Retcons, Reboots And Resurrections #17: Will The Real Spider-Man Please Step Up?

They say the only three certain things in life are birth, death, and change. When it comes to comic books those things are also certain as they come in the form of retcons, reboots, and resurrections. 

For our purposes retcons are elements that are retroactively added into a character’s history after the fact, reboots are either big full change revivals of a character/title or are extensive changes to their canon, and resurrections are characters making the return from death or character limbo. 

Each week we’ll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to Retcons, Reboots, and Resurrections.

Things have taken quite a turn for one Peter Parker lately. After an almost 100 issue run led by Nick Spencer that dealt with demon deals and retcons to ‘One More Day‘ and a number of other stories, Peter lost his best friend Harry again and is reeling. In has come a whole new crew of creators for a big 19-part storyline called ‘Spider-Man Beyond‘. The biggest focal point of this run is that Peter is left injured and on death’s door, while at the same time his clone Ben Reilly has returned and has become Spider-Man at the behest of the Beyond Corporation (because the Spider-Man identity was trademarked by Doctor Octopus when he was in Peter’s body, it was a whole thing).

That’s right, his clone. Ben Reilly the former Scarlet Spider is back as Spider-Man once more. So in honor of this fresh start, let us cast a gaze back to the beginning, middle, and end of the infamous Clone Saga!

What Was It?

While ‘The Clone Saga‘ is a ’90s story, the foundation for that story was born quite a few decades earlier. In 1973’s The Amazing Spider-Man #149 it was revealed that the villainous Jackel was Peter’s professor Miles Warren who revealed he was in love with Gwen Stacy and found himself distraught and broken when she died which he blamed on Spider-Man. Warren tricked his assistant Anthony Serba into cloning Gwen Stacey and when Serba found out and pushed back, Warren killed him and fully unleashed the Jackel within himself. 

Long story short, he also cloned Spider-Man and had the two Spiders fight, and when Warren had a change of heart and died in a bomb explosion the clone was thought to be dead as well. After a bit of self-doubt about whether he was real or the clone, Peter found the body of his clone and dumped it into a smokestack in The Amazing Spider-Man #151. 

As most comic book fans (and readers of this column) know, death means very little in comics. 

Jumping all the way to 1994, the choice was made to revisit this plotline. In Web of Spider-Man #114, there is a moment where a mysterious person is seen calling and chatting with Aunt May, someone who had been checking up on her regularly. This person realizes there is trouble in New York and decides to go there, and in issue #117 (following a brief cliffhanger appearance in Spectacular Spider-Man #216) it is revealed that this person is one Ben Reilly, the thought dead clone of Peter Parker. 

Warren/Jackel had also managed to avoid death (because he sent a clone in his place) and went to the smokestack after Peter dumped the body to retrieve the actually still alive clone. The doctor placed an already dead clone body in there to sow confusion, and when the still alive clone regained consciousness he saw Peter hugging Mary Jane and assume he was the clone and left. For five years he exiled himself from New York and took a new name, Ben, from Uncle Ben and Reilly because it was Aunt May’s maiden name.

Because of a whole ton of changes at Marvel, this storyline that might have normally only lasted a short bit of time ended up running for well over two years (till December 1996). In that time Peter flirted with madness, Ben and Peter fought then became friendly, Ben became Scarlet Spider, and a whole ton more clones were introduced (Kaine and Spidercide amongst them). At the same time, some of Spider-Man’s classic foes like Doctor Octopus were killed or shuffled off the board.

Eventually, the man named Seward Trainer, a man Ben thought was an ally, convinced the two that Peter was actually the clone and Ben was the real Peter. At the time Mary Jane was pregnant so Peter accepted this truth and the couple left for Portland, and Peter gave Ben his blessing to fully be Spider-Man. 

Ben stayed as Scarlet Spider for a bit but then embraced the Spider-Man name, getting a job at the Daily Grind and fighting alongside the New Warriors and tons of other heroes. Most assumed he was the same Spider-Man but some select heroes found out that he wasn’t the same Spider-Man. He was even there during the whole ‘Onslaught’ storyline. 

That Parker luck though came to play as the whole saga was eventually proven to be a whole plot between Mendell Stromm/Gaunt and Norman Osborn who had survived his glider impaling all those many years before (The Amazing Spider-Man #122). It was all a plot to drive Peter to madness (talk about a long dedicated drawn-out plan) including a plot to drug Mary Jane that sent her into premature labor where the baby was announced stillborn (though there was an abandoned dangler about an associate of Norman’s taking the baby to Europe). The two Spiders fought the revived Green Goblin, and Ben was impaled and turned to dust which proved he was the clone all along. 

Ben’s death was one of those story elements that stayed in place for quite some time, with brief returns to the character in flashbacks and mentions when other clones like Kaine came back into the picture. That was until 2017’s ‘The Clone Conspiracy‘ storyline when it was revealed in The Amazing Spider-Man #22 (volume 4) that the new version of the Jackel was in fact Ben who had been returned to life thanks to Miles Warren and his new cloning procedure that could bring people back with their memories intact. 

This new Ben Jackel dispatched Warren quickly, as the doctor was killing and reviving Ben constantly in order to find a cure for cellular degradation the clones were suffering from and took over the man’s work and Jackel persona. Ben believed that this procedure, and the temporary cure he created, could and should be used to bring back everyone important in people’s lives and everyone he and Peter failed to save. 

There was a whole villainous turn, as his sanity had been compromised, but eventually, Ben was defeated and he fled. He had a whole solo book adventure in Las Vegas before being killed and resurrected one final time with his sanity intact as part of a plan with Doctor Octopus to stop the Inheritors in 2018’s ‘Spider-Geddon‘ story. After a stint in the current Iron Man series, Ben is now back as Spider-Man working for the capitalistic Beyond Corporation which surely won’t go poorly for him.

Was It Good?

Really, it depends on who you ask. 

The infamous storyline is beloved by some for all the stuff it attempted to do (or at least parts of what it did) and reviled by others for being overly long and confusingly complicated. There were certainly a lot of moving parts that made the story more and more complicated by the time it concluded, many of them not really making sense together as some master plan of Norman. 

Reportedly at the time, the editors at Marvel were being pressured to create stories to gain sales like DC Comics was seeing with Death of Superman and Knightfall, which were both longer form event-type stories. This led to stuff like ‘Age of Apocalyps’e, ‘Onslaught’, ‘Clone Saga‘, and more. Despite the story only meant to last a few months, rising sales led to the marketing department pushing for more of the story so plans were shifted by editorial to keep it going to the point that the story outlasted some of the creators that helped kick it off.

While it gave the company a way to revert to a Spider-Man that wasn’t married and didn’t have all the continuity “baggage” of the original, the overly complicated messy nature of the story made it hard for it to continue. There was even a tongue-in-cheek poking at this chaos and exhaustion felt by fans and creators alike with the publishing of Spider-Man: 101 Ways To End the Clone Saga in January 1997. 

In a way, this event and the dangling plot about Peter and Mary Jane’s baby led to the much more beloved MC2 Universe with the storyline in What If? Volume 2 #105 in February 1998, which gave us May “May Day” Parker and so many other characters. 

After running close to 150 issues across almost 9 regular series and a slew of minis and one-shot, love it or hate it, ‘The Clone Saga‘ definitely had a lasting impact on Spider-Man and Marvel Comics/comics as a whole. 

Next Week: A defining father and son relationship that wasn’t actually in the cards.