NEAR MYTHS: "THIS MORTAL COIL" (ALPHA FLIGHT #50, 1987)

Bill Mantlo's tenure on the original ALPHA FLIGHT series wasn't much more distinguished than that of the feature's creator John Byrne. Yet curiously, one of the few times Mantlo delves into the world of epistemological myth was a story in which he was clearly attempting to jettison a couple of characters he didn't like writing-- that is, Northstar and Aurora, whose history I briefly examined in TWINSANITY.

To the extent "Mortal Coil" is remembered at all, it's as the issue in which writer Mantlo made the big reveal that ambiguously gay superhero Northstar was actually a "fairy"-- but in the literal sense (though this didn't keep some commenters from assuming that this revised origin was meant as gay-bashing). Such invidious remarks didn't take into account (1) that Mantlo was also stating that Aurora, who was not gay/lesbian, shared the same human/fairy heritage, and (2) that Mantlo was a fairly conspicuous Liberal, who was unlikely to have been bashing even an implicit gay character.

Bill Mantlo took over writing the regular ALPHA FLIGHT title after John Byrne departed with issue #28, and he continued on the feature until issue #66. I would judge Byrne's stories to be no more than standard Marvel soap-operatics, in which a team of disparate individuals bounce off one another with lots of emoting and hand-wringing in place of substantial characterization. Mantlo's run was largely more of the same, and it can be argued that he made an honest attempt to follow through on most of the character-arcs Byrne had established. The two authors had roughly opposite strengths and weaknesses. Byrne could not plot an arc to save his life, but he was able to give his characters distinct voices. Mantlo was a better plotter, but all of his characters talk like they just graduated Exposition 101.

I glanced over the Mantlo issues prior to "Coil," and for the most part he keeps the Byrne status quo with respect to the mutant twins. Northstar is jealous of Aurora's dalliance with men in a way that would seem incestuous were he not supposed to be implicitly homosexual. As it is, Brother Northstar just comes off as judgmental for no particular reason. After the death of Aurora's former lover Sasquatch, she begins a love-affair with technician Roger Bochs, a legless paraplegic. Throughout these issues, Aurora's split personality remains unaltered, and her superhero persona is that of a flirt who has only light, insubstantial loves. Mantlo clearly had no interest in improving the fractious characters, and "Coil" is a story in which he sought to get rid of the twins-- and, for that matter, another Byrne original, the dwarf-hero Puck.

Since issue #44, Mantlo introduced the notion that Northstar had a "pre-existing disease" that made him cough in every succeeding issue. Unconfirmed rumors of the period asserted that Mantlo meant to imply that Northstar had contracted AIDS and to have the mutant hero perish of that disease. Allegedly, Marvel Editorial refused to let him make even indirect allusions to homosexuality, so Mantlo revised whatever plans he had to rid himself of the mutant siblings. Thus, Northstar's illness, as well as Aurora's mental instability, become serious enough that the team takes both of them to a potential place of healing, a mystical conduit that links to many of the Marvel magic-worlds.

Despite some nice art by June Brigman, most of the perils the Alphans face are standard and uninvolving. Thus there's some irony to my assertion Mantlo saved his creative energies to craft a new origin for the characters, just so that he could be rid of them. This new origin claims that the twins' mortal father, who died before either sibling could have met him, found his way into the Faerie World, and caught a female elf, Danae, who wanted to be caught by him. However, after the two were married and Danae conceived the twins, an Elf Purity Squad tracked the wayward fairy down. The twins' father expires in an accident and Danae, despite being immortal, perishes for some reason Mantlo does not bother to discuss.

This revelation by Loki, Norse God of Mischief, is taken at face value by both twins as they seek to survive in the darkness of the conduit. This situation engenders the closest thing the two characters have to a "mythic moment." John Byrne, during some of his last issues, had Aurora declare her independence from her snobby brother by altering her genetic makeup so that the two of them lost their powers when they made physical contact. Faced with the prospect of death in an otherworld, Aurora makes a sacrifice, radiating her store of light-energy-- which I guess is now mystical in nature-- into her brother's body. This depletes her so that Aurora is captured by some of the conduit's demonic denizens. 

