Brainiac (character)

• 1. Introduction

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  Brainiac made his debut in Action Comics #242, cover-dated July 1958, as a bald, green-skinned scientist who shrank Metropolis and sealed it in a bottle. Writer Otto Binder and artist Al Plastino created him for DC Comics. Few readers that year would have guessed what he would turn into. Over the decades he would be rebuilt as a robot, a stolen human body, a swarm of tiny machines and a being the size of a planetary system. How did a collector of bottled cities become one of Superman's greatest enemies? What exactly is Brainiac, when no two stories seem to agree? And why does he keep coming back after every apparent death?

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• 2. A Strip Rehearsal

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  Between April and August 1958, the Superman newspaper strip ran a story about a villain named Romado. He roamed the cosmos with a white alien monkey called Koko, shrinking major cities and keeping them in glass jars. The strip's bottled Kryptonian city carried the name Dur-El-Va. The comic book would soon borrow almost every piece of this plot.

  Such borrowing was no accident. In 1958 and 1959, editor Mort Weisinger used the strip as a testing ground for ideas he planned to bring to the comic books. Bizarro and red kryptonite were two other concepts that took this route.

  The comic-book Brainiac kept the bottles but changed the motive. He shrank cities, Metropolis among them, so he could restore the planet he ruled, which the story left unnamed. At first he was remembered only for his shrink ray, his force field, and the bottled Kryptonian city of Kandor. Koko came along in that first tale and returned in a 1960 retelling in Superman #141, dated November. Then the monkey vanished from the villain's stories. A version of Koko later turned up as his pet in the series Justice and in the 2008 Action Comics storyline "Brainiac". Brainiac 5 even kept a pet named Koko for several stories in the 1990s.

  In those early years, Brainiac served as a plot device rather than a headline villain. One appearance happened almost entirely offstage. He tried to kill Lois Lane and Lana Lang, which pushed Superman to give both women superpowers. Readers never saw the culprit until a twist on the final page.

  Superman #141 gave him a sharper edge. He stole Kandor, the one city on Krypton that believed Jor-El's warning of doom. Its people had already built a space ark inside the city to carry the population to safety.

  In Action Comics #275, dated April 1961, Brainiac exposed Superman to red-green kryptonite that he had made himself. The result was a third eye on the back of Superman's head, which forced the hero to wear hats to cover it. Superman defeated him and sent him into the distant past. This issue also showed the red diode-like objects on his head inside a story for the first time. They had sat on the cover of Action Comics #242 but never appeared in its pages.

  Another backstory soon followed in Superman #93. Brainiac came from a planet called Bryak, and he returned from a voyage to find everyone dead of a plague. His plan was to repopulate the world with people from shrunken cities, then rule them. A back-up story in Action Comics #276, in May 1961, was about to give him a descendant that nobody had expected.

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• 3. The Villain Who Won't Die

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  Superman #167, dated February 1964, announced that Brainiac had never been a living alien at all. He was a robot built by the Computer Tyrants of Colu to spy on other worlds and invade them. Colu is a rim world on the approach to the Magellanic Clouds. The strange diodes on his forehead were now "electric terminals of his sensory nerves", which he needed in order to function.

  The revelation had to explain the descendant from Action Comics #276. That character, Brainiac 5, claimed to come from the 30th century and used a "twelfth-level intellect" for good. He joined the Legion of Super-Heroes and fell in love with Supergirl. His home planet was named variously Bryak, Yod, Yod-Colu, or simply Colu. The 1964 explanation said the Tyrants gave their robot a young Coluan boy named Vril Dox to pose as his "son". With a family at his side, Brainiac could pass as a trustworthy organic scientist. The boy was designated Brainiac 2, and he later led a revolt that destroyed the Tyrants and freed Colu.

  The same issue's letter column carried a "special announcement" with a very earthly source. The change in Brainiac's nature, it said, was "in deference" to the Brainiac Computer Kit. That toy computer was created by Edmund Berkeley and based on the Geniac, and it predated the comic-book villain.

  Lex Luthor entered the picture in that story too. He learned that the Tyrants could have given their robot a twelfth-level mind but stopped at the tenth, matching their own, so he could never outthink them. Luthor freed Brainiac from imprisonment and raised his intellect to the twelfth level. He also implanted a device to disable or destroy the machine if needed. Brainiac later removed the device and erased Luthor's memory of his inner workings. That first alliance began a long run of Brainiac and Luthor team-ups.

