Before Krypton exploded, the futuristic city was captured by the supervillain Brainiac, miniaturized by his shrinking ray and placed inside a glass bell jar.

Defeating Brainiac and taking possession of the jar, Superman brings the city to his Arctic hideout, the Fortress of Solitude, and spends many years attempting to restore it to normal size.

[2] This was part of editor Mort Weisinger's desire to build a wider canvas of supporting characters and locations for the various Superman titles, creating more opportunities for new stories to emerge.

[6] In their book Supergods, writer Grant Morrison explained the unique symbolism that the Bottle City represents: "This living diorama, this ant colony of real people, had great appeal for children, adding to the childlike nature of this era's Superman.

In the comic strip story, Superman's foe was named Romado, who traveled the cosmos with his pet white monkey Koko, shrinking major cities and keeping them in glass jars.

But I had a lot of fun inventing all that tiny futuristic architecture, not to mention the view from inside the bottle — with the "giant" figures peering in".

In the latter story, Superman uses an enlarging ray to bring the city back; while the buildings prove unstable and crumble to dust, the restored citizens are happily relocated to their new home.

In this version of the story, Kandor was destroyed a thousand years before Krypton's end, blown up with an atomic device by the terrorist organization Black Zero.

[22] The storylines and relaunches Infinite Crisis (2005-2006), Superman: New Krypton (2009-2009), The New 52 (2011) and DC Rebirth (2016) have resulted in a number of different versions of Kandor, with varying degrees of resemblance to the original Silver Age creation.

In the New Krypton world, the city is enlarged, but its people come into conflict with Earth and suffer heavy casualties thanks to the machinations of Lex Luthor.

The inhabitants of Kandor have varied in different continuities: In the 2015 book The Man from Krypton: A Closer Look at Superman, Adam-Troy Castro criticizes "The Pathetic Inferiority Complex of the Kandorians": "As of now, the average size of the remaining members of the species is defined quite well by the people of Kandor, who now face a practical choice between being small and living in a bottle on a shelf, or being small and free to zip around with godlike powers.