Bruno Mannheim: the head of Intergang, from Jack Kirby's comics to Superman and Lois

Bruno Mannheim, the boss of Intergang

Bruno Mannheim is a boss of organized crime in Metropolis. Neither alien nor metahuman, but a man nicknamed “Ugly” from his first speech balloon. What makes him dangerous is Intergang: the crime syndicate he will end up running equips itself with weapons from Apokolips, the planet of Darkseid.

His place among the adversaries of the Man of Steel stands apart: he does not offer a duel, he offers an organization. His first villainous act is to accept a contract on the Daily Planet photographer. Fifty years later, television will make him a neighborhood man who blames Superman for changing nothing.

Jack Kirby and the birth of Intergang

Intergang is older than its future boss: it appears in Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen (vol. 1) #133, dated October 1970, signed by Jack Kirby, in the middle of the Fourth World cycle. At its head, Morgan Edge, boss of the Galaxy Broadcasting System, who has just bought the Metropolis daily and in reality serves Darkseid.

Mannheim arrives six issues and nine months later, in #139, not as the boss but as a “boss” under Edge’s orders: when Edge fears that Jimmy Olsen is getting close to the truth, it is Mannheim he orders to remove him. The issue sets the tone: Mannheim captures the Golden Guardian and the Newsboy Legion, serves them a meal loaded with Pyro-Granulate and announces that they will burn from the inside within twenty-four hours. The Guardian will wrench the antidote from him.

Morgan Edge: three men, one name

One name keeps returning above Bruno Mannheim. In the comics, Morgan Edge is a media magnate who runs and funds Intergang, Mannheim being at first only his subordinate. That Edge is himself a trap: the story will reveal that he is a clone made by Simyan and Mokkari, the real Edge being held prisoner.

Television has blurred the trail twice. The series of ten seasons makes Edge a Metropolis crime boss, and the modern series gives that name to Tal-Rho, Superman’s Kryptonian half-brother. Kirby’s media magnate therefore does not fund the Intergang of Superman & Lois.

Bruno Mannheim takes the head of Intergang

After the event that rewrote the DC universe, Edge becomes the boss again, and it is journalism that brings him down: the journalist he had hired to spy on the Daily Planet turns the operation around and feeds the reporter with the glasses.

Edge collapses from a heart attack in front of Superman, and Intergang returns to Bruno Mannheim, who has trained on Apokolips with Granny Goodness. The sources diverge on the trigger: one keeps that heart attack, in Adventures of Superman #456 and Action Comics #643, the other Edge’s arrest in Action Comics #657. Yet it was under Morgan Edge that he already held the title “Chief of Development” and had built Intergang’s three execution divisions: Gassers, Shock Troops, Wall-Crawlers.

One question stays open: who founded Intergang? His father Boss Moxie in the years 1940, Morgan Edge in 1970, or Mannheim himself according to a later retcon. The three answers coexist in the comics.

Happyland, Purge and the death of 1992

To launder Intergang’s money, Mannheim hires the maker of murderous toys and has Happyland built, an amusement park. Apokolips’s reject Sleez starts kidnapping children there, which draws the police and then Superman. Clark Kent steals a compromising briefcase from Gillespie, Newstime Magazine publishes it, and Mannheim is arrested.

Gillespie, now boss in his place, sends the android Purge to kill him in prison. Superman shuts the machine down, and Mannheim recovers a piece, reverses the technology and builds himself a Boom Tube. The tube collapses halfway through: apparent death, in Action Comics #673, cover dated January 1992, by Roger Stern and Bob McLeod. Superman’s city believes it is rid of him.

52: the Crime Bible that turns Intergang into a cult

What puts him back in the saddle is his father’s death: Boss Moxie is killed by Superboy-Prime in Infinite Crisis #7, when the Superman line starts over from zero. In the weekly 52, published from 10 May 2006 to May 2007, the character changes nature.

Mannheim reorganizes Intergang on a religious basis, around a cult that predates him, the Religion of Crime, which appeared in 52 #11, and its text, the Crime Bible, which appeared in 52 #23. Its central character is Cain, “the First”, and its four Lessons of Blood are Deception, Lust, Greed and Murder. The lever is no longer money but faith, and Intergang recruits children.

The syndicate goes worldwide, from Oolong Island to Chang Tzu’s Science Squad, which uses Intergang’s money to build weapons against the Black Marvel Family, in 52 #49. Before that, its scientists built the Four Horsemen of Apokolips, who appeared in 52 #38 and kill Osiris and Isis in #44.

