Another type of doppelganger that cannot be deemed a "template deviation" and so qualifies rather as a "derivative," would be the "replacement character." All of these doppelgangers are always diegetically distinct from whatever character they replace, as opposed, say, to being "retconned" as distinct individuals. The 1950s version of Captain America was not a replacement, since the original idea of the writer was that Cap and his pal Bucky were just slightly older versions of the WWII heroes. A later retcon then claimed that these costumed crusaders were distinct from Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, which clearly was not the original intent.
In the Golden Age, it was rare for a writer to bother having a new version of a character replace another. Often, as I noted in THE THREE CAMILLAS, a creator would just try out different versions of a same-name series-star, barely if at all caring that this played merry hob with "continuity."
A rare Golden Age example of an overt replacement occurred in the magazine PRIZE COMICS. In the first issue of PRIZE, playboy Doug Danville elected to play superhero, first using the forgettable name "K the Unknown" for his debut, and then changing it for the next thirty-something adventures to "The Black Owl." In issue #13, the magazine introduced the juvenile twin-heroes "Yank and Doodle," whose father Walt Walters was not aware of their double identities. Then in issue #34, someone decided to jettison Doug Danville and to have Walt Walters take over as The Black Owl. This allowed for a little melodrama as the father-hero sometimes crossed over into the adventures of his sons, and vice versa, without the kids knowing who the new Black Owl actually was. I imagine, though, that after a short time the young PRIZE readers probably forgot that there ever was a Danville version of this owlish hero.
In the Silver Age, it was common for villains to be be endlessly recycled, and barely any super-crooks ever succumbed to either imprisonment or death, no matter how seemingly irreversible. A notable exception, though, was the Lee-Kirby creation The Molecule Man. Despite making a powerful debut in FANTASTIC FOUR #20, neither his creators nor anyone else rescued him from his fate at the end of the story: that of being exiled to another world by the heroes' friend The Watcher.
A replacement version, however, showed up in 1974, for the debut issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE. Writer Steve Gerber showed readers the previously undisclosed fate of the villain, first seen dying on an alien world and charging his unnamed son to take over his mission to gain vengeance on his old foes, the Fantastic Four. To the best of my knowledge, this is substantially the only Molecule Man extant at Marvel.
Why didn't Gerber decide to simply revive the original malefactor? I theorize it's because he wanted a new angle on a rather colorless original. After Molecule Man Two duplicates the experiment that gave his late father his molecule-altering abilities, he travels to the Earth-plane. However, once he gets there, he finds that because he grew up in a different time-continuum, on Earth he ages rapidly when he doesn't have his wand to replenish his body. This makes for a stirring conclusion when he fights both the Thing and the Man-Thing, and the former hero deprives the villain of his revival-tool.
Molecule Man Two survived his temporary death in the approved comics-fashion and went on to other adventures, and without checking, I assume that the aging-on-Earth angle was quickly dropped. But his relevance to my idea of replacement characters is to ask what if any "cosmic alignment" he had, according to the principles I laid down in this essay. The original Molecule Man was aligned with the Fantastic Four, and no one else. But though his replacement goes looking for The Thing to satisfy his father's grudge, Molecule Man Two is not his father, and so he's not any more aligned to The Thing-- who he meets for the first time in his debut-- than to The Man-Thing. In the long run, Molecule Man Two didn't end up being aligned with any hero in particular, and so became an example of what I've termed "floating alignment." Given that in his debut Molecule Man Two has a weaker charisma than his father, he doesn't provide even a low-charisma crossover when intersecting with the stars of the team-up title, as would be the case whenever two or more team-up characters encountered a villain foreign to both of their mythoi. Here's a quick example of a valid low-charisma crossover, MARVEL TEAM-UP #22, in which another all-purpose villain, the living computer Quasimodo, tilts his lance against both Spider-Man and Hawkeye, neither of whom had met the villain before.
Next up: non-distinct replacements.
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