The OTHER alien cities Brainiac shrunk

[llozymandias]

it could be that brainiac believes that his emotions are an act.  his hatred of superman seemed pretty genuine.  how did his true nature become common knowledge?

[Captain Kal]

What's interesting in real world research is that emotions are key to decision making and success in life.  Patients with the emotional aspect of their brains cut off are still intelligent, can be logical, but can make no decisions.

To be truly sentient and thinking creatures, both the Coluan tyrants and Brainiac require some base emotional context or else they're incapable of even basic decisions.

[ManSinha]

To be truly sentient and thinking creatures, both the Coluan tyrants and Brainiac require some base emotional context or else they're incapable of even basic decisions

Well, then how would we explain Mr. Spock? Repressed emotions? and Data (before the emotion chip)?

[Captain Kal]

Aside from the fact that they represent a different fictional universe and continuity (heh heh ), Vulcans have been established as having emotions but they have truly inhuman supression of them.  And Data evidently has some degree of emotional awareness even given certain facts like he prefers his proper name pronunciation (when it was mispronounced once), his clear behaviour of love towards his daughter, Lal (despite his voiced objections to this emotion), and his evident anger at Fajo which made him override his respect for life programming.

And he clearly prefers the company of certain humans like Geordi. And he grew attached to Tasha and felt her absence.  These are clear emotional behaviours regardless of what is actually said about or by Data on these matters.

Actions speak louder than words.

[NotSuper]

I always thought that Data was "aping" the emotions of humans around him. As for Spock, I believe Vulcans DO have emotions -- they're just incredibly logical.

Looking back at the comics, it appears that Brainiac really did hate Superman. He didn't just consider him a threat; he actively despised him. I also remember almost feeling that he was unquestionably Superman's greatest foe in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow. Maybe Brainiac was more "human" than he would like to admit.

Getting back to the original topic, I'm confident that one of my two theories is correct. Either Superman returned each city to its planet and later restored them, or Brainiac brought the planets back to Colu, where they were eventually returned and enlarged on their respective planets.

[Captain Kal]

Given how Brainiac seemed pretty obsessed with retrieving Kandor when the opportunities presented themselves and how he didn't seem to have nor care about other cities shrunken, it may be Kandor was the only city he stole before reaching Earth.  We saw the Earth cities restored.  No other cities were evidently on his ship except for Kandor which supports this.  For whatever reason, it looks like Kandor and the Earth cities were the only ones shown shrunken.

You see, you have to wonder about this.  Brainiac kept Kandor around for decades then we see the Earth cities.  We have no evidence he shrank any other cities.  It does seem odd that he kept Kandor around like that and was prepared to do the same for Earth cities.

[Continental Op]

The original Kandor story was retold and "updated" (revised) in a few pages of flashback during DC SPECIAL SERIES #26. THis was a giant tabloid -sized story detailing the history of Superman's Fortress, including the Bottle City itself.

Brainiac's appearance was changed to his current one in the flashback IIRC (with the pink tights and lightbulb-crowned head). Koko also looked a bit more menacing than a harmless little space-monkey. It SEEMS to me that the flashback established that Superman traveled throughout the galaxy before returning to Earth, and restored various alien cities to their homeworlds... but I no longer have this story in my collection, and can't double-check. If anyone else can, it should clear things up. Memory does play tricks on us.

As for the team of Luthor and Brainiac...they always seemed to be roughly intellectual equals (though neither would admit it) with a SLIGHT edge going to Lex because he could grasp human emotions properly. True, Brainiac was programmed with the emotions and mannerisms of a Coluan scientist, and it was always portrayed inconsistently by the writers whether he truly felt emotions or not, and he certainly SEEMED to express emotions like greed, rage, fear, hate, satisfaction etc.  over the years. But my understanding is that Brainiac was acting in the ways he thought he was SUPPOSED to, without necessarily understanding WHY... he was programmed to imitate emotions, rather than truly  experience them. Remember, Brainiac was originally created to blend in among humans as a SPY and  to escape detection easily. (Superman didn't even learn Brainiac was an android until JIMMY OLSEN #87, around a decade after their first meeting in the comics! Strangely, Superman just noticed for the first time then that Brainiac didn't have a heartbeat and other human bodily functions.) Brainiac never developed his emotions as a human does, by evolving them in childhood. Instead they were downloaded all at once.

Vulcans, in contrast, HAD  emotions, but were trained from childhood NOT to show them to others (at least outside their families)  or act on them to make decisions. They believed that substituting logic for emotions was the key to advancement,  since their race had nearly been wiped out by war in the distant past.

For what it's worth, the cover of ACTION COMICS #545 had this to say about the colder, more robotic upgrade of Brainiac:

"The OLD BRAINIAC had the merest TOUCH of HUMANITY! The NEW BRAINIAC has ELIMINATED that defect!"

Brainiac, as a computer, could process far more information and work out many more  theories in the time it would take an organic human mind like Luthor's to do the work. But Lex seeemd to be able to make intuitive "leaps" of logic that Brainiac's rigid computer mind, and even Superman's super-fast yet emotional mind, couldn't...  therefore Lex came up with so many more advanced inventions than either of the other two did.

[Osgood Peabody]

I may be able to shed some light on this.   Brainiac put himself into suspended animation at the end of his first meeting with Superman in Action #242.  Brainiac finally woke up from his long nap in, of all places, Lois Lane.  

In this tale, entitled "Lana Lang, Superwoman" (LL # 17, May 1960 - art by Swan & Kaye), Superman recounts for the benefit of Lois and Lana his first encounter with the arch-villain and says "When my strength returned, I restored all the cities Brainiac had reduced to their normal size and returned them to their native worlds.  I kept the bottle containing Kandor in my Fortress, because there was no world of Krypton left for its people to return to..."

Then Lois asks, "But if Brainiac went into suspended animation for centuries, how could he have returned so soon again to menace Earth?"  Superman responds, "I'll explain that now..."

Only ... he doesn't!  He goes on to tell how he outwitted Brainiac in this return engagement, but never spills the beans on how exactly he was revived.  Of course, a later Superman tale would reveal that Brainiac was not even human, and wouldn't need suspended animation to begin with, so perhaps it's a moot point.