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| Some ten years prior to the Crisis on Infinite Earths event, billionaire industrialist Lex Luthor encountered an individual who would ultimately become his lifelong nemesis Superman. Initially, Luthor offered him a position on his payroll, but Superman proved to be completely incorruptible and uncompromising in his principles a quality that Luthor despised. As he could not convince the Man of Steel to work exclusively for him, he decided to create his own Superman. |
| For two years, Luthor scoured the globe seeking out the world's top scientists to work on a secret Lexcorp program known as Project: Changeling. He found a reputed biologist named Doctor Teng and smuggled him out of mainland China, putting him to work on Project: Changeling at the Hong Kong offices of Lexcorp. |
| Doctor Teng used various devices to remotely scan Superman's DNA, collecting as much data as he could possibly amass. One of the samples he procured came from the legendary swamp monster Solomon Grundy. Luthor had Grundy brought to Metropolis in the hopes that he might possibly kill Superman, but failing that, he still managed to cultivate some skin samples from the undead creature. Uploading this data into a bio-matrix chamber, he sought to physically recreate Superman. Unlike the true Man of Steel though, this was to be a Superman completely subservient to Lex Luthor. |
| Doctor Teng made one critical flaw in his work however; he based all of his computations on the assumption that Superman was a mutated human being, as the world had yet to discover that he was in fact, the last surviving son of an alien world known as Krypton. The miscalculation proved detrimental to Teng's project, and due to the resulting X-factor of the alien DNA, the creature that emerged from the bio-matrix chamber was a shambling, mockery of the true Superman. Luthor, disgusted by Teng's failure, ordered the creature destroyed, but this Bizarro soon broke free of the Lexcorp building and escaped. |