  A machine can be repaired, and the stories took advantage of that. Many tales ended with Brainiac apparently destroyed, only for him to return in a rebuilt body or with his consciousness moved into a new form. Comic covers sometimes billed him as "the villain who won't die!" At some unspecified point he also fled into the 30th century. There he learned to absorb stellar energy and remade himself as Pulsar Stargrave, a powerful foe of the Legion who once posed as Brainiac 5's biological father.

  In the 1980s, DC attempted to refresh several aspects of Superman's stories to lift sagging sales. Action Comics #544-546, from June to August 1983, gave Brainiac a new look drawn by Gil Kane and designed by Ed Hannigan, with writer Marv Wolfman at the helm. In the opening story, "Rebirth", Brainiac was trapped in the core of a giant computer-controlled planet he had built to destroy Superman. He tried to escape by making the nearby star Epsilon 4 go nova and using its energy. Instead his body turned into energy, and his consciousness took a strange journey before returning to his technology. A new body formed for him over the following months.

  During that journey, he recalled seeing a great hand reach out of a void and briefly seize him. He saw Superman's face at the same moment. Brainiac concluded that he had glimpsed the Master Programmer, the divine force behind creation, and that this entity had made Superman an "angel of death" to destroy him. He emerged colder and more merciless, claiming to have no emotions while showing hatred and fear of Superman. His body was now overtly robotic, with a skull-like face and an iridescent, honeycomb-patterned "braincase". His starship took the shape of that skull and sprouted metal tendrils. Fans and creators call it the "skull ship", and it acts as an extension of Brainiac himself.

  This version lasted until the Crisis on Infinite Earths miniseries ended in 1986 and rebooted DC continuity. His final scene came in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" Luthor found Brainiac's robotic head with barely any power left and hoped to team up once more. Instead he became an unwilling host. Fighting for control, Luthor begged a superpowered Lana Lang to kill him, and she broke his neck. Brainiac kept the body only until rigor mortis set in. Then, "propelled by sheer malice", the head left Luthor's corpse and crawled a few inches before its power ran out.

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• 4. Borrowed Bodies

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  After the 1986 reboot, Brainiac's history was written from scratch. The new version was Vril Dox, a radical Coluan scientist sentenced to death for trying to overthrow the Computer Tyrants. In his last moments before disintegration, his consciousness was drawn light years away to Milton Fine. Fine was a human sideshow mentalist who worked under the name "The Amazing Brainiac". Dox needed cranial fluid to keep hold of Fine's body, so he went on a murder spree. He also found that Fine was a metahuman with psychic powers, which he often turned against Superman.

  In 1990, Brainiac took over the minds of several LexCorp staffers. He made the scientists build a new skull ship, saying he had dreamed up the design. They also used advanced genetic science to grow him a body that resembled Fine's but was taller and fitter, with a Coluan's green skin. A new braincase helmet echoed his Silver Age diodes. He was free of Fine's body and mind, yet he kept the man's telepathic powers.

  The "Panic in the Sky" storyline brought him back. He seized the mobile planetary fortress Warworld and recruited Maxima and the alien warrior Draaga. He also found a lost, confused Matrix, an artificial life form who operates as Supergirl, and brainwashed her into serving him. After clashing with the New Gods, he launched a pre-emptive strike on Earth. Superman refused to wait for an invasion. He gathered a large group of heroes, sent one team to attack Warworld, and kept another on Earth. Brainiac briefly controlled some heroes through duplicates of his braincase, but he failed. He was left catatonic and taken to New Genesis for observation.

  A year after Superman's apparent death and return, a body matching his appearance was found in his abandoned tomb. In the "Dead Again" story, readers learned that Brainiac had revived and returned to Earth. He left behind an illusion that he was still comatose. While hidden, he manufactured delusions meant to turn the public against Superman and make the hero doubt his own sanity. When the two fought, Superman taunted him as just Milton Fine, a cheap entertainer. Fine's personality seemed to surface and shut Brainiac down, and Fine was escorted to a psychiatric facility.

  Fine's body was badly damaged in a later skirmish, leaving Brainiac little time. With a new Coluan assistant named Prin Vnok, he retrieved Doomsday, the monster that had seemingly killed Superman, and used him as a host. Doomsday's own mind fought back. Brainiac then tried to steal the premature newborn of Pete Ross and Lana Lang, hoping to create a clone of Doomsday from human DNA. Superman foiled him with a psi-blocker device. Brainiac was forced into a completely robotic body, which he called Brainiac 2.5.

