Leah Mandel on Mike Kelley’s Kandors, in Poetry Foundation.
Superman happened upon the bottle city while on assignment for The Daily Planet. Disguised as bumbling, totally normal reporter Clark Kent, he spotted a spaceship, some ten thousand miles from Earth, on which the data-obsessed villain Brainiac was collecting cities to repopulate his own ruined planet. A long panel in Action Comics #242 from July 1958 shows London, Paris, Rome, and New York, all miniaturized, in a row of glass jars. “One after another, the world’s greatest cities become toy villages in bottles!” the accompanying block letters read. Brainiac examines his spoils with giant tweezers that rip through the George Washington Bridge. “Bah! Such primitive structures,” he gripes, holding the Eiffel Tower under a magnifying glass. Determined to stop Brainiac’s scheme, Superman returns to Metropolis and allows his city, with him in it, to be shrunk. Brainiac studies his new acquisition with glee. Tiny as he is, Superman retains his powers and buzzes like a bee out of the bottle. Fleeing Brainiac’s swatter, he hides in an open container—and as he plunks down, suddenly deprived of flight, past futuristic skyscrapers, Superman realizes he’s not alone after all. He’s in Kandor.
All of the cities on Brainiac’s ship are ultimately returned to normal size and put back where they belong—except Kandor. At the end of “The Super-Duel In Space,” Superman tucks the bottle city under his arm, takes it to the North Pole, and places it on a shelf in his Fortress of Solitude.