Northstar locates the rest of Alpha Flight, but because their leader Vindicator is suddenly antsy about letting the demons out of the gate the heroes opened, she then seals it, with both Aurora and Puck inside. With two of the three characters Mantlo didn't want to write out of the way, he then came up with a way to usher Northstar into the Faerie-World of his mother's race-- though it's not clear why the elves suddenly welcomed a half-elf, half-human when twenty-something years ago they wanted to keep their bloodlines pure. 

The book's heroes have to slink away with their tails between their legs, but Mantlo makes certain that the readers don't condemn him for consigning two regular characters to horrible fates. I won't get into Puck's disposition, except to say that he's relieved of an ongoing curse. Loki then tells some irate deities that Aurora, by hurling all of her light-force into her brother, not only cured him but purged her own elf-nature as well. Loki claims he delivered her to some unspecified mortal custodians and that he supposedly cured her of her split personality.

I don't pretend that "Coil" is a good story, and as soon as Mantlo left the feature, the subsequent writer reversed the "half-elf" solution and both Northstar and Aurora came back, though I haven't re-visited at those stories for years. But I will give Mantlo some credit for coming up with a climax for the Northstar-Aurora sibling relationship, in marked contrast to the characters' creators John Byrne, who was content to have them simply snipe at one another endlessly. The idea of Aurora surrendering her essence to cure her ailing brother could even carry a loose clansgressive motif, which plugs in to Northstar's jealousy of his sister's sexual relationships-- though I won't claim that this was intentional on Mantlo's part. The name he gives to the twins' elfin mother also has an inverted connection to the use of "light" to signify "intercourse." In Greek mythology, the mortal maiden Danae begets Perseus after the hero's godly father Zeus appears to Danae as a "golden shower," usually translated as rain, though the shower's color has stronger associations with sunlight. And though I don't have reason to think Mantlo a "mythophile," it's interesting that the name Danae resembles a Celtic name for the faerie-folk: the "Tuatha de Danaan."

TWINSANITY

As preparation for a "'near myth" analysis about a particular ALPHA FLIGHT story, I felt I needed to write an overview of two of the team's characters, Northstar and Aurora, as they were used in the first 28 issues written and drawn by their creator John Byrne.

I had read all the Byrne issues back-to-back a year or two ago. This time I only wanted to scan for scenes involving the mutant siblings, trying to figure out what if anything Byrne meant to do with them once the team graduated from a few random guest-appearances to their own title.

Today Northstar is arguably the better known of the two, as he will forever be referenced as "the first gay superhero." And Byrne has been unequivocal that he meant Northstar to be gay as soon as he began planning the ALPHA FLIGHT feature. But Byrne could only allude indirectly to the Canadian hero's personal sexual proclivities, given that Marvel Editorial wanted to keep gay politics out of their comics. 

An unintended effect of this editorial restraint, however, was that as a character Northstar was something less than compelling, possibly because the author didn't put his best foot forward. I tend to think that, consciously or not, Byrne modeled his speedster-hero on one of the "speed-freaks" whom the artist grew up on: Quicksilver of X-MEN and AVENGERS fame. Northstar, despite not having been pegged as a mutant early in life as was Quicksilver, seemed very similar in his arrogance and waspishness. And as Quicksilver and his sister the Scarlet Witch joined the Avengers to prove themselves to humanity, Northstar also had a sibling-related motive for allying himself to Alpha Flight. Neither Northstar nor Aurora knew one another growing up; they were made aware of one another's existence only as adults. However, Northstar had once been a minor-league anti-government revolutionary, so he was in a sense already an "evil mutant" in being opposed to the status quo. So Byrne apparently decided that such a character's only reason for aligning himself with a government operation was to watch over his newly discovered sister.

