Masked Manhunters Meet Mighty Mites' Miniature Metropolises

The Dynamic Duo had numerous adventures with the Metropolis Marvel, Superman, and his pal Jimmy Olsen... in both of their cities and across Earth-One... even in space! However, the first time that Superman brought Batman and Robin to his homeworld's last city, Kandor... was a memorable occasion.

During a case together, a bullet ricochetted off the chest of Superman and into his best friend. After an emergency surgery extracting the bullet, Batman physically recovered from his ordeal yet psychologically was traumatized. Thinking he wasn't a worthy partner to Superman, the Dark Knight announced his retirement. In order to help Batman regain his senses and his courage, Superman hatched a scheme with his friend, the Kandorian administrator Than-Ar. 

While bringing Batman, Robin and Jimmy to his Fortress of Solitude on a false pretense, Superman asked for their assistance in tracking down a menace that had reappeared, the Metalloids. An ancient science that transformed men into invulnerable metal while its human host wears a force-radiating instrument, it now terrorized the Kryptonian city which had been shrunken by the alien android known as Brainiac.

After encountering an exceptionally violent Metalloid which threatened the now-powerless* Superman's life, Batman learned this was a ploy by his friend to help him regain his confidence since they were both normal within Kandor's controlled bottle environment.  Although a brief rift formed between the two heroes, they batched up their differences when they combined their efforts to bring the Metalloid Kandorians and their leader, Than-Ar's brother, Jhan-Ar, to justice. 

There was no surviving city of Kandor on Earth-Two, aside from the virtual version contained within the artificial conscience of Kara "Power Girl" Zor-L's Symbioship which brought her to her new home world. However, just as there were a generation of Kandorians born and raised all their lives in a shrunken state within the Bottled City of Kandor a universe away, so to there was a generation of humans likewise miniaturized within the small city known as Midget Town. 

While a chemical formula was used by Darrell Dane to transform into the 6 foot tall Doll Man, in the early 1940s the malevolent mastermind known as Brain Wave developed a purple ray which accomplished this feat. A variation of these treatments was later used on a village by another criminal scientist named Doctor Vargo. Doll Man became aware of these tiny folk, causing them to turn on their creator Thinking this town was destroyed, Dane never revisited it, as it developed into the more civilized Midget Town within a few short years.

When full-sized criminals led by Moose Miller raid the defenseless town, one of its inhabitants named Johnny Wister sought to bring those crooks to justice. This led him into a meeting with Batman and Robin, who along with Johnny and other residents of Midget Town (including Mayor Hawkins and his daughter Carol) accompany the Dynamic Duo back to Gotham City. Together, they track down the hoodlums and capture them.

Uncanny Uncles of Superman: Zor-El and Zor-L

An excellent case study in how near exact counterparts can diverge in key areas can be seen in the example of the younger uncles of the Supermen, Zor-El and Zor-L While each was a brilliant scientist, the areas of science they pursued resulted in radically different results when raising their respective daughters following the destruction of their home worlds.

Both men possessed mechanical aptitude to replicate the rocketship engineering of their older brothers Jor-El and Jor-L, resulting in their designing interstellar vessels that would safely sent their offspring to Earths One and Two following the devastation of their cities.

Zor-El specialized in the physical sciences, allowing him to develop a protective dome, which ended up perserving Argo City alive when it was jettisoned from Krypton-One as that world exploded. At that time, the city of Kandor had been shrunk and placed in a bottle, held captive on the space craft of the android Braniac. However, the Kandor of Zor-L's world remained on Krypton-Two, and as such he and his family moved from his world's Argo City to Kandor prior to the world's end.

Zor-L specialized in the sciences of the mind, allowing him to develop an elaborate artificial reality based upon the inhabitants of Kandor contained within the self-sentinent rocket known as the Symbioship. He also was a master at slowing the aging process, which he equipped the ship to do for Kara. On this vessel, Zor-L sent his daughter to Earth-Two... just as Zor-El would also send his daughter to Earth-One when the Argo City eventually succumbed to Kryptonite radiation poisoning. 

Zor-El and Allura stayed alive by projecting themselves into the Survival Zones where they were phantoms watching over their daughter Kara aka Supergirl during her teen years on Earth-One. Zor-L and Allura continued the raised their daughter Kara aka Power Girl as artificial non-corporeal being in an interstellar dreamworld.

