Brainiac
1890 - Vril Dox is born among the science caste of Colu.
1918 - Vril Dox joins the science elite.
1939 - Vril Dox first begins augmenting his own intellect cybornetically.
32 years ago - Vril Dox breaks from the Computer Tyrants of Colu. He begins using extra-spatial tesseract technology to steal entire populations of underdeveloped planets to use in his experiments, storing them in a hyper-spatial nexus called Kandor.
25 years ago - Vril Dox crafts a clone of himself to give over to the Coluans, abandoning his own genetic markers to make himself distinct, taking the name Brainiac.
19 years ago - Brainiac 6.0 comes back in time using stolen technoloy to kill Clark Kent before he becomes Superman. He is stopped by Rokk Krinn, Imra Ardeen & Garth Ranzz of The Legion of Super-Heroes, who use their temporal tech to finally destroy Brainiac.
11 years ago - Brainiac attempts to steal specimens for Kandor from Earth. His biological body is decimated in his battle with Superman, who stores the nexus of Kandor in the Fortress of Solitude. Brainiac's preserved brain begins constructing an entirely android body.
10 years ago - Brainiac's worldship begins terrorizing whole planets as it actively drains away all knowledge.
8 years ago - Brainiac manipulates Maxima of Almerac to declare war on Earth. Superman defeats her, and together they fight Brainiac as he attempts to steal the population of Metropolis, he is ultimately stopped by Lex Luthor, who is comissioned by the government to extract data from the Brainiac nanomodules, which are kept in cold storage in a Lexcorp fascility.
3 years ago - Brainiac nanomondules in cold storage are activated when Indigo arrives severely damaged and attemps to link with them to repair herself. They corrupt Lexcorp systems convert the stored equipment into new Brainiac drones. They are stopped by the Titans & Young Justice, but Donna Troy is killed.
1 year ago - Brainiac's drones attack the entire solar system, and Brainiac 2.0 emerges from within his ship, having grown a new biological body. Superman and the entire Watchtower stop him. He is kept in suspended animation on New Genesis.
2730 - Brainiac 3.0 constructs Brainiac 4.0, a sleeper weapon meant to target Superman in the past. Vril Dox corrupts the programming of Brainiac 4.0 The corruption allows her alternate personality to assert it's dominance, becoming Indigo. She fights Brainiac 3.0 before escaping into the past, allowing Vril to finally destroy Brainiac 3.0.
2992 - Brainiac 6.0 activates when his failsafe programming finishes compiling. He attacks the headquarters of the Legion of Super Heroes to steal Querl Dox's technology to go back in time to kill Clark Kent before he becomes Superman.
Brainiac is one of those comic characters that completely transcends their own concept. He's been reimagined over and over again across the years with completely different results every time.
As we've continued this project, we've discovered that while the heroes often undergo a refining of their core concept that we can more or less exploit in an effort to find a singular, cohesive vision, the villians actuallt experience the opposite. The more popular they are, the more often they're used, but each time a new writer brings them in they are often reimagined with an entirely new backstory, appearance, motivation and utility. This means a single character can have several different versions. Brainiac is, very likely, the MOST obvious example of this. His original appearance as an alien invader that shrank and stole cities has been reworked as a human with an aliens conciousness, a terminator-looking android, a alien scientist with a penchant for disecting humans, and the current world-dominatingly powerful cyber-organic super intelligent alien menace. How do you carve a single version of that out of all that chaos, especially since a lot of these different takes on the character are VERY cool? The simple answer is, you don't. You find a way to make them all work together. |
Brainiac already has an element of reincarnation built into his concept. It's readily apparent in his animated series incarnation, where he is constantly ressurecting himself in different, more lethal forms. Geoff Johns even addressed this in his very intense reimagining of the character as a brutal alien scientist rebuilding himself into a cosmos-threatening collector.
There are SEVERAL characters that have their origin with Brainiac; Vril Dox, Brainiac 5 of the Legion, and Indigo. The character also needs to have invented a rudimentary time travel technology that is later refined by Brainiac 5... one of the few characters in the entire DC universe to do so. His influence is already felt across out timeline, so we used that as a foundation for the story we were building. We then wanted started looking at the various versions of the character, taking ideas from each and refining them into a singular vision. His original tactic of stealing cities was redesigned into him stealing PEOPLE, and then keeping them in a spatial nexus. This means that Kandor isn't a shrunken Kryptonian city (can't have that many surviving Kryptonians), but rather a contained city of hundreds of different alien races, all living together as refugees. We included a version of his android body and used it as the Brainiac of the Panic in the Sky arc, the first massive invasion of Brainiac's skull-shaped worldship. |
Then, of course, we want the modern Aliens/Borg version of the character, the twisted alien weirdness of Brainiac 2.0, his new incredibly powerful organic body with all it's weird tentacles. This verison of the character really is an artist's goldmine, evoking Clive Barker, H.R. Geiger... a whole plethora of genre-defining horror artists. This is a GREAT superman villian, and we want to be able to use him as much as possible.
Of course, his influence extends long after the modern timeline. We need him to threaten the Legion of Superheroes, to create the rudimentary science of time travel that will, in some distant, unknown time, be the technology that will drive Rip Hunter's timeship. He is the father of Indigo of the Outsiders, and the ancestor of Brainiac 5, one of the seminal characters of the Legion of Superheroes. He's a source of all sorts of amazing storytelling, and here we should have a solid foundation where we can access everything this character has to offer. |