Full disclosure, a lot of the behind the scenes information for this massive story arc comes from the excellent blog The Life of Reilly where Andrew Goletz and Glenn Greenberg both summarize the infamous storyline from the mid-90s and input their memories of the inner workings at the time. I highly recommend reading it, because there’s going to be a lot of cool takes and utterly bizarre side-notes that won’t be included here.

While I was working on this article, the original webpage went down. While it can still be found on the Wayback Machine, the link I have included is the backup.

The year is 1995, and Marvel is full swing into what would one day be called The Clone Saga. As we’ve seen last time, Marvel brought back the formerly thought dead Spider-Clone from 1975, and revealed he had been alive this whole time and took the identity of Ben Reilly. The original plan was that Peter Parker would be replaced as the “one true Spider-Man” by Ben by Amazing Spider-Man issue 400, so this way writers and editorial could have a Spider-Man who was single again. The fact that many of them had nostalgia for Spider-Man when the character was unmarried was, of course, beside the point.

Fortunately, sales actually rose as fans were drawn into the confusion and plot twists of The Clone Saga. I would be remiss if I didn't admit I spent my allowance trying to catch up on this years later, grabbing old issues from this time period like mad. However, with the saga of Clones coming to an end, the marketing team of Marvel started to demand that the writing team keep this up for as long as humanly possible. While X-Men and Spawn admittedly dominated the sales charts of March 1995, for example, Amazing Spider-Man 400 drew down approximately 121,000 in issues sold. This doesn’t sound like a huge amount, but the top-selling book that month was The Amazing X-Men 2, which sold approximately 168,000.

Admittedly, the fact that it was a landmark issue and we were fast approaching the tail end of the comic speculation market boom might have helped improve the issue sales. Looking at the next-best issue sold that month, Spider-Man 57 had an estimated sales of 73,000 issues. It sounds less impressive, but it was also better selling than some companies’ entire offering that month. So, the first sign that The Clone Saga was slipping off the rails came in March 1995, with Spider-Man: The Clone Journal.

Most tellingly, there are no credits for this issue. This is likely due to the fact that over 90% of the art is literally recycled from the earlier issues in The Clone Saga. Narration is new, but there’s no credit given there either. However, it acts as a catch-up for any fans who are completely lost in the Clone Saga so far. All for the cover price of $3.95.

Where the story really continues is Players and Pawns, a two part story that would continue to toss doubt into who was the real Peter Parker. Covered in The Spectacular Spider-Man 222 and Web of Spider-Man 123. While Kaine searches the ruins of the Jackal’s lab, the mysterious pod from Smoke and Mirrors opens up, revealing another clone of Peter Parker. Or, since it’s fully clothed in normal clothes, perhaps the original…?

Kaine digs up tests from the Jackal’s labs and gives a copy of them to Peter, saying it’s cool and he’s the original. Meanwhile, the Jackal torments a local high school and former Spider-Man bully Flash Thompson to… do something to Ben Reilly.

I mean, credit where it’s due. The Jackal isn’t just spamming Spider-clones all over the place, and the animal creations actually are kinda unique while being beastly.

No, the spider-spam comes later.

The third Peter hitches a ride to New York, but claims that he has no memory. Meanwhile, Aunt May wakes up from her stroke-induced coma and claims that Peter needs to hurry before something vague happens. Ben also receives a single copy of the Jackal’s clone notes from one of the Jackal’s assistants, and Ben genuinely wonders if he should look at those notes. However, what would have been a great note to end The Clone Saga on happens.

Finally, Ben had realized that he wasn’t the Peter that was cloned, and even if he was the original, it didn’t matter anymore. He was a different person, and life was in the living rather than whatever name you called yourself.

It’s a shame no one told marketing this.

The collections of The Clone Saga then take a massive diversion, with most of volume 3’s content taken up by a special story line: The Planet of the Symbiotes. To make a very long story short, Venom splits. Eddie Brock is no longer convinced that the Venom symbiote isn’t taking control of their pairing, and forces his Other away. The painful psychic scream causes a lot of trauma to those sensitive to it. 

At the very least, it’s a nice idea that could be explored and looked into. However, what happened instead is that a spaceship filled with symbiotes lands instantly in upstate New York, and they’re determined to take over the world. Why? Well, these symbiotes drain their hosts and they’ve been doing so as parasites across the universe for centuries. 

