Doing a newspaper search, the first reference I see to Brainiac is on April 27, 1958 from a Great Bend Daily Tribune article on a science fair.
The first appearance of Brainiac in comics was in the July 1958 issue of Action.* But comics are dated three months ahead of newsstand appearance and were written several months before then. It’s likely that both were playing off the “ac” or “iac” ending of Eniac and Fermiac and Univac.
Why the revival in the 1980s? I can’t find any slang usage of the term, but Brainiac did appear in the Superman newspaper strip in 1980 as the villain. Maybe that reminded people of the character.
Besides the similarity of the ending to computers like ENIAC, the name “Brainiac” sounds like BRAIN + MANIAC. Certainly that has to be the way the American title of the hilariously bad Mexican film El Baron de Terror was chosen
They called it “Brainiac”, and there’s not a computer in sight.
As for Superman’s “Brainiac”, if he wasn’t originally intended to be a computer or android, then it seems likely Otto Binder had the “maniac” connection at least partly in mind. “–iac” might suggest a computer, and therefore sciency stuff, but it also suggests Brain + Maniac"
I started reading Superman in the 1960s, so I never saw that first issue, and am not familiar with its contents. Certainly from the 1960s on, Brainiac was a computer/android. That explained that network of red lines and the lights. If he wasn’t a machine, what were those supposed to be?
And howcum Brainac 5 didn’t have them, but instead had a full growth of hair?
Bear in mind that MW doesn’t re-write every entry with every edition. The 1982 cite in their etymology is old information; it was the earliest they could find in, well, probably 1982 or so. Before the internet, in other words. If they were just now adding Brainiac to the lexicon, there’d likely be a better cite.
Brainiac 5 is a humanoid alien, not an android or robot. His people, the Coluans, live much longer than humans, which is why there were only five generations between the 1900s and 2900s (B-5’s time). The original Brainiac was an android originally tasked to spy on the populace of Colu by the computers who ruled the planet; he adopted a child to help his disguise, which is how hte naming scheme got started.
I’ve heard that theory and the one that it derives from Betty Boop. But supposedly the slang originated among the California surf crowd and originally referred to blondes so the Archie character seems the most likely.
By the way, the word Superman predates its use in comic books. It’s a translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s term “Übermensch.” Merriam-Webster gives the date 1903 for its debut.
Also, “iron man” was generically used to mean strongman or weightlifter long before the Marvel character appeared.
A: Sticking to the OP question (narrowly confined to comic book characters)
As with the plethora of silly phrases borrowed from Batman (“Holy X, Batman!”) there are references to Superman circa the 1960s when he had “super-EVERYTHING-imaginable”, hence someone referring to their “super hearing” or “super intuition” or “super tastebuds” or whatever. Also “x-ray vision” would seem to be a recurrent Superman-ism.
From Dick Tracy, I think (?) comes the recurrent references to someone having a “decoder ring” if they can make sense out of something that others around them find bewildering.
B. Expanding beyond actual comic books (since others have done so),
Charles Schulz gives us several, including most memorably “security blanket” and also, I think (even if indirectly), ::happy dance:: (Peanuts never used the phrase AFAIK but I’ve never seen it without visualizing Snoopy doing his dance)
Brainiac (classic green skin look) was one of the Legion of Doom members in the Challenge of the Super Friends cartoon, which fits right into that timeframe. I’m sure that’s got to have had a bigger influence than the newspaper strip.
IIRC, a revamped Brainiac (now looking more like a robot) also appeared in a later incarnation of Super Friends that was rebranded to tie into the Super Powers toyline.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to imply that the revamped look originated with Super Powers, just that it’s use on Super Friends coincided with the revamp of the show into a Super Powers tie in.