Friday, May 20, 2016

A Month of... Batman's Got a Gun, Day 20: Robot Death Call!



Cover of World's Finest Comics #164 (February 1967), pencils by Curt Swan, inks by George Klein, letters by Ira Schnapp

Look out, Genia, Mistress of Malice, in a story that is not called "The Broken Code" but is instead titled "Brainiac's Super Brain-Child!" Well, I've gotta say, that second one has a little more je ne sais quoi to it, doncha think? In any case...look out, Genia! Superman and Batman are going to shoot you with hair dryers!


Panels from "Brainiac's Super Brain-Child" in World's Finest Comics #164 (February 1967), script by Leo Dorfman, pencils by Curt Swan, inks by George Klein

Aw, cool yer jets, Greyson. It's the Silver Age, where nobody ever dies at the hands of a superhero — not even Hitler in the confusingly titled "Aquaman Kills Hitler" in Adventure Comics Annual #2. Instead, she's been banished by whoever is the quicker draw to the exile of their choice! In the original version of this series Wonder Woman also guest-starred and fired a gun that shot Genia into a very liberal all-girl's school on Paradise Island, but they cut that bit out because they were afraid it would upset readers of a nervous disposition... But not me, I can tell ya.


No, instead Superman sends her, via illegal torrenting, into the bottle city of Kandor, where everyone is always incredibly earnest and also dress like Legion of Superheroes cosplayers. Here they will "re-program" her criminal tendencies by drilling into the skull just below the temple, scooping out...oh wait, I forgot she's actually a robot. Yeah, they're actually re-programming her. Which will make her a valuable ally of Superman the next time she appears!

Genia, of course, never appears again.

2 comments:

Tom said...

Genia's programming got cancelled and they ran My Mother The Car reruns instead.

Blam said...

"How will you do it?"
"Well, I don't know if this will make sense to you laypeople, but we ask Curt Swan to draw her with normal eyebrows instead of arched ones."