The artist-author had much more freedom with Aurora and devoted much attention to her history. Byrne depicted in great detail how during her youth Aurora had been raised in a restrictive, religious orphan's home, which imprinted on her an animus toward her own sexuality. This deviation from a normal upbringing resulted in a split personality: one harsh and anti-sexual, the other an audacious, fun-loving libertine. To Northstar's credit, once he found out about his sister's impairment, he did his level best to help her. However, he never bonded with the other members of Alpha Flight; to Northstar, they were at most a means to an end.

Byrne, being an avid Marvel reader, also would have known the history of the Quicksilver-Scarlet Witch team in the AVENGERS title: that by the early seventies, Quicksilver and his sister had a falling-out due to her dating the android Vision, and that he departed the super-group while she remained a regular member for most of the next fifty-plus years. It's probably no coincidence that when Northstar had a falling-out with Aurora during the Byrne tenure, it was because the brother had some objection to the sister cozying up to a male of which the brother did not approve. But whereas it was clear that Quicksilver didn't think his sister ought to be humping an artificial man, Northstar's objections to Aurora's choice in lovers, that of the hulking Sasquatch, is never very clear.

Byrne did not stay on the title long enough to permanently sever relations between Northstar and the rest of Alpha Flight, but the most prominent Northstar-Aurora arc for those 28 issues was that Aurora began to resent her brother's bossiness and his comments on the sauciness of her libertine persona. The first conflict appears at the end of AF #7, where Northstar makes the rude comment that he thought his sister had vamped a super-villain (and a particularly ugly one) in order to save her life.

The two remain at odds for several more issues, until issue #22. Aurora, going through a psychological breakdown, seeks out her brother, and they reconcile somewhat. However, by coincidence Northstar gets a call from one of his old revolutionary friends, who owns a circus now and is getting trouble from Pink Pearl, a felonious fat lady. But thanks to Aurora overhearing conversation about Northstar's past illegal activities, she cuts him off again, and even informs him that she plans to tell Alpha Flight about his history. 

This was rather out of left field even for Byrne. At this point, though one might think Aurora's conservative persona might be politically conservative, none of the characters had discussed any real-world political concerns, and even Northstar's recollections about his former status are vague at best. A few issues later, one of the Alphans summons Northstar to help them with some great menace. He thinks Aurora called him, and when he makes an egocentric statement about how much she needs him, she slugs him.

That's pretty much the state of affairs between the siblings by the time Byrne wraps up his run. For most issues, Byrne was more concerned with exploring the different aspects of Aurora's personality. One of the last wrinkles was that she wanted to be separated so much from her brother that she had Sasquatch alter her mutant powers so that her powers and those of her sibling were no longer boosted when they touched hands. This seems like a very risky super-science procedure, but that remained the status of the twins as the Byrne tenure came to a conclusion.

    

MYTHCOMICS: "DAYS OF FUTURE PAST" (X-MEN #141-142, 1981)

 

It's a mark of my long-retired investment in the seventies X-MEN franchise that I can still recall the experience of reading the first pages of DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. 

A few months earlier, Chris Claremont and John Byrne had concluded the ambitious "Phoenix Saga," which, despite its tragic climax, also sported a couple tons of "sense of wonder" elements. Then came X-MEN #141, depicting how, thirty-six years later (than the comic book's cover date), all of America would be reduced to a doomed world bereft of wonders. In the future, the robotic mutant-hunters known as The Sentinels, whose potential had never really been tapped in their first stories. took control of the United States (at the very least) and killed all the Marvel superheroes and most of the X-Men. Only a tiny handful of the mutants survived, kept in power-dampening collars and dressed in jumpsuits designed to evoke the sufferings of real-life WWII Jews. DAYS OF FUTURE PAST addresses the desperate attempt of the survivors to cancel out their dreadful future. Not until re-reading DAYS, however, did I perceive one reason why this dystopian fantasy seemed so much better grounded in reality than dozens of others. 

