Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

Too Many Clones

At the risk of eliciting the wrath of the Clone Anti-Defamation League, allow me herewith to propose that far too many clones appear in comics these days.

If these words cause a cautious reader to doubt, consider the following of characters I remember having clones (and consider that my comics reading stopped between 1983 and 1996):

• Manhunter (Paul Kirk), who in 1974 vied against an army of clones of himself before the story resolved with his death; at least one such clone survived to appear as Manhunter in the Secret Society of Super-Villains comic book.
• The Guardian, a Golden-Age superhero reintroduced during Jack Kirby's stint at DC (said clone existing to explain why the Guardian didn't suffer from the symptoms of middle age appropriate to a forties hero in 1970s comics).
• Dr. Doom, who in the late seventies attempted to pass off a clone of himself as his son and heir until the Fantastic Four revealed his subterfuge and did something that ended up killing the clone.
• Adolf Hitler, one of the characters in Marvel's Super-Villain Team-Up, who needed a reason to exist when Russia claims to have his body.
• Spider-Man, who had a clone in the seventies who died, then reappeared, giving on excellent authority that someone had confused the original with the clone, causing Spider-Man to adopt the alter ego "Ben Reilly" for a while until writers got back some kind of order in the courtroom; at last decision, Spider-Man remained Spider-Man, and the clone remained the clone.
• Magneto, whose clone thought himself Magneto, but somehow rendered amnesiac and twenty years younger, but turned out the product of a duplicated transporter signal manipulated into serving the ends of Magneto's enemies.
• Superman, sort of; when Superman had died, scientists had attempted to clone him and produced the modern Superboy, who later turned out to contain different genes altogether owing to the irreproducability of Superman's Kryptonian DNA.
• Superman before 1985, whose enemy Bizarro represented the product of a malfunctioning matter replication ray - in other words, a clone made with a ray rather than with tissue culture.
• Jean Grey, who had to have a clone to explain her mysterious return from the grave before a subsequent resurrection confirmed that the first Jean back from the dead suffered from an ersatz nature.
• Lex Luthor, whose original brain occupies the body of a clone of himself which he attempted to pass off as an expatriate son from Australia; in other words, Luthor has a clone but no original.

Real aficionados, those whose encyclopedic memories refuse to abandon a single detail of years of comics reading, might be able to add to this list, but we have here misery in excess; why make it worse? Already, we have too many uses - nay, abuses - of the concept of cloning.

One may find some irony in the knowledge that comics writers use clones for purposes that bad writers once employed (secret) twins and look-alikes; but stopped using twins and look-alikes because of their improbability.

When in Doubt, Clone

Cloning, it seems, has come to offer a reliable substitute for good writing. It serves a number of storytelling purposes, all of which pose considerable difficulties without it.

Cloning offers a false promise of painless ways . . .

1. To undo some seemingly incontrovertible character development (for instance, Magneto's clone Joseph, who has gone straight)
2. To explain why a character didn't die after all (Jean Grey or Lex Luthor)
3. To serve as a tool in some evil scheme (Dr. Doom, Magneto's clone, Manhunter's clones)
4. To replace somebody who (apparently) died (Superboy).

Note that the wretched Spider-Man clone fails to even show in this list of explanations for clones. Said clone appeared in a desperate tissue of panicky fabrication, a loathsome story arc based on the "Everything about your life is a LIE!" premise that good writers can work and poor writers use as a justification for clone-laden horrors that hurt readers and contribute to the growing insanity of mankind.

Also note the degrees of awfulness involved here. The death-reversal element earns derision in Luthor's case, but perhaps a lynching instead in Jean Grey's; the Magneto clone serves an evil scheme that might induce a dangerous streak of yawns, but the Manhunter clones comprised part of a rather compelling (for its day) story; and of all the clones, Superboy actually seems to enjoy a logical reason for coming into existence.

Reproducto ad absurdam

One long and convoluted story line, however, deserves some kind of lifetime achievement award for conspicuous abuse of the idea of cloning. Those of you expecting me to cite the dreaded "Spider-Clone Saga" may have to live with some disappointment, since said story centers around the confusion resulting from a single clone and his prototype becoming confused about who may rightfully claim seniority.

To my mind, the stories surrounding the death of Superman provide a cockroach-like infestation of clones. If the number of Superman-related clones did not glare like an overpowered neon sign in the earlier list of examples, the following paragraphs will clarify this premise. Clones filled most of the roles in this story.

We may begin, before Superman dies, with the colorful denizens of Metropolis. Therein, Superman remained unaware of the machinations of Lex Luthor, a clone of the original who hid behind the identity of a fictional son from Australia. Clone tally so far: one.

