Ultra-Humanite: Superman's first recurring adversary and his changes of body

Ultra-Humanite: who is this scientist who changes bodies

Ultra-Humanite is an enemy of Superman who has almost never fought with his own body. He is a scientist, nicknamed «Ultra», and his weapon is his brain — in the literal sense, since he has it transplanted from one body into another. He arrives in Action Comics #13, dated June 1939, twelve issues and one year after the hero's first adventure.

His starting body gives nothing away: an old man paralyzed in the lower limbs, in a wheelchair, with no physical ability at all. He advances only through intellect, his inventions, and front men. That is the whole drawing of the character, built as the exact inverse of Superman: an infirm body under a sovereign mind, where the hero has a sovereign body and the intelligence of an ordinary man. The name itself is a near-synonym of «Superman».

His place in the gallery of adversaries stands apart. He is not a brute force, nor a machine intelligence like the one from Colu, nor an industrialist like the boss of LexCorp, whose first version, a mad scientist, arrives ten months after him — the businessman and his empire date only from the 1986 overhaul. What defines him is a mechanism: changing envelopes, even species, and carrying on the game.

Action Comics #13 (1939): the entrance

The story is titled «Superman vs. the Cab Protective League». Superman goes after a racket squeezing taxi drivers, led by one Jackie Reynolds. The investigation turns quickly: Reynolds is only an enforcer, and the man behind him stays hidden. That is where the old man in the wheelchair appears.

What follows is a serial scene. Trapped by an electric shock, Superman ends up tied under a circular saw. The blade breaks on the Kryptonian's skin, and it is the shards that kill Reynolds. The scientist escapes by plane; Superman brings the aircraft down, but finds no body in the wreckage.

The date circulates in two forms. The cover reads June 1939, confirmed by the publishing files, while the on-sale date is earlier, in April 1939. An old fan page gives July, which no reference source follows. On the credits, Superman's two creators sign the character, with Paul Cassidy behind the page.

Why Ultra-Humanite is Superman's first recurring adversary

The title is not a formula, it is a matter of counting. In 1939, Superman's antagonists are one-issue criminals: they arrive, they fall, they are not seen again. This one comes back. In Action Comics #14, dated July 1939, he is behind Star, Inc., the company that built the subway tunnels with poor materials; in #17, dated October, behind an extortion outfit, where Superman describes him as a mad scientist who wants to dominate the Earth.

Six stories put him on stage between June 1939 and February 1940. No source presents itself as exhaustive, so it is better to stick to that figure than to a closed list. They also diverge on the formula: first supervillain faced by Superman for some, first recurring enemy for others. The second is the safest, because both support it.

Issue #19, dated December 1939, is titled «Superman and the Purple Plague». The scientist releases a purple plague on the hero's city, then dies when Superman places him in front of his own electric gun. His assistants revive him with adrenaline, but the body is doomed. For any other villain of 1939, the file would be closed; for this one, it is the starting point.

Dolores Winters: the actress's body that changes everything

Action Comics #20, dated January 1940, is titled «Superman and the Screen Siren», and it is the issue that makes the character something other than one more man behind the scheme. His men kidnap a young actress, Dolores Winters, and transplant the dying scientist's brain into her body. The villain resumes his business under a face the public knows.

«Dolores» takes a yacht of celebrities hostage for ransom. Superman recognizes his enemy by the look in the eyes, at the moment she threatens her captives with a blowtorch: the body changes, the intention stays readable. Issue #21, dated February 1940 and titled «The Atomic Disintegrator», keeps him in that body — he kidnaps the atomic physicist Terry Curtis, forces him to build a disintegrator, then vanishes into the crater of a volcano. It is his last Golden Age appearance against Superman.

The actress was not forgotten. JSA Classified #20, dated February 2007, brings her back alive: her brain had been placed in another body when the scientist took hers. In the gallery of women in this universe, she holds a rare place — victim of a villain, and a villain in everyone's eyes for two issues.