Eventually, both Karas were confronted with their parents... Supergirl found hers as phantoms that became real... Power Girl learned hers that seemed real were actual phantoms! And while Supergirl's parents moved to Kandor, and later to the planet Rokyn to be with fellow Kryptonians... the remnants of Power Girl's parents along with their Kandor seemed to cease to exist. However, it wasn't just Power Girl who was traumatized by the mental illusion of parents... Supergirl likewise was once tormented by her arch-enemy Lesla Lar into seeing her birth parents seemingly appear then disappear. Nevertheless, the Girls of Steel persevered and withstood any mental torment, living up to their potential as superheroines thanks to the training of their mothers Allura, and their fathers Zor-El and Zor-L!

Rokyn: The Last Homeworld of Krypton in Two Universes

The different cities of Kandor are famous for their long and rich histories. On Krypton,-Two, while the physical metropolis and most of its residents were destroyed, a digital replica of both the people and the structures which composed it remained within the databank containment vessel of Zor-L's Symbioship. This ship preserved alive his and his wife Allura's daughter, Kara, through her decades long journey across the stars. Upon arriving on Earth-Two, where she finally met her cousin Kal-L, the woman who became known as Power Girl had already experienced life within the Kryptonian society. From this experience, she joined the Justice Society alongside Kal aka Superman, and this helped pull her away from the mental grasp of Symbioship which she destroyed. Effectively, that Kandor was no more.

About a year later, on Earth-One, Superman and Supergirl likewise destroyed the containment vessel that housed a minaturized version of another Kandor. This bottled city was originally a normal metropolis on Krypton-One, until the evil android known as Brainiac used his shrinking ray to steal Kandor from its homeworld... just as he had done with scores of other cities across the universe. When Brainiac later encountered Kal-El, aka Superman, his loss meant that all of Brainiac's hijacked cities could be restored to their original worlds. However, Kandor remained on Earth-One within Kal-El's Fortress of Solitude, as he was unable to restore it to normal size and it no longer had a homeworld to call its own.

Throughout the three decades of its diminutive existence, Kandor-One continued to prosper to the best of its ability.  It would grow to between seven to ten million inhabitants, with many having been born during its captive state. It also had resident superheroes, in Van-Zee and Ak-Var as Nightwing and Flamebird... who were inspired by the exploits of Kal-El and Jimmy Olsen when they created these alter egos while briefly living in Kandor. Kara's parents Zor-El and Allura, who had survived the destruction of Argo City in a Survival Zone, moved there.

As for the electronic copy of Kandor-Two, it likewise had replicas of the existing Kandorians alive during its Krypton's destruction, including Zor-L and Allura, who raised their Kara into her teens. And Kara formed relationships with the "offspring" of these faux-adults, each given synthetic life by Zor-L's elaboriate dreamworld program. However, given the constraints of this artificial reality, Power Girl would initially struggle to form stable relationships with actual humans who displayed emotions she had not grown accustomed to within the Symbioship. This meant that her cousin Kal-L and his wife Lois became surrogate parents to her, assisting in this transition.

Years after, Kal-El and Kara Zor-El found the means to restore Kandor along with its people to its original size. The inhabitants of the city choice a world they named Rokyn. However, the device Superman used caused half of Kandor's buildings to disintegrate. Nevertheless, the Kandorians were able to rebuild their city on this new world, one they picked as it would distnace them from the El cousins. The residents of Rokyn wanted to no longer be dependent on the super-cousins, and so choose a world that shifts due to its cosmic axis between Earth-One's universe and that of another. But which universe?

On previous occasions, Kal-El and Kal-L, along with their teammates in the Justice League and Justice Society, discovered that the universes of Earths One and Two are intrinsically tied together. And during the Crisis on Infinite Earths, only five universes remained... these two along with Earths Four, X and S.  Superman brought his cousin Supergirl’s lifeless body back to Rokyn during this period of time, following her fatal encounter with the evil Anti-Monitor. So this trans-universal world still existed when only five positive matter universes remained.

Thus, the likelihood as to which other universe Rokyn, and its millions of surviving Kandorians, reside at least part of the time is in the universe of Earth-Two. Poetic then, that the flesh and blood versions of the Kandorians... whose digital counterparts were lost with the Symbioship's destruction... now existed in both dimensional planes of existence. Perhaps one day, Power Girl and Kal-L might journey to Rokyn and experience life in Kandor, as had Supergirl and Kal-El.

Last Daughters of Krypton and Brainy Boys

Well established is the romance between Supergirl and Brainiac Five, the surrogate descendant of her and Superman's adversary, the android Brainiac. On occasion, she and the original actually battled, such as on the occasion when her cousin Superman finally enlarged the last surviving city, Kandor. While doing this, Supergirl used Brainiac's shrinking ray against him, seemingly eliminating him. 