  At the turn of the millennium, Brainiac 2.5 revealed that he had planted a sleeper virus inside LexCorp's Y2K bug safeguards. The virus was meant to boost his abilities. It instead let his upgraded future self, Brainiac 13, travel from the 64th century and take over his body. Brainiac 13 began turning Metropolis into its 64th-century version. He also upgraded Metallo into a giant copy of himself and took control of android heroes including Red Tornado and Hourman. The Metal Men were protected by their responsometers.

  Superman found the flaw during a fight with the Eradicator. Brainiac 13 could not cope with Kryptonian technology. With the rebuilt Kelex's help, Superman tricked Luthor into linking a Kryptonian battlesuit to one of Brainiac 13's power conduits. Red Tornado helped break the villain into nanobots and trap him in the suit. Later, Brainiac 13 teamed with Brainiac 2.5, now housed in the aged body of Lena Luthor. Together they engineered Imperiex's defeat so Brainiac 13 could absorb that power. Superman finally destroyed both of them by sending them through a temporal Boom Tube into the Big Bang.

  Around the Graduation Day event, a future Brainiac called Brainiac 6 used his "granddaughter" Brainiac 8, also known as Indigo, to kill Donna Troy. Indigo died in the battle that followed, and Brainiac 6's fate afterward is unknown.

  The real surprise came after Brainiac 13's death. The version of Krypton Superman had visited through the Phantom Zone was a trap. Defeated by Kryptonian technology, Brainiac 13 had gone back to the true Krypton before its destruction and stolen the Eradicator matrix and Jor-El's diaries. He then built a false Krypton modeled on Jor-El's favorite period of history. Later, Superman met Brainiac 12 in the future and learned that every move Brainiac 13 made in the past was meant to ensure his own creation.

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• 5. Attempt Number 242

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  In Action Comics #866, dated August 2008, a Brainiac robot probe landed on Earth and fought Superman. Clark mistook it for the real thing. After the probe fell, data about Superman's blood flew to the original Brainiac. As that villain woke, his computer announced "Attempt #242 in progress", a wink at his first appearance and at all his clashes with Superman.

  Supergirl then told Superman a hard truth. Brainiac had shrunk the Kryptonian city of Kandor and bottled it, and every earlier Brainiac Superman had met was only a probe, clone, or body controlled by nanites. As she put it, no one had ever actually seen him. Superman set out to find him and arrived at a populated world just as Brainiac destroyed its star. The supernova knocked him unconscious, and Brainiac's ship pulled him aboard.

  When Superman escaped his cell, he saw Brainiac step from a "bio-shell". This body looked like a larger, more muscular version of the original. His methods echoed the Superman: The Animated Series version. He traveled the universe stealing alien knowledge, took a city from each planet as a sample, and then destroyed the planet so the knowledge became more valuable. He subdued Superman and fixed him to a machine that could read his mind, hoping to assimilate his brain. The ship went on to Earth and stole Metropolis, and Brainiac readied a missile to destroy the Sun and Earth with it.

  Superman broke free again and released Supergirl, who stopped the missile. In the fight that followed, Superman knocked Brainiac out of the ship and into a swamp, where microscopic organisms overwhelmed him. Out of spite, Brainiac launched a missile at the Kent farm. The farm was destroyed, and Jonathan Kent suffered a fatal heart attack.

  The captured Brainiac was held at a top-secret military base, where the imprisoned Lex Luthor was assigned to learn his secrets. Luthor used Brainiac's link to his ship to kill the soldiers guarding him. Brainiac then broke free of Luthor's control, forced him aboard, and escaped with him. During the story, Superman guessed that Brainiac destroyed Krypton, since its sun went nova soon after Kandor and Argo City were taken. He asked what Brainiac had done to that sun. Brainiac ignored the question, but he heavily implied the answer.

  Brainiac returned in the New Krypton storyline with a robot army and a ship whose force fields seemed invulnerable. His drones carried red sun ray guns, so General Zod's army could not stop them. Brainiac 5 hacked his ancestor's force fields and let the heroes in. Meanwhile Luthor sabotaged the ship and enlarged one of the stolen cities, which sent the ship crashing into New Krypton. Brainiac found Luthor in the wreckage. Luthor spat in his eye, and Brainiac snapped his neck.

