Bruno Manheim

Picture
43 years ago - Bruno Mannheim is born the son of Moxie Mannheim, boss of Metropolis's Intergang.
26 years ago - 17-year-old Bruno sees Tobias Whale take control of metropolis's drug trade from Intergang.
23 years ago - 20-year-old Bruno takes over as head of Integang, warring with Tobias Whale over the Metropolis drug trade.
21 years ago - 22-year-old Bruno is forced to truce with Tobias Whale when Lex Luthor grants him contol of the Metropolis drug trade, limiting Intergang to weapon smuggling.
13 years ago - 30-year-old Bruno strikes a backdoor deal with cyber-tech industries to illegally distribute advanced weapons to fight Superman.
12 years ago - 31-year-old Bruno and Intergang gain access to the Metropolis drug trade when Lex Luthor withdraws his support from Tobias Whale thanks to Black Lightning's work to dismantle his organization.
11 years ago - 32-year-old Bruno and Intergang begin using Cyber-tech weapons build by John Henry Irons after Tobias Whale is imprisoned.
9 years ago - 34-year-old Bruno puts a hit out on John Henry Irons when he discovers the connection between Cybertech and Intergang.
​8 years ago - 34-year-old Bruno forges an exclusive partnership with Lucia Rojas smuggling cartel.
6 years ago - 37-year-old Bruno' is contacted by Desaad of Apokolips.  He becomes his agent on Earth in exchange for dealing Apokaliptian technology.
5 years ago - 38-year-old Bruno severs ties between Cybertech & Intergang as Steel systematically dismantles their organization, instead focusing on Apokaliptian technology.
4 years ago - 39-year-old Bruno escapes from Apokolips control after they attack Earth, stealing their technology to create a Earth-based boomtube network, his body mutating to grow in size, held in check by regular doses of boomtube energy.
1 year ago -  42-year-old Bruno's boomtube network is used by the Watchtower in the battle of Mageddon.  He later sells access to the Legion of Doom.
Bruno Mannheim isn't the original leader of Intergang.  When originally conceived, their leader was 'Moxie' Mannheim, Bruno's canonical father.  Later, Intergang would be led by Morgan Edge, a Superman character whose utility has seemingly changed dozens of times.  Eventually, Bruno became the leader of the longstanding organization and has essentially maintained ever sense.  

Intergang is a WEIRD part of DC's mythology and Superman's in particular; a criminal organization with one foot in the very weird world of alien despots and supertechnology.  We're basically using Bruno's story as a way to include Intergang in all its weirdness.

Bruno Mannheim's Comic History

Intergang was created in 1970 in the pages of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen.  You'd think that one more random organized crime syndicate bouncing around in the world of DC wouldn't stand out, but this particular group was built by Jack Kirby and is exactly as insane as that should suggest. 

Intergang was never just a crime organization.  It was an Earth-based extension of Kirby's Fourth World.  They were criminals who were working alongside Darkseid's forces, manipulated to do their bidding on Earth in exchange for access to Apokaliptian technology.

Weirdly, this original story has basically been the ONLY story that Intergang is ever a part of.  They've added some new elements like the strange 'crime bible' story that played out through the '52' weekly series in 2006.  Notably, Kurt Busiek actually infused some new ideas into his Superman run that suggested some possible new story ideas for Intergang that we're going to pick up and run with, like the image of Bruno suddenly being as big as a large house. 

The real challenge here is to try to coalesce the particular weirdness of Intergang into a single vision where they also make sense as an actual criminal organization.

Our Bruno Mannheim Story

Perhaps the biggest innovation we're infusing into the story of Bruno Mannheim is to solidify their place within the organized crime picture of Metropolis before we ever introduce the idea of their relationship with Apokalips.  Obviously, Metropolis is far more organized than the chaos of Gotham... Lex Luthor basically decides who does what and when.  We already know that Metropolis's Suicide Slums spent several years under the thumb of Tobias Whale before he was actually defeated by Black Lightning, so that gives us two story elements to use here... A long period where Intergang suffered while Whale had the majority of the power and a sudden power vacuum that Intergang can occupy. This actually explains how this organization developed a taste for unorthodox allies.

Second... We're using Intergang as a part of a larger story between John Henry Irons and the tech company that sold his weapon designs.  They need a street-level contact to work with to move those weapons, and Intergang actually works really well here.  It creates a culture within Intergang where their path back to power is through smuggling illegal high-tech weapons... Something that will become a major part of their story.  When they lose access to Cybertech, it totally makes sense that they would be open to smuggling bizarre alien technology they don't understand.  This takes all the weirdness of Mannheim and Intergang and creates a real-world framework where it can actually happen.

Bruno Mannheim's Future

There have been attempts to move Mannheim's story forward; most notably the crime bible story from '52'... and the entirety of Final Crisis.  Neither of those stories is making its way into our timeline; one because it felt like a nonstarter even when the comics were being published, and the other because it basically ends DC as we know it so there would be no point in any of it.  

So what do we do with Mannheim, then?  For a character with forty years of history, surprisingly little has been done with him, but this is often the case with Kirby characters.  The original stories of these characters are so out there that they basically just get retold over and over.  

The best exception is in Kurt Busiek's Superman run where we get hints that Mannheim has survived the Apokaliptian assault on Earth and has managed to secure his own store of alien technology.  The idea that he is a street-level criminal that has access to this weird tech is really cool and it sets him up to be an interesting villain moving forward.  We decided to embrace the idea that his base form is now giant and that he needs regular treatments to appear normal-sized, but also that he has constructed an Earth-based boomtube network.  Some of the potential story elements that come from this are really fantastic. We're making him deal with the Legion of Doom to begin exploring those possibilities.

Related Characters