[3] In his comic book appearances, Brainiac is commonly depicted as a superintelligent android or cyborg from the planet Colu who is obsessed with collecting all knowledge in the known universe.

He travels the galaxy and shrinks cities to bottle size for preservation on his skull-shaped spaceship before destroying their source planets, believing the knowledge he acquires to be most valuable if he alone possesses it.

[5] Brainiac is a bald, green-skinned humanoid who arrives on Earth and shrinks various cities, including Metropolis, storing them in bottles with the intent of using them to restore the then-unnamed planet he ruled.

King Kull later enlisted Brainiac and Mister Atom of Earth-S to attack the city of Tomorrow and speed up the rotation enough for the people of Earth to fly into the air.

Since he was essentially a living computer program that could be housed in different forms if "killed", Brainiac was sometimes referred to on comic book covers as "the villain who won't die!".

In Action Comics #544-546 (June–August 1983), Lex Luthor acquires a renewed sense of purpose and dons a high-tech warsuit, while Brainiac is reimagined by writer Marv Wolfman and artist Gil Kane and given a new appearance designed by Ed Hannigan.

In Wolfman and Kane's story "Rebirth", published in Action Comics #544, Brainiac attempts to free himself by causing the nearby star, Epsilon 4, to go nova and utilize its energy.

Reborn in a new body, the villain believes he has seen the Master Programmer, the divine force behind the universe's creation, and that this entity created Superman as an "angel of death" to destroy Brainiac.

The Post-Crisis version of Brainiac was now a radical Coluan scientist called Vril Dox who, having attempted to overthrow the Computer Tyrants of Colu, was sentenced to death.

In his last moments before disintegration, his consciousness was attracted light years away to Milton Moses Fine, a human sideshow mentalist who worked under the alias "The Amazing Brainiac".

He makes the scientists create a new version of the skull ship (saying he thought of the design "in a dream") and use advanced genetic science to grow a new body for himself, resembling Milton Fine's form but taller, more physically fit, and with the green skin of a Coluan.

Now free of Fine's body and consciousness completely but still possessing the man's metahuman telepathic powers, Brainiac confronted Superman and then left Earth to plan another attack.

Brainiac returned in the "Panic in the Sky" storyline after seizing control of the mobile planetary fortress Warworld and recruiting assistance from Maxima and the alien warrior Draaga.

Hoping to create a clone Doomsday form by manipulating human DNA, Brainiac attempts to steal a prematurely born baby Superman is transporting to a Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit, the newborn child of Pete Ross and Lana Lang.

[39] Following this, Brainiac, now in possession of his ship again, unleashes his robot army against the newly created planet of New Krypton, and the Kryptonian citizens rise up to fight the drones.

General Zod's army proves totally unable to fend them off, as the Brainiac's ship's force fields are seemingly invulnerable and his drones are equipped with red sunray guns, allowing them to kill tens of thousands of Kryptonians.

In response, Zod fires the red sun radiation from an Archer rifle at himself, to remove his powers and thus supposedly level the playing field as he prepares to take Brainiac down.

Copying the planet's database, Dox constructed an army of robot servants called Terminauts and miniaturized the city his wife and son lived on and bottled it in a force field, while the rest of Yod-Colu was destroyed by the Multitude.

After the destruction of Yod-Colu, Dox constructed an army of starships and distributed his consciousness across a series of robots that would each travel the universe to preserve planets from the Multitude, becoming known as the Collector of Worlds.

[42] Clark is having a dream of Krypton's final moments in which an artificial intelligence that controls the planet wakes up robots in an attempt to preserve the Kryptonian culture.

He sends most of the heroes home, and with help from the Zero Hour Parallax and the pre-Flashpoint Superman, averts the collapse of the Multiverse from Crisis on Infinite Earths, and is returned to the normal Brainiac.

The entirety of the Green and Yellow Lanterns (including Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, and John Stewart), along with Starro the Conqueror, are lured into a trap and subsequently hit with a shrink ray while on the planet Xudar, leaving them tiny and helpless.

[56] The machine's victory is short-lived, however, as it is revealed that Larfleeze was able to reprogram it to his side using an Orange Lantern ring, having rebooted its life systems after finding it inactive on his homeworld with its ship.

His clone-son, Vril Dox/Brainiac II, later revealed that if Brainiac's plan had been followed, he would've hijacked the power of the Titans himself, destroyed Earth, and conquered Colu before going on to dominate the universe.

[67] Brainiac's most consistent power (endemic to all versions) is his "twelfth-level intelligence", allowing calculation abilities, enhanced memory, and advanced understanding of mechanical engineering, bioengineering, physics, and as well as other theoretical and applied sciences.

The final body utilized by the Pre-Crisis Brainiac (resembling a robotic skeleton) was technopathic, superhumanly strong, and resilient, and was capable of generating and "spinning" psychokinetic energies into a web-like net which could hold even Superman at bay.

His vast psychic powers allowed him to seriously challenge Superman and defeat many members of the New Gods (including Orion) with a single blast,[75] but this body's lack of durability is the major liability and eventually led to it being rendered useless in a gasoline explosion.

[84] His force fields are so impregnable that a direct hit from an energy weapon killed several solar-powered Kryptonians as collateral damage and didn't leave so much a single scratch on his ship.

Brainiac, in The New 52, seems to have kept most of the powers and equipment of his Post-Crisis incarnation (including his shrink ray, force field belt, and robot army), with notable additions.

[90] By the Superman: Doomed story arc, Brainiac utilizes his vast intellect to become an enormously powerful psychic, augmented by the alien minds that he had stolen and digitized from across every galaxy.