There's one problem, though. If we look at what Ellis says carefully, I think we have to admit that all superheroes are clones or analogues of some kind. "[T]he truth of any current superhero 'hit' is that they're about the audience's relationship with old characters."
Every new artist team or generational shift, or even editorial fiat, makes a character anew. For example, in the first dozen issues of Superman comics, Superman himself was an anarchic force. He smacked around cops and subverted the political order, demolishing a block of tenement houses, for example, to force the government to rebuild them.
After the first year, however, the editors instructed Seigal and Shuster (who continued writing and drawing the character for many years after selling it to DC) to make Superman more status quo, at which point he started literally going on missions for the then president. The post editorial-fiat version would seem to be a clone of the 'original,' even though it was written/drawn by the same two guys, who also created the character.
If we extend that same kind of shift to all superheroes who've passed through the hands of more than one set of artists or editors, then almost all of them are clones, and a good deal are analogues. Like all folklore and legend, their stories are told and retold, over and over again. Repetition of the theme and tropes of the narrative are part of their nature. By this reasoning, superheroes just are clones and analogues.
This leaves us with one, further problem, though: in a genre that almost exclusively uses a rotating roster of artists and editors, how do we even define 'original' to begin with? Are we not actually working with Baudrillard's 'simulacra,' copies without originals?
Posted by orion at February 20, 2006 6:08 PM