The two issues are cover-dated January and February 1981, though the whole adventure as such is internally dated as occurring on "Friday, October 31, 1980... the final Friday of one of the closest, hardest-fought Presidential elections in recent memory." To be sure, since one might argue that Marvel-reality may not always line up with our reality, one can't be entirely sure that Claremont is talking about the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter. But even had Claremont wanted to address a real political situation, it's unlikely that any Marvel Comics editor, least of all Jim Shooter, would have allowed a Marvel writer to editorialize about a living political figure. That said, given the lag time between comic-book production and the comics' availability to customers, it's not impossible that Claremont plotted DAYS before he actually knew of Reagan's victory-- which may be a reason why, when the new President does appear in the story, he's only a shadowy figure with no name or distinguishing characteristics. In fact, DAYS might be Claremont's projection of what might happen if America went down "the wrong road" that most liberals of the time associated with the Republican Party.

From the conception of the Sentinels, they incarnated the idea of isolating a subgroup of human beings from the rest of humanity. This science-fiction motif was pointedly compared to the human history of racism and chauvinism by many comic-book readers and creators, not least Claremont himself. To my knowledge no one from 1976 to 1980 accused Ronald Reagan of wanting to impose some version of the Nuremberg Rules upon the United States, though at least one of his campaign speeches back in 1980 was accused of recrudescent racism. But it's still interesting that on the very day that the new President of Marvel-Earth was announced, a set of circumstances arise that will bring about the destruction of civil rights-- not only for mutants, but for all human beings.

In 2013, there are six surviving mutants. Five are older versions of Storm, Wolverine, Magneto (now crippled and out of the action), Colossus and Kitty-- now "Kate"-- Pryde. The sixth is a new character, a psychic named Rachel, whom Claremont will explore in great detail over the next decade. The X-survivors intend to erase their doleful era by using Rachel's mind-skills, projecting the consciousness of 2013 Kate to inhabit the body of 1980 Kitty. Then, rather than simply watching over Kate's comatose body to see what happens, Storm, Colossus, Wolverine and Rachel-- joined by the last surviving scion of the Fantastic Four, Franklin Richards-- plan a frontal attack upon the Sentinels.

The mind-transfer succeeds. Kate Pryde takes over Kitty's body and informs the X-Men that a new incarnation of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants is out to assassinate Senator Robert Kelley, a politician obsessed with legally restricting the activities of mutants. Kate informs the heroes that in her world, this murder doesn't cow humanity, as the Brotherhood intended. Instead, in 1984, a new President-- carefully unnamed-- approves the creation of a new set of Sentinels, who carry out their draconian plan to corral all mutants, which extends to keeping all humanity under control as well. Kate also asserts that the Sentinels in her era plan to extend their control to other countries, which will certainly bring about nuclear Armageddon. After overcoming a natural reluctance, the X-Men-- then consisting of Storm, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Colossus, Kitty and guest-star Angel-- zoom off to prevent the Brotherhood's dirty deed.

The battle of the X-heroes and the Evil Mutants isn't particularly mythic in itself, though it's in this narrative that Claremont and Byrne decided to give the ranks of the villains a makeover. The new roster includes only one old-time X-foe, The Blob, and debuts three new malcontents, Pyro, Avalanche, and the oracular Destiny. Lastly, Claremont re-purposes a character he created for the MS. MARVEL series, Mystique, as the new leader of the Brotherhood. Mystique's reasons for believing she can intimidate all of humanity with one assassination are not explored at all, possibly because Claremont, following up on a plot-thread introduced in a 1980 story, was preoccupied with suggesting a connection between Mystique and Nightcrawler. (Eventually she's revealed to be his long-lost mother, FWIW.) The heroes triumph, Kate departs the body of Kitty (who has no memory of the events). and Robert Kelley's life is spared. However, the concluding clincher is that the heroism of the X-Men means nothing to the obsessed politician. In a coda, Kelley is seen conferring with the President-elect-- as said before, given no name and depicted in shadow-- as the new President does what his 1984 successor originally did: authorizing a new series of Sentinels. 

