BIZARRO!

What started out as an attempt by Lex Luthor to create a duplicate of the Man of Steel turned into the ghastly monster Bizarro. When Superman first arrived in Metropolis, Luthor commissioned his staff, led by Dr Teng, to obtain as much information as they could about him. Sensors hidden in Luthor's office were able to scan Superman's cellular and molecular structure during one of his early visits there.

What Dr Teng and Luthor had not accounted for, because there had been no reason to suspect it, was that Superman was not human. The bio-matrix Teng used to create his clone of Superman was equipped to duplicate any known form of life, but Superman's alien heritage proved too much for the machine, and thus was born Bizarro, an imperfect duplicate of the Man of Steel, posessing all his memories and powers but none of his intelligence.

Bizarro escaped from Luthor's laboratory. Believing himself to be the real Superman, he went to Metropolis. On his way, he rescued Lois Lane's sister Lucy, temporarily blinded from chemical exposure, from a suicide attempt. Lucy noticed that "Superman" seemed to be coated in dust as he flew away.

Once downtown, Bizarro encountered Superman, who tried to get the imperfect duplicate away from innocent people. During their battle Superman also noticed the dust which Lucy had felt. He examined it and discovered that, although the cells had the ability to mimic living cells, they were not alive.

This was the first battle Superman had engaged in with someone even remotely as strong as he. Superman had always been careful engaging in battle with humans, for fear of killing them; but since Bizarro was not human Superman could hit him with everything he had.

The two Men of Steel charged headlong towards each other and collided in midair near Lois Lane's apartment balcony. Bizarro shattered into a billion fragments from the impact, and the dust wafted everywhere, including all over Lois and Lucy Lane, whose eyesight was remarkably restored by exposure to the chemical dust.

That was the end of Bizarro, or so it seemed.

Years later, when Lex Luthor realized that his cloned body was dying, he attempted to re-create his experiment, hoping that this clone of Superman might offer his own body's salvation. As before, his clone was an imperfect duplicate. This new Bizarro, however, was slightly more sophisticated than the last--it had the ability to speak, to reason, and--most horrifying of all--seemed to know that Man of Steel's secret identity! Convinced that it was the real Superman, Bizarro kidnapped Lois Lane and took her to its own twisted version of Metropolis.

Lois escaped Bizarro and helped Superman track it down. But as Superman and the scientists from Cadmus prepared to study the imperfect duplicate, representatives of Lexcorp arrived to claim Bizarro's body.

Superman and Lois followed Bizarro's captors to the Lexcorp tower, and arrived just as Luthor's scientists were preparing to operate, to try to find something in Bizarro's genetic makeup that would save Luthor's cloned body. In a final act of self-sacrifice, Bizarro destroyed the computers which held its DNA just before it died.

The next Bizarro to surface was chillingly more intelligent than the previous versions had been. This Bizarro was in fact a creation of ex-Cadmus geneticist (and all-around mad scientist) Dabney Donovan, who had created his imperfect Superman duplicate and had it break into the nursery in Lexcorp where Luthor's infant daughter Lena was resting and kidnap the baby girl. Superman tracked the girl to the Hypersector development in Metropolis, where he found his twisted replica had placed the girl in a makeshift spacecraft surrounded by dynamite! The monster's intent was perfectly clear--he was going to try to send Lena to another world as Kal-El had been sent, moments before Krypton's destruction!

Superman and Bizarro fought, and the Man of Steel was triumphant. As Donovan pressed a killswitch destroying his creation, Superman flew baby Lena to safety, returning her to her father.

When the Joker tricked Mr Mxyzptlk out of most of his powers, and recreated the universe in his own twisted image as Emperor Joker, one of his creations was a new version of Bizarro. No longer the mute animal like his predecessors, this Bizarro was a true opposite of the Man of Steel, right down to a backwards "S" shield on his chest, ice vision, and flame breath.

Although Mr Mxyzptlk claimed to have returned all of reality back to normal once Superman defeated Emperor Joker, he did leave a few things unaltered. This backwards-talking Bizarro was one of them, as Superman discovered to his surprise on the eve of Lex Luthor's Presidential victory. Although Superman told Bizarro to leave and never return (actually what he said was "Stay while you can't," but Bizarro didn't get the message...er, he did...), the backwards monster was captured by Ignition and pressed into service for a new master...General Zod!