(Colossus Comics 001, 1940)
I included this cover here in order to indulge in a little personal nostalgia but instead I feel like I am going a bit mad. See, I know this cover very well, from somewhere. I thought it was from Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Supervillains, which I read through about one million times as a youth, but when I decided to check out the entry on Colossus in that book I could not find one. Ditto for the Encyclopedia of Monsters and even the Encyclopedia of Superheroes. As far as I can tell the oldest book I own with this image in it is Jon Morris' the Legion of Regrettable Supervillains, and that came out when I was 36 years old - will I ever learn where I encountered it as a young skeleton?
But enough of my memory crisis. The real important thing to note about this cover is that That's Not What Colossus Looks Like, or at least Dresses Like. Perhaps if this issue weren't his sole appearance he might have adopted something closer to the... well, I can only really describe it as a metal bondage outfit. The metal bondage outfit that he's wearing on the cover, then
Colossus is originally Richard Zenith, a humble lab assistant of the year 2640. He works for scientist Doctor Blitzmann, who is a good enough boss to know that Zenith's secret wish is to be a burly six-foot tall man like their colleague Bryn Hale (rather than *squints* his current burly five-foot-ten or so) but also a terrible enough boss that he says this in a shitty and humiliating way while injecting Zenith with growth serum.
Blitzmann's daughter Eve also works at her father's lab and it seems like she might not have gotten the job on merit because when she prepared the syringe of Hyper Catalyst VII growth serum for Zenith so that he would stop referring to himself as a "short king" she mixed it roughly 20 000 times stronger than needed.
The serum seems to be more than merely biochemical in nature, as Zenith grows to thousands of times his original size without collapsing into a pile of viscera and broken bones. Plus, his clothes grow with him!
The power inherent in being a big big man immediately goes to Zenith's head and he declares himself "Colossus, Ruler of All the Earth!" and sets out to extract a surrender from Gregory Graves, head of the Tri-Planetary Federation's Solar Patrol, by threatening to destroy the Federation capital of Urbania. It's you classic case of a nerd being given power and immediately turning into a fascist.
In a fortuitous coincidence Earth's old enemies, the very cool Plantaliens are also attempting to conquer the planet at the same time as Colossus and so there is a bit of a turf war that is handily won by the unstoppable 2000 foot tall man. Too bad, Plantaliens! Try again in another 60 years!
Colossus Comics was reportedly a test by Sun Publications to see if it was worth getting into this crazy new industry, and if that was indeed the case then the answer was "no" because this is the only appearance of Colossus (next month, i.e., never, "Colossus over Europe"!)
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