The fact that 1980 present-day events are only partly rewritten may have been Claremont's rationale for not erasing the Sentinel-future from Marvel continuity. I don't remember what happens when Kate's mind returns to 2013, by which time the future-versions of Storm, Wolverine and Franklin Richards have all been slain-- though I have a feeling that the threat of nuclear doomsday somehow gets taken off the table. Unlucky 2013 has to continue, though, because Claremont has introduced the telepath Rachel for the purpose of having her time-travel back to Marvel-present. In due time it will be revealed that she comes by her psychic talent honestly, for she's the child of Cyclops and the recently-deceased Jean Grey a.k.a. Phoenix. For many years to come, Claremont will get a lot of mileage out of Rachel Summers, though DAYS is probably more notable for all the stories Claremont and other Marvel writers generate from Kelley's "Mutant Control Act," which will morph into the Superhuman Registration Act underlying the CIVIL WAR continuity of the 2000s. 

One last myth-point: though a lot of superheroes are mentioned as having been slain by Sentinels by 2013, only the Fantastic Four and their mythos has any direct impact on DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. I've noted that the survivor-mutants are briefly aided by Franklin Richards, but not that he's also the boyfriend of Rachel, and that he's killed early in the story, His presence seems to be nothing more than a foreshadowing of the revelation that Rachel too will prove to be the offspring of superhero parents. The Sentinels, when attacked by the 2013 mutants, have made the Baxter Building their HQ, which would carry a sense of irony were the occupants not unfeeling robots. Finally, a scene in which Kate walks by the tombstones of dead superheroes displays only the names of either X-Men or FF-members. Much later, Kurt Busiek's MARVELS would comment on how the transformed foursome of heroes were lauded by the public while the mutant crusaders were despised for being fundamentally different from the rest of humanity. But Claremont anticipated the same contrast. The Fantastic Four is the "first family" of Marvel-Earth, and the fall of those heroes could be interpreted as the demise of Silver Age Marvel. In contrast, though most of the 2013 mutants also perish, the future of Marvel turns out to be more aligned with the children of Xavier than the buddies of Reed Richards. Claremont was at the top of his game when he plotted out this challenging opus. The downside, though. was that he kept churning out less resonant visions of nightmare realities, most of which were as bad as DAYS OF FUTURE PAST was good. But such is the conundrum of talent: praise a writer for doing one thing well, and nine times out of ten he'll run the same idea into the ground.

MYTHCOMICS: "LIFE AND DEATH AND THE END OF TIME" (LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #50, 1988)

ENTROPY:
a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder-- Merriam Webster online.

From the POV of a Silver Age DC enthusiast, John Byrne would be the incarnation of entropy. DC continuity was constructed slowly and erratically during the Silver Age, and was then codified into a regularized cosmos during what I term the Bronze Age. But by 1986, DC continuity was deemed unwieldy in comparison to competitor Marvel Comics. Byrne, who insisted on revising the Superman continuity to exclude Superboy, was one of the key players who degraded the established continuity, though to be sure if he hadn't done it, someone else would have.

Of course, the re-ordering of post-1986 continuity had a drastic effect on the profitable feature LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, which was based on the idea that the 20th-century crusader Superboy periodically traveled to the 30th century to have adventures with a cadre of similarly teenaged heroes, the Legion. For the first few years, writer Paul Levitz compensated by inventing the idea of a "pocket universe" where the Legion's continuity was maintained. Yet, since the company didn't want, contra Byrne, any sort of Superboy flying around, that hero had to be killed-- killed by the same entity who created the pocket universe, the Time-Trapper.

This particular Legion villain had gone through some pre-1986 revisions himself. He was invented as a toss-off villain in the story "Menace of Dream Girl," wherein he prevented the heroes from traveling to the future (providing a contrast to the debuting heroine Dream Girl, who could at least intuit future occurrences). Hamilton's story implies that the Trapper is just another sci-fi mastermind, though a later Levitz story makes him into a member of a super-powerful race, the Controllers. By the time of this 1988 story, though, the Trapper becomes the embodiment of a cosmic principle:

They have called him by a thousand names. He is night. Death. Apocalypse. Eternity. Entropy. Time.

