Despite being the archetypal superhero, Superman has a surprisingly limited rogues’ gallery. However, he does have a few heavies aside from Lex Luthor, and arguably the #2 Super-baddie is Brainiac.

We had a version of Brainiac in DC Super Heroes, based on the short-lived robot version that, despite is brief time in the comics, managed to inspire a much-loved Super Powers figure. To the best of my knowledge, the Silver Age version of Brainiac has never had an action figure until this year–suddenly he’s getting one in both DC Direct’s upcoming History of the DC Universe and here in Mattel’s DC Universe Classics “Clash in the Cosmos” two-pack.

To be fair, it’s not all that hard to see why the Silver Age Brainiac has had a hard time getting made–he’s absolutely, 100% goofy-looking. The electric pink shirt, the white polo shirt collar, the black shorts and knee socks…seriously, what was artist Al Plastino thinking when he designed this guy? I think he probably looked ridiculous even in 1958; by the late 1970s, his design was flat-out ludicrous.

However, that hasn’t stopped good writers from making Brainiac a force to be reckoned with, from his appearances as a major big bad on Justice League Unlimited to his recent retcon/reboot at the hands of Geoff Johns.

Oh, and there’s a Superman figure, too. (more…)

In the 1960s, as DC Comics developed their revamped Silver Age world of superheroes, they found themselves in a quandary–how could they explain all those earlier adventures of Batman, Superman and other heroes while maintaining the integrity of the new Silver Age stories? Thus was born the DC Multiverse, in which the Golden Age adventures now took place on “Earth-2” while the Silver Age took place in the contemporary “Earth-1.” Once this concept had been introduced, writers immediately began to play with it, introducing other Earths such as Earth-3, a world where Superman is evil and Lex Luthor is good.

Alexander Luthor was an acclaimed scientist on his homeworld of Earth-3, one of many “alternate universes,” where history often played out in opposite versions of the Earth we know. When two of his counterparts from Earth-1 & Earth-2 set their sights on conquering his Earth, Alexander enlisted the aid of the evil Luthors’ respective archenemies, the Supermen of their world, to come to [sic] and help fend off the attack. In response, the evil Luthors partnered with Earth-3’s twisted version of Superman, the evil Ultraman, to back their cause.

Born on the planet Krypton of an alternate universe where good and evil are reversed, Ultraman quickly became the most powerful super-criminal of that planet. A mirror-image of Superman, Ultraman had all the powers and abilities of Kal-El, only with the desire to use them for evil. He joined with other super-criminals to form the Crime Syndicate of America, the evil opposite force of the Justice League. Ultraman’s primary opposition came from Alexander Luthor, Sr., a genius scientist devoted to bettering humanity through his inventions.

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