by Earth Elemental 99
Not long before the Crisis on Infinite Earths, Superman’s old foe Brainiac became much more than an android with an inflated ego. He had become an advanced mechanical being with an expanded consciousness — a robot with a data-based computer intelligence. (*)
[(*) Editor’s note: See “Rebirth,” Action Comics #544 (June, 1983).]
Around the same time, the Swamp Thing slowly evolved into a godlike, primordial, supernatural being when Jason Woodrue, the Floronic Man, seemingly proved that Swamp Thing had never truly been human in the first place. (*) Thus, he needed a human mate — Abby Cable — and humane moral values and friendships in order to sustain his sense of humanity. (*)
[(*) Editor’s note: See “The Anatomy Lesson,” Saga of the Swamp Thing #21 (February, 1984) and “Rite of Spring,” Saga of the Swamp Thing #34 (March, 1985).]
But in the fall of 1985, a few months after the Crisis, the Swamp Thing was betrayed by the U.S. government when the highly classified secret agency known as DDI struck him with a beam invented by Lex Luthor. Since the beam disrupted his biomagnetic connection to the earth, making it impossible for him to remain, the Swamp Thing found himself fleeing into the safety of outer space. (*)
[(*) Editor’s note: See “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Swamp Thing v2 #53 (October, 1986).]
Over the course of several months, the space-lost Swamp Thing confronted loneliness on a world with blue vegetation, met the Earthman Adam Strange and two Thanagarians on the planet Rann, helped usher in the next generation of a strange life-form in outer space, and he had met Green Lantern Medphyll on the planet J-586. And soon he would encounter the New God called Metron at the Source, who would help send the Swamp Thing back to Earth in a Boom Tube.
But little did Swamp Thing know that, before his .n to Earth could happen, he would cross paths with that of the cold and calculating machine called Brainiac.