Bizarro

Few characters capture the gloriously strange heart of Silver Age DC quite like Bizarro, who shambled onto the scene in Superman #136 in 1960, conjured by writer Robert Bernstein and artist Wayne Boring. An imperfect, mirror-world reflection of the Man of Steel himself, Bizarro has haunted the pages of Superman, Action Comics, and Batman for an astonishing 66 years — a testament to how deeply this backwards, broken figure has lodged himself in comics mythology. With three key collector issues to his name and a rogues' gallery of co-stars that reads like a DC hall of fame — Superman, Batman, Lex Luthor, Green Lantern, Clark Kent — Bizarro clearly belongs at the center of the DC universe even as he exists magnificently at its fringes. If you love the Silver Age's willingness to get genuinely weird and wonderfully ambitious, this is a character whose nearly century of catalog appearances demands your attention.