  The killing turned out to be a trick. The dead man was a Luthor robot supplied by Toyman. The real Luthor had been working for General Sam Lane all along, to bring chaos to New Krypton, and he earned a presidential pardon. Zod fired red sun radiation from an Archer rifle at himself so he could fight the powerless Brainiac on even terms. Superman, nearly killed by the explosion, was revived when Brainiac 5 gave him a transfusion of Conner Kent's blood and a large dose of concentrated yellow sun rays. The story ended with Zod declaring war on the planet Earth.

  Mon-El later planted the many bottled cities on planets across the galaxy. By the 31st century they would become the United Planets, the same worlds that would produce the Legion of Super-Heroes. Brainiac 5 delivered Brainiac to Colu, where Vril Dox, Brainiac 2, gladly handed his "father" over to his people. Lyrl Dox, Brainiac 3, then freed his "grandfather" with a weapon called Pulsar Stargrave. A battle for Colu followed among all three present-day Brainiacs, with Vril calling in Lobo for help. Brainiac escaped with Stargrave in tow.

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• 6. Collector of Worlds

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  Superman #23.2 told the origin of Brainiac in DC's "New 52" line. Vril Dox was the greatest scientist on Yod-Colu, thanks to his advances in force field technology and miniaturization. His artificial intelligence, C.O.M.P.U.T.O., helped him discover the fifth dimension, which was at war. A group of its inhabitants called the Multitude had entered Dox's dimension and destroyed over a hundred planets. Yod-Colu was next. The magistrates sentenced Dox to exile for his desperate experiments, including some on his own son. Dox took over the planet's computer networks with C.O.M.P.U.T.O., built an army of robot servants called Terminauts, and bottled the city where his wife and son lived inside a force field. The rest of Yod-Colu fell to the Multitude. He then spread his consciousness through robots that would roam the universe to preserve planets, and he became known as the Collector of Worlds.

  On Earth, the Collector first appeared as a mysterious informant feeding Lex Luthor details about Superman's alien nature. Harvester robots invaded a factory where Clark was conducting an interview, and John Corben, the future Metallo, was possessed by the intelligence. Metropolis was miniaturized and bottled and carried to a ship in space. There Superman found many bottled cities, Kandor among them. The intelligence demanded that he choose which of Kandor and Metropolis to save. Superman chose neither, put on indestructible Kryptonian armor, and fought back. He freed Metallo by reasoning with him about his feelings for Lois Lane. Then he used his own Kryptonian rocket, which had been shrunk along with Metropolis, to attack Brainiac's mind. It worked because the rocket's primary mission was to protect Kal-El. Superman kept the ship as his new citadel.

  The Colony of the Collector of Worlds then explained the many names of one technology. On Yod-Colu it was C.O.M.P.U.T.O. On Noma it was Pneumenoid, and on Bryak it was Mind2. On Krypton it was Brainiac 1.0. On Earth, it said, the same intelligence is the Internet.

  On the planet Tolerance, the setting of a bounty-hunting game show called The Hunted, Brainiac struck a deal with Lady Styx, overlord of the Tenebrian Dominion, and bottled part of the Sh'diki Borough. A former Green Lantern named Jediah Caul infected his ship, and Brainiac abandoned the plan. Back on Earth, one of 20 people kidnapped and given metahuman powers by Brainiac infected Lois Lane. Her body became a vessel for his twelfth-level intelligence and a path through Earth's defenses. His minion Cyborg Superman, a rebuilt Zor-El, built a portal for the invasion fleet.

  In the Doomed storyline, Superman fought through the mothership to its core and found Vril Dox himself. Dox said he stole minds from across the universe because he believed uniting enough of them could change reality. The goal came from guilt over his lost wife and child. Superman dragged Dox and the mothership into a black hole. A being who appeared to be the true Brainiac, an immensely powerful entity from outside the universe, snatched Dox away.

  The Convergence story explained that being. It was the pre-Flashpoint Brainiac, thrown back through the timestream and mutated by crisis events such as Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, and 52. He reached Vanishing Point, roamed the history of the Multiverse, and collected doomed cities from defunct timelines. He left an agent, Telos, to rule a planet of the same name. When Convergence nearly destroyed the Multiverse, the time traveler Waverider freed Brainiac, who said he was sick from his mutations and wanted to be Brainiac of Colu again. Brainiac helped avert the collapse, and the surviving timelines became the new Multiverse.