Eddie Brock is able to stop the invasion by combining himself permanently with his other, creating another psychic scream that somehow disintegrates every other being of his species. And also, there was a giant Carnage looming over everyone for reasons. Amusingly enough, this entire story would be ignored for future Venom stories. The Venom symbiote would go to Flash Thompson for a time, as well as former Scorpion Mac Gargan. And, as the current King in Black storyline can attest, Venom did not kill off anywhere near his entire race.

However, it was included in the Marvel Canon thanks to these collections, so we must mention it here. Following this bizarre diversion, we return to our regularly-scheduled Amazing Spider-Man 400.

As you can guess, the planned resolution of making Peter shuffle off the book with MJ and having a happy ending was not in the cards. Ben even talks about leaving New York, what would be the first of many weird red herring endings before The Clone Saga would actually be resolved. Instead, with Stan Lee’s blessing, Aunt May Parker would be passing away. The story overall is utterly fantastic, but the perpetual motion engine that was The Clone Saga did keep some of its weirder plot threads slipping into the story. Ignore the third Peter, and you have one of the most fantastic stories to come from the era. Aunt May wants to spend a day out on the town with Peter, and they go up to the top of the Empire State Building, where May tells Peter something.

She knew. It’s never specified, but most seem to think that it happened around the time of Amazing Spider-Man 200, where Peter stopped the burglar who killed Uncle Ben from coming back to find the stolen cash he’d hidden there before the house was inhabited by the Parkers. Unfortunately, Aunt May also pushed herself just a little too hard that day. They return home, and May passes alongside her family and friends in a genuinely beautiful scene that calls back to Web of Death from a few months prior.

The issue is genuinely wonderful, and it did cause quite the stir in both the fandom and the creative teams at Marvel. Letters of complaint and compliment arrived, and some in the writing staff felt that Aunt May never had to be killed off. Sending her off to Florida, perhaps, but never killed off. However, in retrospect, most fans now agree the issue is a bright spot in the weird and muddled darkness that is The Clone Saga.

...until she was “resurrected” less than 5 years later and it turns out this May was actually an actress...

Before Ben can leave town after May’s funeral, however, Peter Parker is arrested for murder! And it sounds like this was actually Ben’s fault! Judas Traveler again shows up, acting like a bootleg Phantom Stranger for the Parkers. He allows Peter to escape from prison with an illusion in his place, because Mary Jane’s life is in danger. Kaine also kidnaps Mary Jane, because he keeps getting flashes of her dying, so she’s in danger. This happens during a story titled The Mark of Kaine, promotions for which promised to tell the truth about Kaine and his powers.

Oh, and the third Peter Parker remembers who he is. True to his planned plot, he does not know he’s married to Mary Jane, but still feels the need to go save her. This isn’t going to get complicated at all.

It becomes a race to find Mary Jane. The Peter who came from Prison dons a costume made out of civilian clothes and leftover gloves and mask from his black costume days. Ben remains in his Scarlet Spider costume, while the newest Peter Parker wears the classic blue and reds. They all come to a clash in an issue-ending cliffhanger, and the third Peter Parker realizes that everyone just has to be insane, and he has to kill them all for it to make sense.

Peter and Mary Jane escape while Ben and Kaine reluctantly hold off what should now be considered another clone. The clone starts to lose his mind and form, gaining the nickname of Freakface from Ben as they fight. He eventually disintegrates, despite claiming to be Peter Parker the whole time.

Ben promises to help Peter get to the bottom of who framed him for murder once Freakface is dealt with. How? By trading places with the man, and going to jail himself as Peter Parker. This… somehow means that Peter also has to wear Ben’s Scarlet Spider costume for reasons of cheap drama, and Kaine also uses Peter’s costume to ambush a team of villains who wish to kill Kaine for killing some of their co-workers. It was weird.

However, The Mark of Kaine didn’t actually resolve the mystery of Kaine, nor did it actually resolve any plot threads beyond just taking too dang long to resolve the Third Peter Parker mystery. Volume 4 of The Clone Saga opens with issue 125 of Web of Spider-Man, featuring the clone of Gwen Stacy who was retconned to not be a clone of Gwen Stacy. Well, she’s a clone again. As it turns out, she fell in love with a clone of Miles Warren, who was dedicated to finding some way around the degeneration that seemed to slowly be killing all clones made by the Jackal. Unfortunately, a new Green Goblin shows up, and seemingly tries to kidnap Gwen before Warren dies and Gwen goes missing entirely.

