both versions are cool in their own ways. it all depends on who and what you want brainiac to be. to me, milton fine being corrupted into a cyborg against his will was compelling-- he *knew* what was happening and what brainiac (the stage name adopted by his coluan assailant) wanted, but he was powerless to stop it.

the all-robot version was cool too, especially due to the skullship and the frankly evil look of the robotic form. not even ultron looks this villainous.

brainiac has been used very heavily lately, though, and he's probably one character i'd take offstage for awhile. considering he was the key part of the whole new krypton storyline, and was involved in morrison's first action comics arc, i'd say he's due for some rest.

I'm not a big fan of the "Dr. NastyGuy" school of villain names!

While Brainiac was originally just a super-smart alien with a pet monkey, the later iteration with the diodes made for a memorable and effective Silver Age villian. One of my favorites, in fact.

The Alex Ross/ Jim Krueger mini-series "Justice" made effective use of this creepy "fusion" of flesh and science by showing how the skin "healed" around those implants. Unfortunately, Ross modeled his Brainiac to look just like Grant Morrison, and I therefore cannot read any scene with the character in there without being thrown violently out of the story.

My favorite Brainiac, however, is the Ed Hannigan version. That is a beautifully designed villain. It's similar in some respects to his Silvermane for Marvel, but nicely "alienated," to make the shapes more otherworldly and menacing. Plus, you can't go wrong with a skull-headed villain... Well... okay, Albert Pyun can, but not all of us are as committed to unbridled atrocity as Pyun...

Plus, his new raison d'etre in the series was that he'd been captured, dismantled down to a molecular level, and reassembled by a bizarre machine world so complex his twelth-level intellect could only begin to grasp its origins and nature... In this sense, he found "religion" and became more mechanized, calculating, and chilling.

The Silver Age Brainiac was villainous, but the Hannigan version was on a mission... (Plus, something new had to be done since Cary Bates, I believe, had reformed the Silver Age version by having Superman do some super-fast reprogramming to his circuitry. Having a helpful Brainiac flying in on his saucer to render needed assistance was really kind of a bummer phase in the character's career. The Super Powers version was an effective and necessary re-villainization of the character, and one that was sadly too short-lived.

Still, it lasted lost enough that we did get to see Kirby draw him! Woohoo!