Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

As regular readers of Comics Daily will know, while I’m not much of a fan of John Byrne as a person, I can’t deny that in my eyes, he’s up there with Curt Swan as one of the most definitive Superman artists of all time. This has plenty to do with some of my most formative comics reading being of his late ’80s run, when he relaunched the character in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths and had a successful run along with Jerry Ordway and various others that took the character towards the end of the decade.

The writing on these books was solid, rather than spectacular, but he did lay some important groundwork and told a handful of quite memorable tales, one of which is this story, Lost Love, that I remember reading as a kid and which I found a copy of at Bristol last weekend. Looking back over it now, however, perhaps the biggest surprise is just how much it sticks to the original version of the story of which it’s a retelling - that of Lori Lemaris, the mermaid who was Superman’s other great LL-related love.

The original story was by Batman co-creator Bill Finger and legendary artist Wayne Boring, and published in 1959 - and unlike the revamps of various characters such as Mr Mxyxptlk and Metallo that Byrne was busy carrying out in those early issues, this one shows remarkably little deviation from the template. The way in which a college-age Clark and Lori meet - with Lori in a runaway wheelchair - is replicated, complete with almost identical dialogue. Similarly, we get a scene where Lori “talks” to an octopus, again with just a few words changed in the dialogue, and the story rolls on with Clark proposing to (and being turned down by) Lori, and wondering just why she has to be home by eight each night before discovering the water tank in her trailer home. Byrne also homages one of the more memorable of Boring’s panels, as Clark and Lori share a goodbye kiss.

This is all well and good, of course - it’s a classic and well-remembered story, and Byrne’s updating is an effective homage. Where the issue suffers, however, is in his attempt to expand the story beyond the natural end-point of the original. He first adds some material - still part of the “flashback” story that Clark is telling - involving Aquaman and an insane sailor called Schmidt; but while it feels like material that has been told before (from the way it skims over and just picks up the pertinent points), I’m not sure it can have been - after all, the series had only been running for a year at this point, and I’m not sure when all this stuff is supposed to have happened. Worse is the fake-out that Byrne pulls by having Lori stabbed by Schmidt - we’ve already learned that she is either missing or dead from the context of the framing sequence, but this supposedly horrific stabbing shortly leads to a full recovery.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the issue, though, is the changes Byrne makes to Lori’s own character. In the original story, shortly after Clark discovers that she’s a mermaid there’s a great sequence where the pair of them each use their unique abilities to stop a flood disaster - here, though, she simply gets nekkid in the water and they kiss some. After this, she’s given little control over her own destiny - after being stabbed, she falls in love with the doctor that saved her, and rather than making the heartbreaking decision not to be with Clark because of the oceanic distance between them, she simply decides that he probably never loved her in the first place. It rather reduces her to being defined by the men in her life (and by her ability to look good with no clothes on), and it’s disappointing; nor is the lack of proactive behaviour really balanced out by a quick reference to her having “died defending the city she’d searched so long to find” (not least because, well… we got shown the bit where she was stabbed and survived, but we’re not told the story of her death?)

There are still neat touches, particularly when the issue is referencing the original, and the reveal at the end of the nature of the “greatest poet in the world” is nice (although, you know, poets write poems, not songs). And of course, the art throughout is customarily superb - even more so than with his X-Men run, I’d define this as the absolute top of Byrne’s game, perhaps due to his occasionally loose style being reined in by Karl Kesel’s tight inks. But it’s far from the best of those late ’80s stories, and while it does serve the purpose of bringing an important part of Superman history into the post-Crisis continuity, most of what makes it truly memorable can be found just by reading the original.

Tags: john byrne, Superman
Publisher: DC, Dusting Off