The Shattered Prayer

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Che has been appreciating the beauty of Smallville’s version of Brainiac (I mean — who wouldn’t appreciate that beauty? Gotta love ol’ Spike.) She therefore right naturally assumed that the comic book version would be just as beautiful.

Well, not quite. Here, then, is a little history of a character who is celebrating his 50th birthday this year — Brainiac: Evil Computer from Colu.

Brainiac first appeared in Action Comics #242, cover dated July 1958 (meaning it probably went on sale April or May of 1958). By that reckoning, this is perfect timing for a post on Brainiac, it being his 50th birthday and all! Many happy returns, Brainiac!

When we first meet Brainiac, he is, in all honesty, a simple collector. His hobby is not collecting comic books (more’s the pity for him), or collecting baseball cards, or even collecting expensive cars. No, Brainiac is a collector of cities. In fact, in his first appearance, he steals New York, Paris, and Rome. This was bothersome enough to Superman, but when Brainiac decided to steal Metropolis, he forever earned the enmity of Superman. It seems, that Superman and all of Metropolis were shrunk by Brainiac’s Hyper-Ray (defeatable by Ritalin, one would imagine). Like any good collector, Brainiac put his collection in protective casings — glass bottles. Brainiac’s plan was to take all of these cities back to his home planet, Colu, and repopulate it. Seems Colu’d been a little lifeless as of late. Who cares that it would be repopulated by humans and other aliens and not Coluans? That doesn’t bother our intrepid collector!

Because collecting is a difficult hobby, Brainiac decided to take a nap during the return trip home. This was his undoing! During his slumber, a miniaturized Superman flies around the space ship, returning all the Earth cities to their proper size. There is only one city that he cannot return to its proper size and location — Kandor! Long lost capital city of Krypton (Since Superman was supposed to be perpetually 29 in the pre-crisis world, Brainiac had been collecting cities for at least three decades! Seems like he should have had enough to repopulate Colu long before meeting Superman.) In a plot contrivance, after returning every other city back to its proper size, there is only enough juice in the restoring ray to return one more object to full size — Superman or Kandor. The selfless people of Kandor feel that they cannot condemn the universe to a 1 inch Superman and turn the ray on him. Superman takes the bottle and puts it in his fortress, hoping one day to restore them all to their proper size. (Apparently no one considered restoring Kandor with Superman inside it! Everyone wins that way).

Of course, when Brainiac wakes up, he got right pissed off, but that was a story for another day.

There are several interesting things about Brainiac’s first appearance. For one, he prefers to wear pink. He was the universe’s first preppy — only they thought pink and green went well together. For a while, all of Superman’s main villains wore very questionable color combinations. Pink and Green for Brainiac and Purple and Green for Lex Luthor. Additionally, Brainiac preferred to wear an elaborate shirt with just a pair of pink underwear. I guess he liked to show off those sexy legs. Finally, we discover that Brainiac was an animal lover. He had a space monkey named Koko who traveled with him. Koko would reappear a few more times in order to be an invaluable tool for the writers. It allowed them to create an audience for Brainiac’s often longwinded monologues. Koko apparently understood everything Brainiac said.

Although he is obviously a villain, Brainiac does appear to be doing some good in the story, albeit unintentionally. He’s trying to repopulate his planet and he saved thousands of Kryptonians from certain death. In fact, these were the first Kryptonians Superman ever met. Brainiac and Kandor preceded Supergirl’s arrival on Earth by almost an entire year. So call Brainiac a villain if you want, but he gave Superman friends to play with. He made Superman no longer be “the last son of Krypton.” Superman was no longer alone.

And that is a nice thing.

Brainaic next appeared in Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane #17. I mention that only because I wanted Lois to appear in this post. It was also 2 years after his first appearance. It took Brainy a little while to catch on in popularity.

One year later, Brainiac was back for a third appearance, and by now he was becoming quite popular. In fact, in the very next issue of Action comics, he got a son — of sorts. Supergirl traveled to the 30th century to join the Legion of Super-Heroes and met Brainiac 5, a fellow Legion applicant, who claimed to be a descendant of the evil Brainiac. Unlike his evil ancestor, Brainiac 5, also known as Querl Dox, was good! Supergirl learned to trust this green skinned sweetheart and even started to date him! It is true that love conquers all. Or perhaps she just thought he looked good in a white speedo (scroll past the other Legionnaires — Brainy’s there). Their relationship, though often sidelined, was strong enough to cause Brainy to cry when Supergirl was killed in the Crisis. He didn’t usually do such things.

Unforunately, like his ancestor, Brainiac 5 had questionable fashion sense. He tended to wear ill fitting purple jumpsuits (or simple white Speedos). Additionally, his 12th level intelligence (ordinary humans like you and me only had 6th level intelligences) tended to make Brainiac 5 go insane from time to time. (When Supergirl left the 30th century for good, Brainy went temporarily insane and made himself a Supergirl love robot! Who rejected him! Now that is insane.) In spite of this occasional instability, Brainiac 5 proved to be invaluable to the Legion. He invented the flight rings that gave them the power of flight and his intelligent mind also got them out of many scrapes. It was also casually mentioned that his tossed off inventions provided valuable funding for the Legion.