This new Goblin, as it turns out, was another attempt to make a teenage hero who was like Spider-Man. Phil Urich, nephew of Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich, stumbles across a cache of Goblin tech in New York, and tries using it to become a heroic Goblin. He lasted 13 issues, but it didn’t stop Marvel from pushing the book and character.

Another two-part story called Crossfire took place over the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man 402 and Spider-Man 59. Judas Traveller is once again back, and promises that New York City will be destroyed in less than 24 hours, unless Spider-Man does nothing to stop Traveller’s newest plan to find out the morality of man. Again, it feels important to note that almost no one had any idea what to do with Traveller at this time. He was only added to the book because it was one of the ways other Marvel creators were trying to mimic the X-Books that were selling so well: weird man with weird clothes and an unknown past doing weird and mysterious things. Most of those creations at the X-Office, however, had some plan for their character at some point and some reason behind their deal.

Traveller? Nope.

Luckily, the day is saved when Peter Parker does things, and saves New York. However, a fourth Peter now shows up at the Jackal’s headquarters somehow, as the plot thread that just won’t die comes back once again.

Web of Spider-Man 126 kicks off The Trial of Peter Parker, another one-month story that would resolve if Peter was guilty of murder, or if Ben did it, or if it was a hilarious misunderstanding. During the actual trial with Ben in Peter’s place, Judas Traveller and Kaine would place Spider-Man on trial as well. The argument is that Peter was somehow responsible for making all of his own villains, not unlike the argument for Batman making the villains he’s infamous for fighting. The whole thing is remarkably goofy and takes precedence over the actual murder trial, but it does lead up to the promised reveal of who Kaine is.

No, not the one from 1975. This is a Clone from before that, which was perfect until Clone Degeneration kicked in and made his body start to fall apart. How Kaine has survived for so long is never really brought up, but the degeneration is blamed for why Kaine is such a hench example of a human. Further, his Spider-powers were distorted and twisted - future visions and the ability to burn his hand print into objects being the two big ones. 

Kaine goes public with part of his identity, taking responsibility for the murders. Which were his, so that explains the mystery there. However, he just claims he “hates Parker,” and wanted to destroy Peter. None of the people in uniform or the judge question this, and Peter is cleared of all charges. Hooray!

Ben’s confidant and pal Seward Trainer shows up at this time, and he wants to have Ben and Peter do one last bevy of tests. This way, with an independent source of results, they can see if anyone’s really the clone, or the original,or what. While we’re about a month late, we do get the results that Marvel was aiming for:

Well, whoops. Peter does not take this well, openly trying to kill Ben with his own bare hands. He claims Ben is trying to “take [his] life away from [him],” which goes against everything we’ve seen in the comics so far. Mary Jane even tries to intervene, and Peter strikes out of panic at her.

Luckily, unlike Hank Pym, Peter was never stuck with “The Amazing Wife-Beater” moniker. Instead, he flees the scene, wondering if he’s some kind of amoral monster.

Another marketing-inspired book shows up in here, The Jackal Files. Most of the book contains splash pages with technical data allegedly written by Miles Warren himself. The real nature of the book, though, is to introduce a key player for the upcoming story line. It’s yet another clone of Peter Parker, which is actually a restored version of Freakface, and his name is…

Spidercide is in a reversed color scheme of Spidey’s normal clothes, with a bonus Venom mouth slapped on. There’s no webbing, but it seems like this was done to make him easier to draw because Spidercide’s powers include morphing his body. It’s not a bad design overall (one that would be knocked off with Spider-Man 2099’s own clone joke), but it's still another Parker clone that isn’t needed.

You’ll want to get used to that, because now we enter MAXIMUM CLONAGE. This is perhaps the story that everyone thinks of when The Clone Saga is brought up, it is confoundingly bad. As they’re under the same editorial umbrella and their sales weren’t doing great, The New Warriors were also brought in to join under the seemingly endless cycle of new clones and no answers.

Starting with issue 61 of The New Warriors, we have Spidercide breaking into a scientific research facility to steal some generic technology, and the New Warriors hunting him down. Between their team drama that anyone from the Spider-Books picking up this issue would be lost by, they fight Spidercide and some of the Jackal’s beast blending clones, only for readers to be told to pick up Maximum Clonage Alpha to know what’s going on next.

