Brainiac

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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. One of his earliest captives is the Durlan, who he takes from the Computer Tyrants. 
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.  
It is really hard to overstate just how wide-reaching the influence of Brainiac is.  Superman has other iconic villains, but they are all built on existing archetypes, like the mad scientist or the scheming businessman.  Alien invaders existed before Brainiac, but the particular visual of the psychic alien tyrant with brain powers is almost exclusively started here.  Even the word, Brainiac, has its origin here!  

Often, while classic long-running heroes will develop a conceptual archetype around themselves that subsequent writers are always chasing... villains are the opposite.  New writers will fully reinvent them to fit their own version of the hero, meaning we'll see a vast reimagining of even classic villains, and Brainiac has some of the most fun examples of this.  What's more, those huge changes in his dynamic all happen while still maintaining the same core character concept. We get to try to carve a single character out of all this chaos!

Brainiac's Comic History

Brainiac's first appearance is in Action Comics #242 in 1958.  This is a few years after the official start of the Silver Age in 1956 with the introduction of Barry Allen, but the transition is a little bit murkier for characters like Superman whose original Golden Age books were still being published.  Personally, I consider the introduction of the Justice League in 1960 the real complete transition of the entire line into the Silver Age.  This would place this book in that space between the Golden and Silver Ages, sometimes called the Atomic Age. 

The story told in #242 is an absolute tour de force of glorious sci-fi concepts of the era.  It begins with Lois & Clark as passengers on a new test rocket, showcasing how sci-fi of the era viewed space travel (NASA was actually created in 1958!), only for them to be confronted by a space saucer piloted by Brainiac, and his shoulder-space-monkey-with-antenna Koko.  He proceeds to shrink whole Earth cities and store them in large bottles, prodding them experimentally like a kid with an ant farm, using this great visual of a huge scalpel descending from the sky to slice away the cables of the George Washington Bridge.  Superman tries to fight Brainiac, hurling chunks of planetoids at him that bounce off his forcefield.  Eventually Superman himself is shrunk down with Metropolis.  He explores other captured alien cities until he discovers the Kryptonian city of Kandor, establishing one of the most enduring concepts of the Silver Age Superman stories. 
Brainiac was a regularly occurring Superman villain for decades, evolving along with the rest of his mythology.  In the 80s, while DC was focusing on developing its visuals to be used in animation several major characters underwent comprehensive visual design updates.  There WERE in-world explanations of those changes... in Brainiac's case, he was updated in Action Comics #544 in 1983, but the stories in these cases were almost incidental.  DC's overall continuity was unbelievably dense at this point, and was already being prepped for the upcoming reset in the Crisis of Infinite Earths, which really empowered writers to go absolutely off the rails with stuff at this point.  Suffice to say, Brainiac updated himself to now have a completely android body with a really cool transparent hexagon brain and a giant skull-shaped spaceship.  

John Byrne's reimagining of the Superman story post-crisis streamlined and updated a lot of his mythos, but there were also elements that became needlessly, wildly over-complicated, and Brainiac was certainly one of them.  We meet a circus mentalist Milton Fine, who has actual psychic powers, and watch as his mind is taken over by the disembodied consciousness of an alien scientist who had been executed for trying to overthrow the Computer Tyrants of Colu, his homeworld. The Superman comics of this era were loaded with ongoing crossover plots, so this version of Brainiac took a long time to evolve, but EVENTUALLY the Vril Dox entity fully took over Milton's mind and was able to update his body to make him fully Coluan, finally much closer to the classic version of Brainiac, culminating in the crossover story Panic in the Sky. In the end, it does become a very functional version of the character, it just took them a WHILE to get there. 
Brainiac would go on to appear in several other major storylines of the era; imprisoned on New Genesis and then escaping, and playing a role in the Doomsday Wars storyline... but the biggest influence on the character actually happened over in the world of animation.  Brainiac was reimagined in the Superman Animated Series to play a much larger role in the origin of Superman as a Kryptonian supercomputer that was responsible for hiding the information that the planet was dying from the planet's elite.  He would go on to appear with a big, menacing android body that would pose a major threat across the entire series and on into the following Justice League series.  The comics didn't adapt this change to his story, but they immediately started to make references to his animated appearance.  

Another major update to Brainiac happened during Geoff Johns' run on Action Comics. Continuity mixologist that he is, Johns revealed that all of the versions of Brainiac we'd met to that point were just aspects of the original.  Now we were meeting the TRUE Brainiac, a hulking techno-organic horror right out of H.R. Geiger or the Borg.  It's a very interesting adaptation of Brainiac's visual, but it does gloss over certain elements of what had come before.  Still, Brainiac remains one of the all-time great Superman villains, challenging him on a scale that almost no one else can achieve.  He's an archetype of a comic book villain that is so vital to the genre, he's almost inevitable. 

Our Brainiac Story

The first thing we have to do is decide, up front, we want to depict SEVERAL of the variants of Brainiac from across his history.  This means we'll need to cherry-pick and adapt specific events that allow us to evolve the character over his timeline.  He already has themes of constantly updating and reincarnating himself across history, so we just get to use them to shift from his original organic Coluan body, to the glass-brained Terminator android, and eventually to what we're calling Brainiac 2.0, the hulking techo-organic monstrosity wired into his skullship, wielding an endless arsenal of grappling tentacles and forcefields.   
The whole 'shrinking cities into glass bottles' concept is unbelievably charming in a wholesome Silver Age style, and honestly I would not fault anyone for wanting to retain it in their headcanon.  For me PERSONALLY, it strains the capacity of my suspension of disbelief just a tad too far.  I still want to retain the role it plays in the mythology, however, so we invented the Kandor Nexus, a hyper-spatial tesseract of contained space where Brainiac stores the populations he steals from across the galaxy.  It's a single city populated by an endless variety of alien species, which Superman can take and store in the Fortress.  This serves the same narrative purpose as the classic Kandor, but it manages to do so without the (admittedly adorable) idea of a miniaturized city in a bottle, and also removes an entire population of surviving Kryptonians.  Perhaps it's just me growing up during the John Byrne era, but not having a lot of Kryptonians out there in the world is an important detail. 
Brainiac's legacy has also gone on to touch a lot of distant corners of our timeline... with clones, updated versions, and descendants occurring almost on top of each other.  MODERN Brainiac does not have access to time travel, but he does achieve it in the distant future, creating the rudimentary science that will one day drive Rip Hunter's Time Sphere.  This means that Brainiac is one of the few characters who actually gets to move around our timeline.  Vril Dox, Brainiac 5, Indigo, and future variant Brainiac 6.0 all appear, but we believe the flow of events is all done pretty elegantly.

We generally avoid actually explaining in advance the future events of a character, preferring to leave it open to be interpreted down the road.  Brainiac is a unique case, however, in that his involvement with later timelines is actually set.  As we leave the timeline, the techno-organic Brainiac 2.0 has been unleashed, but in the future we will see other versions occur until his attempt to use time travel to kill Superman in the past using Indigo is thwarted by Vril Dox, finally allowing him to take over the future of Brainiac's legacy and lead to the hero Brainiac 5... at least until Brainiac 6.0 reveals himself!

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