Over his eight decade run, the Man of Steel has had a seemingly endless roster of baddies stirring up trouble in Metropolis. While you may know some of the hero’s more enduring villains, how much do you know about the first supervillain he faced?
Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Ultra-Humanite made his debut appearance in Action Comics #13 in June 1939. The character was designed to be the polar opposite of Superman. While the hero had superhuman strength, Ultra-Humanite was a criminal mastermind with a crippled body but a highly advanced intellect. The Ultra-Humanite’s past is shrouded in mystery, with the super-criminal himself unaware of his true name or appearance. He attributes his vast intellect and mental prowess to a variety of scientific experiments.
The fiendish mad scientist is paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. The comics describe the bald villain as the “head of a vast ring of evil enterprises” whose “fiery eyes burn with terrible hatred and sinister intelligence.” After acquiring the most agile brain on Earth, the Ultra-Humanite embarks on his ultimate plan of world domination. Ultra-Humanite was Superman’s only foe until he was replaced by a similar looking Lex Luthor towards the end of the Golden Age. With the introduction of Luthor, Ultra-Humanite was later killed off and thought to be gone forever.
The Ultra-Humanite was later reintroduced with his brain transferred into the body of 1940s starlet Delores Winters. Shortly thereafter, Ultra-Humanite reads about physicist Terry Curtis’ atomic weapon and seduces and kidnaps the scientist. Ultra-Humanite persuades the scientist to build him an atomic arsenal but is ultimately defeated by Superman. The Ultra-Humanite seemingly dies in Action Comics #21 and made no further comic book appearances for several decades. In the Silver Age, the character was reintroduced as the genius Gerald Shugel who was suffering from a degenerative disease. While working to cure himself, the African country stormed his facility and forced Shugel to transplant his entire brain into one of his test albino apes.
Ultra-Humanite remained a recurring villain of Superman, along with facing off against various incarnations of the Justice League of America, Justice Society of America and Infinity, Inc. Throughout his comic appearances, Ultra-Humanite has transferred his brain into a giant insect, a Tyrannosaurus rex, Justice Society member Johnny Thunder, and a glass dome. But his best-known and most frequently revisited form is that of a mutated albino gorilla. Outside of comics, the character has also starred in the animated series Justice League, Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Young Justice.