Power Girl, like her doppleganger, had dealings with the fifth Brainiac's own cosmic twin, which didn't go so well. And later on, she would also have an encounter with Ultra-Humanite... his world's version of Brainiac...when she joined Infinity, Inc.

However, a persistent mystery involved what Power Girl's connection with another "brain baddie" was... namely Brain Wave. This villain, born Henry King, had been a psychologist with the mutant mental ability to project realistic images. From this, he built devices that pulled his victims into virtual dreamworlds, as he had with the Justice Society both when he first battled them, and then later with his "Dreams of Madness" as Dr. Forest Malone. 

This occured during the early to mid 1940s, during the time period when Power Girl as Kara Zor-L was travelling through interstellar space from her doomed homeworld to the same destination her cousin Kal-L had already reached of Earth-Two. And during the same time period that a young Henry King discovered his dreaming abilities, a scientist on Krypton-Two named Zor-L had himself invented dreaming technology for his daughter's Symbioship.

It would seem that during the decades of floating through the void, in a virtual Kandor modeled after the city she and her parents had resided in before the planet's destruction, her mind at some point connected with that of Henry. While he was unaware of this, she was aware of his existence, so much so that decades later when appearing for the first time as Power Girl on her adopted world, she was already aware of Brain Wave's plans.

Perhaps Henry was a virtual resident of Kara's Dreamworld Kandor, without even being aware of it. This city was so real, that an Earth-One Kal-El... Superman... could relate to Power Girl the experience of living amongst fellow Kandorians, knowing she had done so as well.

Marvelous Miniature Mighty Men & Maidens

In 1943 on the world known as Earth-S, the young hero known as Captain Marvel Junior met a tribe of miniature men and maidens which is labeled the Trolls. They were the same hidden dwarfs as were those encountered previously by Captain Marvel shortly before this. They were their universes version of the Kandorians of Earth-One, who were originally Kryptonians of Krypton-One who were shrunk by the android Brainiac and kept in a jar until located by Superman. On Earth-Two, the mini Kandorians were actually virtual reality copies of the now long dead Kryptonians

Just as the Marvel Family had connections to their Trolls, so had the Superman Family with Kandorians. After securing them for his foe, Superman brought them to his Fortress of Solitude where several of these Kandorians aided him later as the Superman Emergency Squad. 

Similar miniaturized humans were found in Midget Town. While a chemical formula was used by Darrell Dane to transform into the 6 foot tall Doll Man in 1939, in the early 1940s the malevolent mastermind known as Brain Wave developed a purple ray which accomplished this feat. A variation of these treatments was later used on a village by another criminal scientist named Doctor Vargo. Doll Man became aware of these tiny folk, causing them to turn on their creator Thinking this town was destroyed, Dane never revisited it, as it developed into the more civilized Midget Town within a few short years

Mirror Metropolises of the Multiverse: Kandor-One and Metropolis-Two

When the Bottled City of Kandor was enlarged, it was decided that the planet where the sole surviving city of Krypton-One would reside on was the planet of Rokyn, However, Rokyn was a world on an interdimensional fault line, which shunted it into another dimension where the Kandorians, including  Supergirl's parents Zor-El and Alura, would live. This second Krypton would endure for over a thousand years, as its inhabitants would encounter the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Not to long after Raokyn's founding, during the Crisis in one timeline, Power Girl's adopted parents Kal-L and Lois Lane lived in a dimension accessed by Earth-Three's Alex Luthor, wherein Superman recreated the Metropolis of Earth-Two in perfect detail. While the actual city still endured on the Earth-Two that survived the Crisis event, this duplicate was in an adjacent dimension similar to Raokyn's, although without any additional residents of the actual Metropolis.

In place of actual survivors and descendants as those of Krypton-One that existed due to the survival of Kandor-One... a virtual Kandor-Two, wherein simulated copies of these long dead Kryptonians and their fabricated descendants lived, within the Symbioship. This ship was developed by scientist Zor-L and his wife Allura so that their daughter Kara Zor-L would be raised within her civilization prior to her arrival on Earth-Two wherein she became Power Girl.

Kara Zor-L would, like Kara Zor-El, return to her miniature Kandor later although it wasn't the home she now found on her new world... Earth.

Miniscule Mimics: Lookalikes and Socialites

In the Bottle City of Kandor which survives the death of its himseworld Krypton-One, thanks to the greedy gimmickry of the antagonistic android known as Brainiac, a curious discovery was made by the city's savior, Superman.