The albino gorilla: the body that lasts

This is the image that outlived the character: a giant albino gorilla, white fur, red eyes. The files give him 2.36 m and 302 kg, with superhuman strength and resistance. He appears for the first time in this form in Justice League of America #195 to #197, dated October, November, and December 1981, in the arc «Targets of Two Worlds» — Gerry Conway, George Pérez, John Beatty, Len Wein editing.

The wording matters: these issues show him already settled in the ape, and no source names an earlier episode in which the graft would be shown. In the arc, he rebuilds the Secret Society of Super-Villains with villains from two parallel Earths, and prepares the removal of ten heroes from the multiverse to unbalance the cosmic scale. The hero's team stands in the front rank of the targets.

On the passage from the actress's body to the gorilla's, the sources diverge, and there is no reason to choose: one version places the scene in 1948, with Per Degaton and a young Despero pulling him from a hospital while a cancer condemns him; another, published in 2009, places it in the Congo. Both are canonical at their date and do not overlap.

Ultra-Humanite's changes of body: the mechanism and its limit

At the start, it is surgery: a brain removed, a brain set in place, and no graft rejection, even from one species to another. Later, he gains the direct transfer of his consciousness, without an operation. That is his signature, and what makes him hard to kill: destroying the body settles nothing as long as the brain finds somewhere to go.

The mechanism has a cost the stories have never erased. Ordinary human bodies degrade under his mental activity, faster and faster. The albino gorilla is therefore not an aesthetic choice but an engineer's: a receptacle robust enough to last. His mental range is wide — hypnosis, telepathy, telekinesis, mental blast, control of gorillas — and his hypnosis has already reached almost an entire team of heroes at once.

His knowledge counts just as much. He can cure cancer, give abilities to ordinary humans, build weapons, vehicles, and machines ahead of his time, and he wields an artifact named Powerstone. Faced with the Kryptonian arsenal, all of that goes around the problem instead of meeting it: a mental attack does not strike an invulnerable skin, as with the troublemaker from the fifth dimension.

April 1940: Lex Luthor takes the place

Action Comics #23, dated April 1940, brings in Lex Luthor. The effect is immediate: the scientist is set aside and will not reappear in the comics for decades. The case is unique in the catalogue of Superman's enemies — a villain whose narrative function was literally taken over by another character.

The comparison between the two has become a required stop, and that is where caution is needed. One encyclopedia claims the scientist would be twice as intelligent as Luthor; a database settles for a «some say he is more intelligent», pointing to a comic-strip line. It is therefore a sentence in a balloon, not a datum: nothing to quantify.

What separates them is worth more than a ranking. Luthor wants to win in the world as it is: he builds a company, a reputation, and will end up aiming at the White House. Ultra-Humanite wants a body first, domination comes after. One capitalizes, the other recycles himself — and the second was long harder to hold in a monthly series.

From Earth-2 to Stealing Thunder: Ultra-Humanite's returns

The return takes place in Superman Family #201, dated June 1980, where he becomes the recurring antagonist of the serial «Mr. & Mrs. Superman» — the early years of the marriage of the Earth-2 Superman and Lois Lane. DC had in the meantime poured the whole Golden Age continuity onto that parallel Earth: the villain of 1939 no longer faced the same hero as the couple followed on the newsstand.

Then comes the «Ultra War», his most twisted crossover. In All-Star Squadron Annual #2, dated November 1983, and Infinity, Inc. #1 and #2, dated March and May 1984, he acts in 1942 in Dolores Winters's body and allies with his own future version, the gorilla. He hypnotizes the whole Infinity, Inc. team sent into the past, and fails when it breaks free.

Crisis on Infinite Earths changes the terms: the Earth-2 Superman leaves continuity and the scientist is shut out of the hero's restart. His old fights are rewritten against other heroes of the years 1940, and he becomes an enemy of the JSA. His most ambitious stroke comes from there: in JSA #32 to #37, from March to August 2002, under the title «Stealing Thunder», settled in the aged Johnny Thunder's body, he obtains the pen that commands the Thunderbolt and takes the Earth, which becomes almost a single mind.

