As long as Brainiac is some form of artificial life, intelligent, and obsessed with knowledge and is amoral in the pursuit of it, that's fine by me. Your idea shows that you at least know who Brainiac
is. You spent some space giving thought to Brainiac's motivation and that's more than I can say for many writers these days. The fact he was once human gives a degree of irony to Brainiac's contempt for organic intellects. And you have created a framework to use that neat mecha-Brainiac structure seen in the 1980s, as well as the stuff Brainiac got in the Animated Series.
Brainiac was my favorite villain, and part of the reason I never liked LOIS & CLARK is because he never showed up. (That, and the fact they used Byrne's apocryphal, clueless, fraudulent variation, and
for the love of God, Sherman Helmsley as the Toyman! But I digress.)
Being a fan of "classic" Superman, I'd love to see Brainiac shrink cities - so much mileage was gotten out of "The Greatest Crime in the Universe," the Shrinking and theft of Kandor. If you have him use his distinctive weapon of choice - the Shrink Ray, and that neat skull head ship, I'm sure it'll work out.
Although I don't buy the business about robot bodies tough enough to stand up to Superman. The Brainiac on the show could stand up to *animated* Superman, who is a gigantic wuss, who is knocked flat on his cape by a manhole cover booby charged with an electrical current. But that doesn't mean you are denied interesting fight scenes. If Brainiac can download himself into several robots at a time, he can overwhelm Superman by force of numbers.
As for the business about Stan Lee comparing comics to modern mythology...well, let's just say Stan Lee only compared HIS comics to modern mythology, if you get my drift. That guy was a genius at inventive selling. "Watch OUT, Cats and KITTENS! This is surely the supremest sizzlin' saga since Shakespeare!" It was so over the top and obviously not serious that it got a lot of attention. Hey, if you're as great as Shakespeare, mythology's like a step up from that, right?
Yes, it is true that superheroes and mythology have a lot in common, as your comparison below indicates (though my memory of Greek Myth fails me - which one of the Argonauts again could travel through time and melt things by looking at them?
). But the fact that superheroes and mythology are similar do not make them identical. For one thing, superheroes have something that mythological characters do not: they operate according to an idealistic dedication to the greater good. While the figures in myth are charismatic and powerful, they fight for tribal interests and family interests and personal interests and sometimes even selfish and antisocial interests. No mythical character has anything even similar to "the Neverending Battle."
The comparison to gods forgets the fact that gods and sometimes heroes are not three-dimensional personalities: they personify abstract qualities, or alternatively, have personalities that can be summarized in one word, like "wise" or "warlike." Whereas superhero characters *should* have rounded personalities, the more developed, the better.
And the fact that superheroes and myths have things in common does not mean that their comparisons are any less pretentious and shallow. Here's a hint, Grant Morrison: if you name a character after Prometheus to "sound smart,"
make sure you know who Prometheus actually IS. Though I wouldn't say that FOURTH WORLD characters were superheroes, any more than I would describe the characters in Roger Zelazny's LORD OF LIGHT that way.
Though the way various comics companies stick to themselves and never interchange does suggest similarities to various mythological cosmos, doesn't it?
Here's who I'd compare them to:
DC Comics = Egyptian Myth. Grandiose. Powerful. Gigantic. Nobody built or thought bigger than the Egyptians. And they were the first, after all. Egyptian myth is filled with chants from the book of the dead and elsewhere, said at the necessary moments in a clockwork cosmos. And has DC ever given us the greatest, most poetic "ritual chants" ever: the GL oath, Superman's "faster than a speeding bullet," or "the Neverending Battle" "criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot" - phrases that are commonly envoked every day. At the same time, the gods of Egyptian myth were mighty and aroused curiosity, but were unknowable and mysterious, with no clear motivation or human personality. Which comes very close to the DC Heroes, who were mostly written in an era when characterization was less important than plot (and oh, what brilliant plots were created). A friend of mine once argued that the first DC Hero to actually have a personality was Karate Kid in LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES.
Marvel Comics = African Myth. Well, let's see: the greatest heroes are wiseacres and tricksters who achieve not by valor or bravery but by the deliberate reversals of the customs that we're used to. None of them are an Achilles-like paragon of an abstract idea of manliness: there's always something wrong with them; either they're six inches tall while their brothers are giants, or they are a great ironworker, but are lame, or are a great hunter and loving father, but are terribly ugly. And lest we forget, the greatest hero in African myth is a Spider... :wink:
Image Comics = A dreary, cold, twilight world of perpetual conflict where in the end, evil triumphs and the only force that really matters is how many people you take with you and how much blood you shed. Remind anybody else of Norse myth?
Charleton Comics = Greek Myth. They say that philosophy destroyed the Greek Gods, because Greek thought on the ordered nature of the universe eliminated the need for gods to run everything, creating doubt and atheism. In a related vein, Steve Ditko's "philosophy," or raving "Randroid" pro-free market rah-rahs, disrupted much of the enjoyment of his Charleton Comics for readers that aren't interested in politics with their funnybooks.
America's Best Comics = Hebrew Myth/Judaism. We only worship one God. By astonishing coincidence, so does ABC: Alan Moore. And there are 5 comics in the ABC line, just like the 5 books of the Torah!
