[8] Professor Vale encounters Corben and transfers his brain into a robotic body covered by a flesh-like artificial skin and powered by kryptonite.

[9][10] After obtaining a job with the Daily Planet, Corben briefly tried to romance Lois Lane, while deciding that he would use his powers to eliminate Superman, the one person who might expose his criminal deeds.

[13] Despite ignoring Vale's commands, Metallo came into conflict with Superman on various occasions, largely due to his continued activities as a petty thug.

Metallo later lost his kryptonite heart to Lex Luthor, though back-up life support systems allowed him to reactivate himself and escape.

As a result, Metallo could morph his body into any mechanical shape he could imagine (such as turning his hands into guns or "growing" a jet pack from his back) and project his consciousness into any technological or metallic device.

As Superman and others learned on various occasions, the most effective way to neutralize Metallo was to remove his (largely invulnerable) head and isolate it from other metallic items.

As such he would receive numerous upgrades or whole new chassis' to replace his damaged parts, such as by the obscure supervillain organization Cerberus, which modified him with a vastly superior body, one with lead-lined skull-plating and an anatomic layer that even Superman could not demolish.

[23] Soon after it was destroyed, Corben had received a new body from a fellow Kryptonite-powered supervillain Conduit; which gave Metallo radioactive blasts from his hands and could utilize geomagnetism to make him physically immovable, even by the Man of Steel, so long as he stood on solid ground or flooring within a building complex.

In experimenting with his newfound abilities, Metallo found he could alternate differing energy frequencies for harnessing and redistributing it from various power sources.

[27] He is also occasionally portrayed as having a liquid metal-based endoskeleton, possessing the ability to morph parts of his body, specifically his limbs, into different weapons or tools, such as chainsaws, shovels, hammers, etc.

While not a genius like Lex Luthor or Brainiac, Corben's time spent with machines has given him a gifted understanding of how they work, enabling him to tinker with their mechanical functions even before gaining his technomorphing capabilities.

In the previous continuity, the pre-Flashpoint Lex Luthor modified Corben to holster and utilize different forms of kryptonite; boasting mutagenic red-k, inverted blue-k and lastly, artificial depowering gold-k on top of the green he already possessed.

[37] The John Corben incarnation of Metallo received a "Collect and Connect" figure in Wave 5 of the DC Universe Classics line.