  The "DC Rebirth" relaunch of 2016 opened with a hint. In Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps, the Green and Yellow Lanterns and Starro were shrunk and bottled by a robot claiming to run on "Brainiac 2.0" software. Larfleeze had secretly reprogrammed it with an Orange Lantern ring and wanted its shrinking technology for his own collection on Okaara. His greed got the better of him, and he broke the bottle, freeing the Lanterns. Larfleeze destroyed the robot in a rage when it said it had only done what he programmed it to do. The Superman story "New World" later confirmed that the post-2008 Brainiac still existed and that the robot was merely one of his drones.

  In No Justice, Brainiac arrived on Earth to warn of a cosmic threat. The Omega Titans were attacking his homeworld, Colu. He built four teams outfitted with his technology, mixing heroes and villains, with himself beside Superman. Amanda Waller used a hidden Protocol XI to probe his mind, and the strain made his head explode. His clone-son Vril Dox later revealed that following Brainiac's plan would have ended with Earth destroyed and Colu conquered.

  Lex Luthor recovered the body, and Professor Ivo rebuilt it so Brainiac could join the Legion of Doom. Their plan was to revive the cosmic being Perpetua. In the course of it, Brainiac bottled "hypertime", whole timelines, and used their technology in the 853rd century to become Brainiac One Million. When Perpetua returned at full power, she made him her control station and throne.

  In the Dawn of DC era, Brainiac bottled Lobo's city in the belief that it held Earth's greatest secret. He attacked Metropolis and captured most of Superman's powered allies. Luthor discovered that Brainiac was dying, because creating new bodies across the multiverse had split his consciousness and strained his own body. Superman realized that Brainiac was feeling emotions for the first time and had been trying to build a family so that he could feel love.

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• 7. Twelfth-Level Mind

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  One quantity stays the same across nearly every incarnation: a twelfth-level intelligence. Comics rank minds on a scale, and the population of 20th-century Earth sits at the sixth level, with the 31st century at the ninth. That gap gives Brainiac calculation ability, enhanced memory, and mastery of engineering, bioengineering, physics and other sciences. His post-Crisis form claims his brain can process knowledge of over four hundred ninety octodecillion beings. That is about five billion times the estimated number of atoms on Earth. Among organic beings, he regards only his frequent partner Lex Luthor as an intellectual peer.

  Before the 1980s, Brainiac was a scientist with no superpowers beyond his mind. His force field belt shielded him from all harm. His shrink ray captured cities, and his headpiece of diode-like objects let him link with technology and fire energy blasts from his head. Superman described those blasts as "blindingly painful... almost unbearable" and a threat to his life. One narrator called him "the super-computer space pirate-- Superman's most powerful nemesis." Even after he was revealed as an android, he still relied on external weapons.

  The changes of the 1980s produced the abilities that would persist afterward: super-physical attributes, intelligence, and technopathy. His technopathy extends to his ship, with which he has a symbiotic relationship. He can download his consciousness into spare robot bodies and possess organic beings, as he did with Luthor. The last pre-Crisis body, resembling a robotic skeleton, could spin psychokinetic energy into a web-like net that held even Superman at bay. He had absorbed extensive hand-to-hand combat techniques, yet he considered physical confrontation beneath him and preferred to win with his mind.

  John Byrne's reimagining gave the character telepathy and telekinesis. Its human psychic body defeated many New Gods, including Orion, with a single blast. But the body was fragile, and a gasoline explosion eventually destroyed it. After that his abilities depended on whichever body he occupied. The nanoswarm Brainiac 2.5 could shapeshift, regenerate, project energy blasts and force fields, and match Superman blow for blow. Superman judged him as strong as Doomsday in that form. The strongest was Brainiac 13, whom Superman could not remotely hurt even before he absorbed Imperiex.

  The New 52 version of the ship had been upgraded until it was larger than an entire planetary system. It carried a huge invasion fleet of smaller ships. By the Doomed storyline, Brainiac had become a powerful psychic, strengthened by alien minds he had stolen and digitized across every galaxy. He could control eight billion minds on Earth at once.

