Brainiac’s Upgrade Make Him DC’s Powerful Super Villain:
Brainiac is a menace to the entire universe. In more ways than one, he is the guy responsible for the first-ever mishap to ever happen in DC Comics. Superman, the first-ever superhero, lost his home planet to an explosion for which Brainiac was responsible. And the guy has managed to be at the forefront of super-villainy ever since, becoming a headache for the entire Justice League. And he is certainly not stopping when it comes to keeping up with the times. One of Brainiac’s many abilities is his power to upgrade himself, which is just a fancy word for saying he powered up. And his recent most upgrade is something that everyone should take notice of as it might change the very equations of the DC Comic book Universe.
SPOILER ALERT: The following article contains MAJOR Spoilers for Justice League #31. Enter at your own risk.
Lex Luthor’s Doom War initiative in the on-going storyline of Justice League is making heads turn. The superheroes of the Earth are not in a state where they could fight Lex Luthor’s machinations. In Year of the Villain, Lex Luthor gains the gift of primordial cosmic energy manipulation to become Apex Lex, a gift given to him by the cosmic goddess called Perpetua. Perpetua and Lex intend to conquer the galaxy and then the entire universe and rewrite the fabric of reality as they wish. Superheroes need to act fast.
Using his cosmic rod, Starman sends members of the Justice league across space and time to gather information and allies for fighting Lex Luthor. Their objective is finding pieces of the Totality – a weapon that Lex requires to rule the universe. The Flash aka Barry Allen and Green Lantern – John Stewart, have been sent back in time to handle Justice Society of America.
Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman have traveled to the distant future where they meet Kamandi in the Hall of Justice. It is there that the trio realizes that Brainiac, whose latest upgrade could make him one of the most powerful entities in the universe, could be the key to the solving the puzzle of how to defeat Lex Luthor.
In the future, Kamandi is fighting Brainiac and his robot army by using his own force of animal soldiers. It is a losing battle for the former since Brainiac is just too overwhelmingly powerful. The trinity destroys a contingent of drones and then Batman decides to hack into one of the drones to gather data. To Batman’s surprise, he realizes that the Brainiac of the future is way more powerful than the incarnation from the present timeline. The Brainiac from the future does not shrink, bottle and collect cities. He collects entire future timelines!
How does Brainiac do this? A recently introduced concept called “Hyper-Time” is what allows Brainiac to use this technology. Brainiac can jump through time and into different worlds and realities and gather data. Using this data, Brainiac can analyze every possible future and hence, every possible action that his enemies could ever think of. While Brainiac is only using this technology to find out more about the location of the missing Totality Shards, there is much more to this powerful tech than what meets the eye.
Imagine if Brainiac gains access to a Totality Shard. Why would a guy who knows what is going to happen in the future, has plans for every possible direction the timeline could unravel, knows how to manipulate the space-time continuum, give away the Totality Shard to Lex Luthor? Brainiac is no longer a collector of cities. He is a collector of time itself. And we don’t even know what else this guy has in store for the Justice League. Brainiac has become way too scary now. One more thing that needs to be mentioned is that we still do not know if Brainiac is working under Lex Luthor and Perpetua or is operating independently. Maybe Brainiac has taken over and is now heading Lex’s crusade against creation? Guess we will have to wait and find out.