After observing the business with Doomsday and Superman's reaction thereto, we find Superman temporarily dead and his assailant similarly lifeless. Then began the large squabbling about the disposal of Superman's remains; one faction desired to use Superman's body to produce clones to replace the indispensable original. Another faction desired to leave Superman's corpse alone and inter it honorably. This faction included Luthor (Clone 1) and a Metropolitan superhero named the Guardian. This Guardian, a clone, represented a duplicate of a Golden Age superhero by the same name. Clone tally so far: two. In his squabbling over rights to the super-corpse, he ran against a newly created super-being named Auron, who combined Jim Harper's original genes (from which scientists had created the Guardian) with some enhancements to provide him super-powers. Guardian and Auron came to an agreement about a common purpose and ethos, and Auron failed to provide immoral bureaucrats with Superman's transcribed DNA sequences. Clone tally so far: three.

Some initial disagreement followed, wherein pecking orders and priorities finally sorted out in the aftermath of fist fights, grave robbing, and sabotage. The scientists of Project Cadmus created a replacement Superman, the clone subsequently dubbed Superboy. Clone tally so far: four.

In the absence of Superman, however, strange things happened in Metropolis, including the appearance of Superman cults expecting him to return, like Jesus, from the dead. Soon afterwards, citizens of Metropolis began seeing figures they identified as Superman.

The Last Son of Krypton convinced portions of Metropolis to believe him the returned Superman. However, he had deluded himself in believing this by absorbing some of Superman's memories during an attempt to occupy his corpse. The Last Son of Krypton had appeared earlier in stories as the Eradicator, and had come to resemble Superman by converting some inorganic matter from Superman's tomb into a copy of his body. The Eradicator made this nonliving matter into a body by copying Superman's DNA and using it to form tissues. Clone tally so far: five.

Another faux Superman appeared shortly, this one a cybernetic being. This Cyborg had a body recognizable as Superman's where parts still existed, and a mechanical half. When tested in a lab, the mechanical parts passed as Kryptonian, and the flesh parts passed as consistent with Superman's DNA. The Cyborg, a mechanical being, had created a Superman body from Superman's DNA to perpetrate a hoax at Superman's expense. Clone tally so far: six.

The remainder of the story dealt with the various contests between would-be heirs to Superman's mantle. These squabbles frequently involved two or more clones, some of whom suffered physical destruction (the Eradicator and the Cyborg) that allowed them to return in other bodies. Later, stories established Superboy's non-Kryptonian heritage; the new Superboy, it seems, resulted from modified human DNA changed to become as Kryptonian as possible, whatever that might mean to a comic-book biologist.

Considering the density of clones in this story, how can we fail to recognize in it a serious contender for "Greatest Abuser of Cloning?"

Reproducto ad absurdam II

Roughly in the same period as the aforementioned "Spider-Clone Saga," but two or three years after the "Death of Superman" stories, DC and Marvel both came together to present a two-series story line encompassing a single event: DC vs. Marvel (sic) and the Amalgam comics. The writers of DC vs. Marvel, while minimally mentioning Spider-Man's soon-reversed clone status, fortunately lacked the creative space in which to traumatize readers by embedding it in their consciousnesses to remain like a bad taste in the mouth.

In the Amalgam comics that followed DC vs. Marvel, familiar superheroes appeared as fused versions of two or more established characters. For instance, Superman and Captain America appeared as a single, fused being named "Super-Soldier."

Some characters fused because of similar names (Dr. Doom and Doomsday became "Dr. Doomsday"); others, because of a similarity of concept inherited from a single creator (Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown and Kirby's Fantastic Four fused to become the "Challengers of the Fantastic").

Fortunately, Amalgam comics treated their topics with more humor than reverence, lest they produce something so painfully bad as the travails currently happening in the pages of Spider-Man's unfortunate "Spider-Clone Saga." Instead, Amalgam poked some slight fun at this work by fusing Superboy (a clone, as you might remember) with Spider-Man (who then believed himself a clone) to form Spider-Boy, a character retaining much of the look and attitude of the new Superboy but adding to these some of the fun-loving nature of more fortunate treatments of Spider-Man.

The Flaw in the Picture

Why so much cloning, though? Granted, we recognize it as a shortcut that solves certain problems raised in previous stories, as enumerated previously. Why, though, do writers insist upon painting themselves into the corners that require them to track the floor with such drastic means?

To put the abuse of cloning into perspective, consider that it now provides an improbable out that writers of an earlier era might handle another way. Back before cloning became a topic of science fiction (and, eventually, bona fide science), bad stories could erase a death by postulating the substitution of a previously unknown twin. The "secret twin brother" cop-out represented an unworthy escape for some time, until writers abandoned it in the face of well-deserved derision. After all, people can recognize the inherent unlikeliness of the series of coincidences necessary to substitute a twin.

Therefore, writers turned to cloning. No one could believe in something so improbable as a secret twin.