  A later revelation held that the post-Crisis Brainiac, like the others, was only a mentally controlled probe. The real Brainiac was a living Coluan who had modified himself both genetically and cybernetically. He lacked psychic powers but was far stronger and more durable than Superman. He overpowered the Kryptonian in unarmed combat and took several blows to the face without visible harm. His speed was so great that he once caught a punch from Superman. Brainiac 5 warned Superman he would most likely die in a straight fight. His technology made him more dangerous still, including missiles that push a star into a premature supernova. His force fields were so strong that an energy blast killed several solar-powered Kryptonians nearby and left his ship unscratched.

  The same Brainiac had weaknesses. He was telepathically linked to his ship, and a sudden separation could disable him briefly. A long separation made him physically deteriorate and weaker. Luthor observed this while studying his unconscious body over several days in government custody. He was also overloaded by particularly dirty environments and human society, a mysophobia that struck as he landed in Earth's atmosphere. That flaw seemed gone in his later battles, such as his fight with Superboy, which suggests he fixed it.

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• 8. Many Brainiacs

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  In 2009, IGN ranked Brainiac 17th in its Top 100 Comic Book Villains list. His name, a blend of brain and maniac, is believed by etymologists to have inspired the informal noun brainiac, which came into common use in the 1970s. That means a comic-book villain may have lent his name to the ordinary word for a very clever person.

  Alternate versions have stretched him further. Galactiac, a composite of Brainiac and Marvel's Galactus, appears in the Amalgam Comics story Challengers of the Fantastic. In Kingdom Come, Brainiac's Daughter, the child of Brainiac and Matrix, joins Superman's Justice League. In JLA: Earth 2, an anti-matter version is an organic lifeform trapped in a tank, who pretends to serve Ultraman and tricks the Crime Syndicate and Justice League into trapping themselves in each other's worlds.

  In The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Brainiac helps Luthor keep Kandor contained to use against Superman. The freed Kandorians destroy him. Justice League/Mighty Morphin Power Rangers has him strike a deal with Lord Zedd, steal the Rangers' powers, and head for their world to take a city. Superman: Red Son makes him an alien AI who arrives on Earth in 1978. He bypasses his reprogramming and pretends to serve Superman loyally for four decades before betraying him.

  The Absolute Superman version is the strangest. The Brainiac Collective built him as a low-level worker whose sole job was to shovel dead Brainiacs into a ship's furnace. Isolation drove him gradually insane, and he escaped to find the others aboard dead. He then bottled cities across the universe, reached Earth, and began working for Ra's al Ghul and the Lazarus Corporation.

  On live-action television, James Marsters played Brainiac in Smallville. This version is the BRAIN InterActive Construct, a Kryptonian nano-supercomputer made by Dax-Ur and Jor-El and corrupted by Major Zod. Introduced in the fifth season, he took the identity of Milton Fine, a history professor at Central Kansas A&M University. In Krypton, Blake Ritson played a Coluan cyborg who takes over the mind of the Voice of Rao, with a design built from makeup, prosthetics and CGI. Nikolai Witschl plays Milton Fine in Superman & Lois as a human computer engineer working for Luthor.

  In animation, Cliff Owens voiced him in The New Adventures of Superman. Ted Cassidy and later Stanley Ralph Ross voiced him in Super Friends, where he belongs to the Legion of Doom. Corey Burton voiced the DC Animated Universe version, introduced in Superman: The Animated Series. That Brainiac is a Kryptonian supercomputer who dismisses Jor-El's warnings so he can secretly save himself, then assimilates the knowledge of other planets before destroying them. A future version from 2979 tries to kill Clark Kent before he becomes Superman and is stopped by the Legion.

  He returns in Justice League with an alliance with Darkseid, and in Justice League Unlimited he is revealed to have hidden a copy of himself in Luthor, curing his Kryptonite cancer and giving him super-strength. That version guided Luthor to fund Project Cadmus, where an Amazo duplicate was built as a body for him. Later voices include Michael Emerson in My Adventures with Superman, John de Lancie in Justice League Action, and Stephen Fry in Harley Quinn. The Harley Quinn version collected information and technology for the Coluan government and had a son named Vrill II. He came home from his last mission with the Hyper-Ray, a shrinking weapon, to find Colu's whole population destroyed.

  The character's screen story is not over. Lars Eidinger is set to play Brainiac in the DC Universe film Man of Tomorrow, scheduled for 2027.

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