The opening pages of "End" show the solitary robed figure of the Time Trapper in a wasteland far removed from the Legion's era, while the captions inform the reader that "all things have ended here, even those that never began... If logic wars with faith over the nature of the beginning, so too it must over the ending. Logic decrees that all things begun, must end."

To say the least, this was not the typical language of a Levitz LEGION story. The elevated, philosophical tone comes closer to what Levitz sounds like in the 1978 tale "The Summoning." Clearly, whatever Levitz's personal opinion of DC's 1986 revisions, he determined that he could give his readers a good story extrapolated from the editorial mandate that "old guard" Superboy had to die. Levitz couldn't alter that policy, but he could create a situation in which the feature's incarnation of entropy was punished for his crime.

Having established the cosmic background of the villain, Levitz approaches the heroes of the Legion in more basic terms, That said, he interweaves two plotlines that are germane to the attempt of the Legionnaires-- spearheaded by their resident genius Brainiac 5-- to avenge Superboy, The first plotline involves a "friend of the Legion," Rond Vidar, who appears to have come back to life despite having been slain by his villainous father. The second thread relates to another character introduced in two earlier stories: Rugarth, a scientist accidentally transformed into another cosmic being known as "the Infinite Man." Rond's mystery is resolved later in the story, but the Infinite Man poses an interesting moral problem, since he's brain-dead and cannot agree or disagree with the role given him by Brainiac 5.

Both of these subplots, not coincidentally, involve persons who may be able to transcend death, thus setting up the suggestion that the degradation of entropy may not be the final answer to all things, as the prologue supposes.

To make the vengeance-drama more personalized, the entire Legion doesn't voyage into the entropic world to combat the Trapper. Only the four members who witnessed Superboy's death make the journey: Brainiac 5, Duo Damsel, Saturn Girl, and Mon-El (who, incidentally, was conceived as something of a Superboy knock-off). To say that the heroes are overmatched is an understatement. Duo Damsel, who lost one of her natural three bodies in an earlier adventure, loses her last extra body.

And Mon-El, the most powerful of the group, unleashes a lot of power but fails just as hard.

However, the Trapper is given some pause by Rond Vidar, whose mysterious return to life is explained by his mastery of a Green Lantern's power.

Yet in the end, Brainiac 5's plan depends on introducing the incarnation of entropy to his conceptual opposite, The green-skinned genius argues that the theory of entropy is countered by one arguing that "time itself is infinite, folding back on itself in endless cycles-- and each end may simply be a new beginning." The incarnation of this principle is, of course, the Infinity Man.

Naturally, the Legionnaires survive this cataclysm and go on to other adventures, just as the Trapper comes back in new incarnations. Levitz ends the story in circular fashion, repeating some, though not all, of the captions from the prologue, but suggesting that even the Trapper's kingdom of entropy has proven temporary.

This story, while consequential to LEGION fandom, didn't have a lot of impact on comics as a whole, certainly not as much as this week's "near-myth," "The End at Last."  Levitz and Giffen produced a better symbolic discourse in their "End of Time." But as I argued in this essay:

Though I define the quality of mythicity in narrative as that of symbolic complexity, not everyone uses the word "myth" this way. Often when the average person describes Superman or Batman as a "myth," they simply mean that they are extremely popular with many people, as some myths in the archaic world undoubtedly were. However, since not all archaic religious myths had widespread popularity-- some being confined to this or that isolated tribe of "fanboy" worshippers-- it follows that not all literary myths are going to be world-beaters either.