In spite of his goodness, Brainiac 5 could also be a bit of a troublemaker. He invented Computo, the evil computer tyrant who killed one of Triplicate Girl’s bodies, turning her into Duo Damsel. He also made Matter Eater Lad go insane by forcing him to eat the Miracle Machine in order to save the Universe from another of his inventions gone wrong due his temporary insanity.

You took the good with the bad when dealing with Brainiac 5.

Brainiac 5 eventually logged in many times the appearances that Brainiac logged in. In spite of his tremendous popularity, the original Brainiac made fewer than 20 appearances from 1958 to the eventual Crisis in 1986 that rewrote DC Comics continuity.

Brainiac 5 also unwittingly caused an unforseen problem for the original, evil Brainiac. Brainiac 5 said he was Brainiac’s descendant. But Brainiac was an android. He couldn’t breed. So where the hell did Brainiac 5 come from? This wasn’t the first or last time that revelations in the Legion of Super-Heroes (which took place in the 30th century) caused problems for writers of Superman in the 20th century.

The problem arose from a misunderstanding. It wasn’t immediately clear that Brainiac I was an android when he was first introduced. Once it became established he was android, the writers had to find a way to make Brainiac 5’s claims be true. After all, Brainiac 5 was fast becoming an extremely popular character.

A fix was created by tweaking Brainiac’s origin. It seems that Brainiac was in reality the humanoid interface for the Coluan Computer network. He was created by the Computer Tyrants of Colu to fool the Coluan populace into accepting their oppressive Coluan overlords (if you call yourself “Tyrant,” the populace should expect bad things from you). The overlords wanted the Coluans to think that Brainiac was one of them, and to this end, he was given a name, Vril Dox. To enhance the illusion that Brainiac was just “one of the guys” he was even given a living Coluan son, named Vril Dox II (or Quil Dox as he was also known. But hey, some stories said Brainiac created the boy himself, so just go with it — it’s the gist of the story, not the specifics that matter.) It was Vril Dox II from which Querl Dox, Brainiac 5 ultimately descended. The overlords wanted Brainiac to infiltrate the rebels and destroy them, which he did. Eventually both the Computer Tyrants and the populace of Colu got fed up with Brainiac and chased him off the planet. From there, he went around the universe collecting cities. (This of course directly contradicts the original motive of “repopulating” Colu, but such inconsistencies didn’t matter in the Silver Age!)

So, you know, whatever. The stories featuring Brainiac didn’t usually bother with such trivialities like coherent origins and whatnot. It was the spin offs that bothered with these petty details. You see, Vril Dox II, or Brainiac 2, eventually went on to make his own Legion. Or rather L.E.G.I.O.N., Licensed Extra-Governmental Interstellar Operatives Network. Vril Dox II was not the nice guy that Brainiac 5 (usually) was. He was in many ways his daddy’s son. Like Querl Dox after him, Vril Dox II wanted to work on the side of good to make up for his father’s evil ways. One of his first acts was to overthrow the computer tyrants who had created the original Brainiac.

It should be noted that Brainiac 2 was operating in the 1980s. Brainiac 5 was operating in the 2960s. That means that Brainiac’s 3 and 4 were extremely long lived! In fact, there was some (very confusing) indications that Brainiac survived that intervening millennium, changing his name to Pulsar Stargrave! Pulsar Stargrave told Brainiac 5 that he was his father! (So Brainiac 1 and Brainiac 4 were the same person?) No wait! He wasn’t his father! He was actually the Original Brainiac! No, wait! He was . . . Eventually the whole Pulsar Stargrave thing got so confusing that everyone just forgot it ever happened. (And with those flares, it was probably a good thing.)

If one forgot all of the extraneous spin offs and concentrated simply on Brainiac’s appearances in Superman and Action Comics (and the occasional World’s Finest or Jimmy Olsen), he was just a Super-Smart adversary for Superman. Just like Lex Luthor. Superman was all muscle, so his adversaries had to be all brain. In fact, Lex and Brainiac teamed up more than once. Of course, their team ups were not without their ups and downs.

In fact, Lex and Brainiac became so close, they eventually decided to update their wardrobes together. Lex still preferred purple and green, but Brainiac decided for a total makeover. Brainiac went so far as to develop a ship out of “living metal” and become part of the ship itself. If any part of the ship survived assault, then Brainiac survived the assault. It was in this, less human looking form that Brainiac saw out the Pre-Crisis universe (look under the word “Crisis.” You’ll see Brainiac the ship). Once that universe was destroyed, this version of Brainiac was destroyed along with it.

So how does this tie into Smallville’s Brainiac? Well, it doesn’t. We haven’t even gotten to the Milton Fine Braniac yet!

That’ll come in the next post.

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