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It’s a city in a bottle, baby
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DC shared a teaser trailer for Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl on Dec. 11, providing a first look at Jason Momoa’s bounty hunter Lobo and Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock of House of the Dragon) beating up loads of space pirates. But the scene with the biggest implications for the DCU is an alien city being shrunken and lifted into the sky by some sort of golden jar-shaped technology. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment in the action-packed trailer that sneakily sets up Brainiac, who will reportedly be the villain of the Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow.
Brainiac was introduced in 1958 by Otto Binder in Action Comics #242 with a storyline that involved him shrinking Metropolis, Paris, and other Earth cities to collect in bottles. When Superman battles the alien invader, he discovers that Brainiac has also shrunk the Kryptonian city of Kandor. While Superman was able to save Earth’s cities, he couldn’t do the same for Kandor. He winds up keeping the shrunken city in the Fortress of Solitude.
Image: Curt Swan, Stan Kaye and Ira Schnapp/DC ComicsThe plot proved so compelling that it has been reused and adapted many times over the decades. In Superman: Red Son, Brainiac messes with Soviet Superman by bottling Kiev. In The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Brainiac uses Kandor to blackmail Superman into working for him. Brainiac bottles Metropolis in season 5 of Harley Quinn, which crafted a musical to explain the villain's backstory and motivations.
While Brainiac has never appeared on the big screen, he’s been in a lot of TV shows. He was the primary villain of David S. Goyer’s Syfy series Krypton, which was set in Kandor. Two different versions of Brainiac appeared on the Supergirl TV series — the evil alien Brainiac 8, who escaped from a Kryptonian prison, and the time-traveling hero Brainiac 5.
Brainiac has alternately been depicted as a superintelligent alien scientist, a cyborg, and a human with psychic powers. One of the most compelling reinventions came from Superman: The Animated Series, where Brainiac was a Kryptonian AI that prioritized his own survival over the planet’s. He lied to Krypton’s scientists about the impending catastrophe so that he could focus on escaping himself. The Adult Swim series My Adventures with Superman — which shares Gunn’s militaristic view of Kryptonians — also gave Superman and Brainiac a shared origin story. That version of Brainiac adopted Kara Zor-El after Krypton was destroyed and uses her as a brainwashed soldier to wipe out other planets.
Image: DC ComicsWhile Kal-El was sent to Earth as a baby, Gunn says Kara Zor-El spent her first 14 years drifting on a fraction of their destroyed homeworld. She presumably witnessed Brainiac taking a city for his collection and leaving everyone else to die. Gunn has positioned Brainiac as a threat so great that Lex Luthor and Superman will have to team up to fight him, and it seems like Supergirl will be a way to build up just how dangerous he is to the DCU.
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