Intended to be a one-shot foe of Superman, he survived to become a household word.
Emblematic of superheroes’ tendency to fight mirror images, Bizarro was introduced in 1958 in — appropriately enough — twin forms.
In Bizarro — The Super-Creature of Steel (Superboy 68, Oct. 1958), writer Otto Binder and artist George Papp showed us how Prof. Dalton created a doomed, imperfect duplicate of Superboy.
“Bizarro was a pathetic, quasi-living creature who had come into being when a device supposedly capable of duplicating physical objects was used on Superboy,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “It proved not quite up to the task, and the result was a brain that functioned at a child’s level behind a face that looked like crumpled-up paper. Bizarro (who took his name from hearing the word ‘bizarre’ applied to him) had all of Superboy’s wonderful powers, but no real spark of life — a fact he was just bright enough to understand. He returned to oblivion on the final page, and was no doubt happier that way.”
Meanwhile, in the Superman newspaper strip, another tragic version of Bizarro was introduced by writer Alvin Schwartz and artist Curt Swan. This one was an imperfect duplicate of the adult Superman, distinguished from the comic book version by the fact that he sported a “B” on his chest in place of the “S” insignia.
Bizarro was not an evil version of Superman, but a confused one — a powerful figure deprived of Superman’s intellectual and moral clarity.
In the Superboy story, like the Frankenstein monster, the ugly, innocent creature is hurt by the fact that Smallville residents fear and shun him. The tale has that throb of pathos achieved in some of the best Superman stories from the 1950s and 1960s.
Mort Weisinger-edited titles often play on children’s fears of rejection, isolation, and abandonment. Here, Bizarro is flatly rejected even by the woman he regards as his mother, the ordinarily kindly Ma Kent.
“Funny books,” indeed.
About Author