The story for Maximum Clonage opens up with Peter Parker (the same one who just learned he was a clone) opening up a vial of gas in the middle of Springville, Pennsylvania, and killing all 2,601 residents of the town with the poison given to him by the Jackal. Apparently, this is all part of Jackal's master plan. You see, the poison doesn’t harm clones! So since Jackal and Peter are clones of some sort, they’re immune, and this will launch Jackal's grand plan of killing off everyone on Earth, replacing them with clones, and ruling over them as their clone king.

Luckily, this was really just Spidercide looking like Peter Parker, as the real Peter is looming over New York like Batman in the rain, distraught with not being a real person.

Ben is also traveling through the rain, trying to find Peter. Giving up for a brief time, he visits MJ to see if Peter’s returned home. He hasn’t, but the Jackal has left a teasing calling card about his mass murders.

While you may be able to get the impression from my summary, this really doesn’t feel like a Spider-Man book anymore. Sure, it’s action and drama packed, but the grand scope of the Jackal’s plans are genuinely beyond what almost anyone thinks of when they think of Spidey. Add in the clone confusion, and the plan to replace Peter Parker, and it seems like not even the book knows what it wants anymore.

Ben gets to fight the New Warriors, who confuse him for Spidercide somehow. The book then takes a nosedive into the insane when Peter comes across the Jackal at the Empire State Building, and the Jackal promises Peter that they can make the world perfect. It’s where he belongs!

I’m not gonna lie, I actually had to go break out some hard drink to finish this story. Yes, there have been worse individual issues of Spider-Man, but there is a good reason why Maximum Clonage is one of the worst overall Spider-Man stories of all time. Bad decisions, bad plots, horrible characterization, and all hit by the worst excesses of the 90s as it congeals into something that just sits there and begs you to think of it as important.

Maximum Clonage part 2 in Web of Spider-Man 127 further descends into madness by bringing another 90s over-hyped property into the book: The Punisher! He’s still out to kill the Jackal for tricking him back in the 70s. Peter drags Jackal along the skylines of NYC, and Punisher drags Peter out by taking potshots at civilians so he can get a clean shot at the Jackal. Miles Warren takes advantage of this by… pretending the Punisher was aiming at Peter.

Peter has apparently further snapped, as he knocks out Frank Castle and drags the Jackal back to one of his labs to stuff him in a clone capsule and heal him. The story slips further away as Ben and Kaine join Peter at the Jackal’s lab. Everyone hates everyone, but Spidercide beats Ben to a pulp and throws him into a jail cell… filled with perhaps one of the most iconic shots of The Clone Saga.

Honestly, it feels like we’ve reached self-parody here. The Gwen Stacy clone returns, and hangs out with Peter while Ben and Kaine slaughter these new clones, and those that aren’t killed wind up melting because they weren’t “cooked long enough.” Spidercide turns on the Jackal, and the whole convoluted mess of comic ends with the Jackal and Spidercide dead, the Gwen Stacy clone still alive, and Ben and Peter both unsure on if they should trade webs, or if Peter should retire or not. I realize this is summarizing about four issues into a paragraph, but it is genuinely not worth looking into beyond this.

There’s also a really weird problem here. Peter is considered the clone now, but he is the same Peter Parker we’ve followed since 1975. This is the same Peter Parker who justified his own existence during existential doubt by remembering his love for Mary Jane Watson, which picked up after Gwen’s death. This means that, somehow, the Jackal kidnapped the original Peter Parker (now Ben), kept him in a stasis pod for months, and let the Clone run around with memories of Gwen’s death that shouldn’t quite be possible.This clone then, miraculously, woke up first and dropped his original in a smokestack to dispose of the body that didn’t kill the original, resulting somehow in all of this.

So, somehow, we had a Peter who was a clone despite not having the established history of possibly being a clone. And a Ben who was the real Peter, despite not actually having a history that made sense. Honestly, it might have made better sense if Peter had chosen to retire when Peter and MJ found out they were with child.

At this point, even editorial on the back end had no clue what to do. They’d inherited The Clone Saga from the previous editor, and even Terry Kavanaugh, the man who had the idea to bring Ben into the book, had left. Tom deFalco, when he was Editor in Chief, had approved of replacing Peter with the Clone so long as there was a backdoor built into the book to reverse the decision.

While deFalco would later claim it was Seward’s tests that could be unproven, no one ever picked up on that easy thread. After all, it could just be explained that the Jackal paid him off to do so. It would be roughly another volume of comics before Ben would officially take up the webs as Spider-Man, and close off the first half of The Clone Saga. Join us next time, as Ben… eventually… takes up the webs!