Bizarro

This article is about Bizarro, the comic book character. There is a separate article about Bizarro, the comic strip by Dan Piraro.

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Bizarro is a fictional character who was Superman's not-so-identical double. The original Bizarro was created by an unsuccessful attempt to duplicate Superboy, in a story written by Otto Binder.

The later Bizarro was created by Lex Luthor, who used the "duplicating ray" on the adult Superman and hoped to use the duplicate to attack Superman. However, this Bizarro did not cooperate and instead tried to emulate Superman. Unfortunately, his attempts to match the original's heroics were clumsy and destructive, and he kidnapped Lois. Superman resolved this situation by creating a Bizarro Lois for Bizarro. Feeling rejected by the people of Earth, he moved to the world of Htrae, which had ancient advanced technology which was used to populate the planet with other Bizarros created in the same manner. Almost everyone on Htrae looked like an ugly Superman (and possessed super powers) or an ugly Lois Lane. When Superman visited he was arrested for being normal, but he plea bargained a proposal to change the shape of the world into a cube for his release.

The original Bizarro wore a button that said "Bizarro No. 1." His only weakness was blue Kryptonite, created by using the same machine to duplicate green Kryptonite.

In the Bizarro world, society is ruled by the Bizarro Code, which states that it is a crime to do anything well or to make anything perfect or beautiful. Predictably camp lines abound. In one episode, for example, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling "Bizarro bonds. Guaranteed to lose money for you". Later in this episode, the mayor appoints Bizarro #1 to investigate a crime, "Because you are stupider than the entire Bizarro police force put together". This is intended and taken as a great compliment.

Later stories introduced Bizarro versions of Superman's supporting cast, including Bizarro Perry White and Bizarro Jimmy Olsen, created by using the duplicator ray on characters other than Superman and Lois Lane. There was even a Bizarro Justice League and Legion of Super-Heroes.

The Bizarro World stories were certainly not to everyone's taste. Some see them as simply silly and irritating. Others see the concept as foreshadowing the enormously successful surrealistic school of farce that includes Monty Python. Just the fact that male Bizarro babies possess super powers, while little girls do not, dates the concept severely (though this is ostensibly because male Bizarros are copies of Superman, who has super powers, and female ones copies of Lois Lane, a normal human). There are also hints of making fun of the handicapped.

Bizarro World was erased from the history of the DC Universe during the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Since then two Bizarros have been created by Lex Luthor. However, in the post-Crisis version, the imperfections in the duplicates are eventually fatal. A Bizarro Superboy was created by Project Cadmus, when they used the same process in their attempts to clone Superman. The current version of Bizarro has a very different origin, having been created by the Joker by the use of the powers of Mr. Mxyzptlk. Recently, Jeph Loeb has introduced a Bizarro Batman, "Batzarro", into the comic book universe in Superman/Batman.

Similar processes to Luthor's were used by Two-Face to create a Bizarro Supergirl and Brainiac 5.1 to create a post-Crisis Bizarro Legion. There was also a miniseries, A. Bizarro, about a Bizarro who was the duplicate of an ordinary man who happened to look like Superman. Most recently, DC produced an anthology, Bizarro Comics, featuring offbeat and irreverent stories by alternative comics writers and artists featuring various DC Universe characters. The anthology's chief conceit was that all of its contents (aside from the framing sequence) were created by Bizarro himself. A second, conceptually similar, anthology entitled Bizarro World has been released.

Bizarro has also appeared in the Superboy TV series and the Superfriends. In the later series, Bizarro was depicted as an outright villain, although the last season had a more faithful depiction. The character's appearances in Superman and Justice League animated series also were faithful to the comics.

'Bizarro ___' eventually became a popular term for a version of a character who, while not always evil, is unsettling or creepy to those who know the original version. The cartoon Sealab 2021 (which airs on Cartoon_Network) has satirized the Bizarro concept (episode #17 (http://pod-six.net/oldsite/sealab.html#17)). Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic used the Bizarro concept (although using a different name) as an important plot element; it was a comic book read by the characters in the story arc A Game of You. The television series Seinfeld, with its many Superman references and in-jokes, devoted an episode to the Bizarro concept, with Elaine dating a mirror opposite of Jerry who had his own Bizarro versions of friends George, Kramer, and Newman. Sometimes, when the WWE RAW show comes from Canada, Jerry "The King" Lawler refers to the country as "bizarro world", where the locals root for Edge and Christian because they hail from Canada.

External links

• Don Markstein's Toonpedia: Bizarro (http://www.toonopedia.com/bizarro1.htm)
• Supermanica: Bizarro (http://supermanica.info/wiki/index.php/Bizarro) Supermanica entry on the Pre-Crisis Bizarro