Action Comics #280

A giant, green-skinned Brainiac — his multi-eyed cranial ports glowing with menace — towers over a helpless, shrunken Superman and several tiny figures trapped near an enormous pencil, promising to add them to his bottled collection. Curt Swan and Stan Kaye's cover for this September 1961 issue of Action Comics delivers an unsettling sense of scale, with Brainiac's gloating speech bubbles spelling out his cold, collecting ambition in chilling detail. With Jerry Siegel writing and Jim Mooney on interior art, "Brainiac's Super-Revenge!" looks like a genuinely clever entry in the Silver Age Superman canon — and the cover banner teasing "How Supergirl Came to Earth!" makes this a particularly packed ten-cent read.