duplicator machine. Bizarro was just as muscular as Superboy, but his body was completely white and his face was craggy and lined. I’ve always thought it looked like he had square planes all over his face, but some artists drew him as if he were cracked. The original writers pitched the idea that he had a face that looked like it was constructed of crumpled up paper. It gave him a freaky, somewhat “frightening” appearance. Although he had already perfected that “Bizarro speech,” (Bizarro never met a singular or plural nominative pronoun that he liked) his original appearance was played for the the pathos. He didn’t fit in, and in the end, he died.

Or rather, um, discoagulated. Because he was not really living, being made of inorganic trash and all.

Bizarro proved so popular that, in spite of being destroyed in his first appearance, he was quickly reintroduced to the adult Superman, once again as an imperfect clone created by that duplicator ray. In this second appearance he was a bit of menace, but that menace would not last long. Bizarro would continue to use his terrible grammar (“Hey! Me am not so bad!”) and he would usually speak in Bizarro opposite speech. (“Goodbye! Me hate you! Me am sad to see you!” means “Hello! I love you! I am happy to see you!” That sort of thing). In fact, Bizarro not only spoke “opposite,” but also did everything opposite, and the writer used this to comic effect. The more he appeared, the more comic he became and soon, he was no danger at all. The more he got played for laughs, the more popular he became. In fact, he became so popular that he pushed Aquaman right out of Adventure Comics and replaced him in his own series, Tales of the Bizarro World!

Bizarro had all of the powers of Superman, and so could be dangerous, but eventually, even his powers were reversed. Superman had cold breath and heat vision, so Bizarro had flame breath and ice vision. At one point, instead of his microscopic vision seeing things that were microscopic, Bizarro actually shrunk things down to microscopic size when he looked at them! And whereas Green kryptonite could kill Superman, blue kryptonite could kill Bizarro. (Blue kryptonite being an imperfect copy of green kryptonite.

But Bizarro was lonely. He longed for imperfect friends to fill his days, so he made a Bizarro Lois (why they didn’t just destroy that Duplictor machine is beyond me) and he and Bizarro Lois left earth and created Bizarro World (hence, the Tales of the Bizzaro World). Using perfect Bizarro logic, Bizarro made hundreds of Bizarro Loises so that Bizarro Lois would not get lonely. Then Bizarro Lois made hundreds of other Bizarro Supermen so that he would not get lonely. To differentiate himself from the other Bizarros, the original made a huge stone medallion that he wore around his neck proclaiming himself to be “Bizarro No. 1.” And the first Bizarro Lois got her own stone medallion proclaiming her “Bizarro Lois No. 1.”

But it didn’t stop there. Soon there was a Bizarro Jimmy Olsen, Bizarro Perry White, Bizarro Lana Lang, Bizarro Justice Leaguers, and Bizarro Legionnaires. In fact, there were even Bizarro versions of villains, like Bizarro Mxyzptlk. They quickly developed a Bizarro code “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!” In fact, they eventually reversed the “S”es on their chests, so that their costumes would not be a “perfect” copy of Superman’s. They even reshaped the Bizarro World to be a perfect cube so that it would not be like Earth, which was a sphere And they renamed it Htrae (get it? Earth backwards). They made sure that their buildings were nonlevel. They had “Scram” mats on their front doors instead of “Welcome” mats. At one point, Htrae even developed a consciousness. “Me am the Bizarro World. Planet Earth not think … therefore, me do.”

But after the 60s, much of the whimsy was gone from comics. They tried to menace Bizarro up, but it didn’t really work. Eventually, in 1986, DC went through a Crisis (Worlds will live! Worlds will die! Nothing will be the same!) in which they destroyed all the infinite earths on which their stories took place and collapsed everything into one “New Earth”. This meant that all of the past continuity was erased, and Bizarro with it.

Post crisis there have been a few new versions of Bizarro. First, a non-living, non-speaking (at first) clone of Superman who was played for pathos (he kept putting Lois in harm’s way just so he could save her, then died in her arms, alone and misunderstood). Then he was a strange a creation by the Joker using the powers of the imp wizard Mxyzptlk who became Bizarro to the extreme (They even messed up the “backwards” speech. Everything was backwards, making it difficult to follow “Me am not Bizarro” huh?).

But these post crisis Bizarros are nothing like the lunacy and insanity of the Pre-Crisis one.

Currently they are trying to move back to the pre-Crisis Bizarro (in fact, a square earth was just found in outer space!) But nothing will ever match the sheer insanity that infused DC during the Silver Age of Comics. It was only then that Bizarro could have been created. It was a brief shining moment in history. And as Bizarro would say, “Me hated it!”

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