I put my last post on a website and got some very sharp responses from another guy who happens to be an academic and knows comics very well. He pointed out a few things that have made me reformulate somewhat.
He said two things that struck a chord with me. First, he said that the distinction between ‘clones’ and ‘analogues’ is immaterial since every copy is going to reflect on the original in some way, and I have to admit, he’s right. The difference, in theory, is pretty simple, but in practise, I have a lot of trouble even thinking of an example of a genuine clone, a character that was a mere rip-off and stayed that way. That may be because genuine clones don’t tend to stick around (why bother reading the copy if you have access to the original?), or that their stories are folded into those of the original, by some process of memory akin to how we fold all the disparate stories of one character together (the long, long history of Batman, for example, is demonstrably not one story!). I’d have to do some hard research to sort out the answer to that question, but on the face of it, the objection is very convincing. Copies always reflect the originals, somehow.
Captain Marvel, the original Superman clone, had a very different origin (magic rather than sci-fi), a different level of powers (they wanted him to be more powerful in the hope that he’d outsell Superman), and a whole different kind of secret identity (instead standing for a child who wants to be a powerful adult, Billy Batson actually is a child). Then there’s the ‘original’ Marvelman, a British knock-off of Captain Marvel who was created specifically because DC sued Fawcett Comics in ’56 for copyright infringement and won. The result was that a British magazine that had been carrying the Captain and now couldn’t, created a copy to fill in the gap. But even then, the Marvelman Family was different than Marvel Family, although clearly derivative. There was no female member of the Marvelman family, for example, and their original was, again, pseudo-scientific, having been created by the RAF, not an old wizard living in the subways.
To me, though, that logic, copies always reflect originals, still carries over to all characters who have multiple creative teams. Mark Waid’s version of the JLA is distinctly different than Grant Morrison’s version, and since the former followed directly after the latter, comparison is almost inevitable. Which means, basically, that I’m still stuck on how we define ‘the original.’ Perhaps a better word would be ‘definitive.’ Not the first iteration of a character, but the most famous, the one that the greatest number of people go to in their minds when you mention Spider-man or Wonder Woman. I’ll let that thought go for now, though, because I’m not sure where to take it. It’ll come back. They always come back.
The other thing that guy on the internet said is that he doesn’t see how the distinction has any use, and I have to admit, that comment stopped me cold. I don’t know what the use is until I use it, but I still have to wonder about, as he said, what the distinction I invented indicates about my assumptions. He said that it’s a system that lends itself to dismissing ‘all those childish clones’ in favour of the ‘good stuff,’ like Ellis or Moore’s analogues. That wasn’t my intention, but he has a very good point. My intention was to create a category for rip-offs and knock-offs that allows us to look at them as valuable characters in their own rights because they provide some kind of commentary, either on the originals or on the genre from which they come. Again, though, he was able to argue that all of the examples I gave of clones could be, in my system, analogues, because there was some level of commentary in every reflection, therefore all I was really creating was a convenient way to push a lot of characters and comics further into the gutter, which I am obviously not in favour of.
I think I have to abandon that distinction, then, as one that merely perpetuates exactly the kind of false high/low split that I don’t believe in (or didn’t think I did, anyway). I’ll just stick with the idea of ‘analogues’ as copies that carry an inherent comment on the originals, and just drop the idea of a copy that has no content. I’m not that post-modern.
Posted by orion at February 22, 2006 12:28 PM