MYTHCOMICS: WORLD OF KRYPTON (1987)

John Byrne's 1980s tenure on the SUPERMAN titles has almost nothing to recommend it in terms of symbolic discourse. In every way, Byrne seemed dedicated to reducing the florid creativity of the Silver Age down to his drably functional revisions. Still, his revision of the Weisinger version of Krypton was not entirely of his own invention, but was borrowed from the 1978 Richard Donner film, wherein the Man of Steel's homeworld was re-imagined as a glacial, over-technologized place.
Given Byrne's enthusiastic endorsement of the Donner Krypton in his 1980 COMICS JOURNAL interview, one might have thought he'd never want to write any stories about such an unappealing environment.

Yet the 1987 WORLD OF KRYPTON, written by Byrne and (principally) penciled by Mike Mignola, is the only time Byrne contributed anything interesting to the Superman mythos.

The story begins a thousand years before the birth of Jor-El, with Van-L, father of Jor-El. In those days, Kryptonians enjoyed near-immortality, hardly ever bothering to sire children, thanks to their advanced techniques in cloning. The opening sequence of issue #1 makes clear that most Kryptonians live a privileged life.

Clone technology makes it possible for Van-L's potential girlfriend Vara to be instantly repaired when she loses an arm in a crash. However, the ethical debate over the immorality of cloning is growing, because the clones are kept in stasis and never allowed to take on individual identities. (The "anti-clonists" use the slogan "minds for the mindless" a couple of times.) Eventually Vara-- whose name references that of Superman's mother "Lara," though she's presumably no relation-- becomes a radical "anti-clonist," and accuses her fellow citizens of being virtual "cannibals." However, what really stokes the cultural conflict-- and even leads to a series of destructive wars-- is the abuse of a clone by Nyra, the mother of one of Van-L's contemporaries, one Kan-Z.

What kind of abuse? Well, I referenced this particular taboo in my analysis of Jerry Siegel's 1960 "Superman's Return to Krypton"-- but where the taboo in that story is purely symbolic within the boundaries of the narrative, Byrne's KRYPTON makes the taboo of incest more literal. Nyra, because she does not believe any woman is good enough for her son Kan-Z, abducts one of her own clones from its facility,. Somehow she contrives to grow the clone to maturity, educate her, and give her a separate identity, all for the purpose of marrying her son to a version of herself. Kan-Z's reaction is to kill his mother and her clone, and to attempt his own death. Later Kan-Z too becomes an ally of the "clones rights" terrorists, whose most radical group is called "Black Zero," after this earlier Superman villain.  

Apparently in Byrne's world incest is worse than cannibalism, for the scandal of Nyra's deed sparks a thousand-year-war, as well as the ultimate destruction of the planet by Black Zero. As if to disavow the sybaritic lifestyle of earlier Kryptonians, the post-war Kryptonians become extreme isolationists. They no longer need clones to extend their lifetimes, having invented other anti-aging techniques, but they've become the inhumanly glacial humanoids seen in Donner's film and Byrne's rewrites.

Mignola's art is consistently gorgeous, but Byrne's ability to invest his characters with dramatic heft is seriously lacking. However, I will give props to the schematic sociological myth he devises for Krypton: first too sensuous, then too abstemious. This stratagem succeeds in characterizing the homeworld of DC:s pre-eminent hero in terms of unpleasant extremes, as against the "divine middle" embodied by the Planet Earth.

Given Byrne's tendency to rewrite earlier stories. it's not hard for me to believe that he caught onto the way Jerry Siegel concealed the quasi-incestuous theme of his story by giving Superman's Kryptonian lover the name "Lyla Lerrol," a shuffling of the name "Lara," Byrne thus creates both a bad mother and a not-so-good girlfriend, Nyra and Vara, before introducing the "good mother" who will make possible the birth of a "savior" of sorts. Byrne doesn't devote nearly as much attention to the two main male characters, dramatically or symbolically. Van-L's name doesn't seem to hold any strong associations, though an old SUPERBOY story does state that one of Superboy's ancestors is named "Val-El." As for "Kan-Z," I can't help but note that his name resembles that of the American heartland where the infant Kal-El ends up; i.e., "Kansas." But the latter confluence may not have been consciously intended.