The sacrifice of Gotham and unexplained returns

His last project is to make Gotham an Apokolips fire-pit. The Crime Bible announces the sacrifice of “the twice-named daughter”, and Mannheim sees Batwoman, Kate Kane, in her. In 52 #48, published in 2007, Whisper A'Daire kidnaps Kate, Kyle Abbot betrays Mannheim because he judges him gone mad, and Renée Montoya becomes the Question.

The ritual turns against him: Mannheim drives the dagger into Kate’s chest, then collapses in turn. On who strikes the fatal blow, the sources do not agree — one says Kate pulls the dagger out and throws it into his back, the other that he survives, becomes a giant and teleports. He reappears nonetheless in Batman and the Outsiders (vol. 2) #13, then in flashback in Batwoman (vol. 2) #0 when the relaunch renumbers everything: none of these resurrections is explained. His move from Metropolis to Gotham only gave him other adversaries.

His means: nothing inborn, everything borrowed

Bruno Mannheim is not a metahuman: the reference sheet gives him no aptitudes beyond intimidation and command. In Action Comics #673 he fires laser beams that briefly rival Superman’s heat vision, but that is attested in that single issue. The Apokoliptian Bio-Armor brings his strength near the Kryptonian level: that is the only reason he gets around, for a moment, the skin that does not yield. The rest comes from Darkseid and DeSaad, from the killer robot Purge to the Neutron Gun.

His real flaw lies elsewhere: force never settles him. Mannheim falls through the press — Cat Grant and Clark Kent for the Edge affair, the published briefcase for Happyland. It is the file the cape does not solve, and that the Daily Planet newsroom settles in its place.

Bruno Mannheim on screen: animation, then Smallville

Among all the adaptations of the Man of Steel, it is animation that gave him a real arc. In the animated series of the years 1990, voiced by Bruce Weitz, he holds four episodes, from 7 September 1996 to 7 February 1998: Kanto brings him the technology of Apokolips, then Darkseid sends him to the slave pits and abandons him on Earth, where he dies fleeing aboard a motorboat, sunk by the explosion of the reactor he was sabotaging.

Young Justice gives him the voice of Kevin Michael Richardson across three episodes, from 11 November 2011 to 9 July 2019, and he appears, voiced by Trevor Devall, in the animated film of 24 July 2018 that adapts the hero’s death.

In live action, the series about Clark’s youth gives him to Dominic Zamprogna in “Stiletto” (8x19), on 23 April 2009. He is not yet the head of Intergang there, only the enforcer of the Ace of Clubs boss: he attacks Clark’s ally and puts Clark himself on the ground with counterfeit bills soaked in the green rock. Two other adaptations do without him: in the series about the couple, Intergang belongs to the Church family; in the recent animated series, it is a trio led by the enemy with the deadly cry.

Bruno Mannheim in Superman & Lois (season 3)

It is the series of four seasons that gave the character his most worked version. Chad L. Coleman plays him, the main antagonist of season 3 opposite the couple formed by Superman and the series’ Lois Lane: a season of thirteen episodes, from 14 March to 27 June 2023. Mentioned as early as season 2, he appears in 3x01, “Closer”, and returns in season 4, imprisoned at Stryker’s.

This Bruno Mannheim is African American and grew up in Hob’s Bay, the poor neighborhood of Metropolis nicknamed Suicide Slum. His mother died of an illness caught near a chemical-waste dump when he was fourteen, and the company responsible refused to help: that is where his program sentence comes from, no one is coming to save us. He presents himself as a philanthropist recognized by his own people, and he blames Superman for putting out fires without touching what lights them.

He also has a family, which does not exist in the comics: his wife Peia, played by Daya Vaidya, a metahuman with sonic manipulation and a female version of Onomatopoeia, and their son Matteo, played by Spence Moore II, who is dating Natalie Irons, the daughter of the armored engineer of Metropolis — Natalie, and not the Natasha Irons of the comics. It is Peia who had killed Antony “Boss” Moxie, the founder of Intergang, a murder blamed on Superman’s historic enemy until Mannheim’s confession.

Conclusion

Keep the trajectory: Bruno Mannheim starts as an enforcer in Jack Kirby, inherits a syndicate he did not found, turns it into a religion, dies twice, comes back without explanation, then reinvents himself on television.

He opens a good door onto the file: Apokolips, journalism as a weapon, and a threat that the refusal to kill does not settle. To go on, the devourer of energy shows the other extreme, and crime arrived in power tells the same idea in a suit and tie.