Gerard Shugel: the origin rewritten in 2009

For seventy years, the character has no civil name: the files on the historical villain read «unknown». It is Power Girl (volume 2) #2, dated August 2009, that gives him one, Gerard Shugel, and rewrites his motive. Shugel is born with an intelligence beyond the norm and a degenerative disease eating at his body. Transplantation stops being a mad scientist's whim: it becomes a way to stay alive.

The same issue gives him a partner, Satanna, a researcher from his class, with whom he works on grafting and animal hybridization. Driven out by animal-rights activists, the two settle in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Satanna transplants Shugel's brain into a modified albino gorilla. In #11, dated June 2010, Power Girl gets him a fresh cloned human body, rid of the disease. Shugel feigns redemption.

Two cautions with this name. It is a 2009 revision: the Ultra-Humanite of 1939 was not «called» Gerard Shugel. And the often-cited link between «Shugel» and the surnames of Shuster and Siegel is visible, but it is advanced only by one encyclopedia, with no reference note — a plausible reading, not a fact established by the publisher.

Superman and the Authority: he claims his title to the hero's face

Before this return, a detour. The New 52 restart wipes the slate: in Action Comics (volume 2) #37, dated February 2015, Ultra-Humanite is no longer a scientist but an alien from the Phantom Zone who feeds on fear. The concept did not hold: Deathstroke (volume 4) #24, dated December 2017, restores the genius with his brain lodged in the albino gorilla.

The miniseries Superman and the Authority, four issues from September to December 2021, gives him his status back — and has him say it out loud. He is the brain behind the threat; in #3 he transfers his brain into a new body; in #4, occupying Solomon Grundy's, he faces Superman in the bottled Kryptonian city and throws at him that it is he, and not Luthor or Metropolis's energy drinker, who was his first true enemy.

The end of the fight is a lesson in targeting. Superman cuts the city's Kryptonian power supply, the Daily Planet reporter fires a charge of white kryptonite — a defoliant, effective against a plant body like Grundy's — and Superman tears off the head. The analysis reveals that Shugel did not have the means for such a graft alone: he was helped, and his benefactor is Brainiac. The story finally announces his next target, the son of Clark and Lois.

Ultra-Humanite on screen: animation, series, and video games

The adaptation that did the most for his fame is the animated Justice League of the early years 2000. In «Injustice for All», aired in two parts on 6 and 13 September 2002, he sits in Luthor's Injustice Gang in the form of the albino gorilla — and he betrays it. An opera lover, hostile to modern art, he is turned by Batman, who doubles the fee Luthor promised in the form of a cultural gift. He returns in «Comfort and Joy», on 13 December 2003, where he repairs the toy he had broken so that it tells The Nutcracker to orphans, alongside the Flash.

The other appearances treat him differently. In Batman: The Brave and the Bold, episode «Four Star Spectacular!» on 4 November 2011, he is no longer a gorilla but a brain in a small robotic jar able to possess others, behind the disappearance of the Allies on Dinosaur Island in 1943. In Young Justice, he takes up the gorilla again and wears the serial number L-10 inside the organization called the Light.

The live-action version arrives with the third season of Stargirl, subtitled «Frenemies», launched on 31 August 2022 on The CW, whose plot knots in the final episodes, in November and December. The series dares a direct nod to the comic: it is the Dragon King who grafted Ultra-Humanite's brain into the body of the actress Dolores Winters. He then has it transferred into Starman's in order to aim at the presidency as Icicle's mouthpiece, before Pat Dugan damages his brain beyond repair. Joel McHale, who also plays Starman, is credited for the character; on the television series side, the list stops there.

Conclusion

If you keep only one thing about Ultra-Humanite, keep that he was first and that he was forgotten anyway. Six stories between June 1939 and February 1940 were enough to invent the figure of the scientist who has it in for Superman, then the boss of LexCorp inherited the role from April 1940. It took him more than forty years to come back and say so.

His interest lies in his mechanism more than in his crimes. A villain who changes bodies crosses the eras without aging: an actress in 1940, a gorilla in 1981, an old hero in 2002, an undead in 2021, without one line of his project moving. To carry the reading further, you can start again from the gallery's other great brain, compare with the inverted Superman of Earth-3, or see what Superman's world looked like in the first hours of the Golden Age.