He learned that several occupants of Kandor were lookalikes of his friends on Earth-One, and in gratitude for having saved their civilization from their computerized captor, the Kandorian Lookalike Squad was formed to assist their fellow Kryptonian in various adventures.

Amongst the lookalike socialites were Vol-Don, Sylvia Van-Zee, Zol-Lar, Ti-Arra and Ar-Rone who were doubles for Clark Kent, Lois Lane,  Jimmy Olsen, Lana Lang and Perry White.

Something similar undoubtedly occurred within the Symbioship virtual reality version of Kandor that mentally bonded with Kara Zor-L during her decades long journey through space. In the real world, two actual look-a-likes of her cousin were allies of his on the All-Star Squadron, of which Superman was a member. These were Midnight aka Dave Clark, who like Vol-Don was a reporter reminiscent of Clark Kent, and Darrel Dane aka Doll-Man. Like Don-El, Kal-El and Kara Zor-El's first cousin, Doll Man not only appeared physically but also dressed similar to Kal in his Superman identity.. with similar powers to match!

When Kara Zor-L's vessel landed on Earth-Two, she was raised by her cousin Kal-L/Clark Kent and his wife Lois, wherein she would have met their coworkers Jimmy Olsen, Lana Lang and Perry White. Eventually, she became Power Girl, just as Kara Zor-El became Supergirl.

Any replicas of real people may have ceased to exist when the bond was broken between the two, although the nature of the Symbioship’s dreamworld is unknown and may still exist with its inhabitants within the Multiverse, as does Sandman’s dream dimension.

Robotic Teacher of Krypton - With Bad Attitudes!

Consider two sets of orphans, separated from their advanced civilizations when their native parallel planets were destroyed. Now possessing the greatest set of powers in their respective universes, how would they be trained to control these awesome instruments that were their now superhuman bodies? 

Send in the robots! And that is what Jor-El did with the Super-Teacher. And Zor-L did something similar with his Symboship which transported his daughter from his doomed world. Both were devised with the benevolent attempt to inculcate instruction into the surviving cousins of counterpart planets Krypton.

Each possessed the ability of creating virtual realities. Symbioship itself could also replicate itself into four different vessels, with one occupying a re assimilated Kara Zor-L outside Gotham City while her cousin Kal-L was occupied with three copies hovering over his own city of Metroplis simaltaneously. These four vessels of Krypton-Two mirrored four similar vessels originating from Krypton-One, all of which contained survivors of the doomed Krypton.

Those four corresponding vessels that had arrived on Earth-One was: 1.) the vessel that carried Kara Zor-El from planetary fragment Argo City after it has been decimated by Kryptonite meteors, 2.) the Super-Teacher unit which itself was a space vessel, 3,) the experimental star craft that brought Krypto to his master Superboy (that Super-Dog’s doppelgänger Thor the Thunder Dog was constructed by alien Manhunters), 4.) the spacecraft Brainiac used to transport the captured city of Kandor shrunken in a bottle.

Zor-L's robotic intelligence needed a humanoid host to pilot it so that it became more bipedal and less vessel, which it assimilated using the body of reporter Andrew Vinson, while the Super-Teacher was fully automated on its very own in its three encounters with the Children of Steel.

Unfortunately, neither possessed the "human touch" when it came to tactful training. This caused some troubles for a young Superboy and, later, Supergirl, when Super-Teacher challenged both kids and left both of them with hard feelings towards the automaton.

For Kara Zor-L aka Power Girl, she was fed up with the exhaustive training of the Symbioship and its attempt to reclaim her by using the human body of her soon-to-be friend Andrew Winston, so she ended up destroying it.

However, Power Girl can thank her ship's inner mechanism for providing her with a virtual reality template of Kandor which included its residents.

Occupants of this synthetic Kandor included her parents and others who lived when Krypton-Two still existed, long after the real city they were based on had expired. It could not take the place of the real thing, which her counterpart Kara Zor-El had when she found the real Kandor-One trapped in a bottle, but was a reliable simulation of it.

However, just as shrunken Kandor of Earth-One survived into the modern day, so too had the cybernetic Kandor on Earth-Two. Both cities' inhabitants resided in other dimensions of Rokyn and Dream Dimension respectively. Later, Rokyn shifted into "another universe", and the closest universe to Earth-One is Earth-Two. So from time to time, other Kryptonians besides Kal-L and Kara Zor-L resided in their realm during the 1980s and beyond!

Not to mention her parents Zor-El and Allura, who were trapped in the Survivor Zone for several years. But then, that's another story.