The Spider and the Exile // The Clone Sagas of Spider-Man, Part II
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.
In our previous examination of the complex relationship of Spider-Men and their Clones, we looked at what Marvel calls The Original Clone Saga. Written almost exclusively by Gerry Conway, it was a single man’s look at the insanity loss can make with a lovely sci-fi twist. And then the 90s happened.
Since 1988, the last time we looked into Peter Parker’s life, it has expanded dramatically. Peter and Mary Jane finally married and became one of the few married couples in the Marvel Universe. True to form, he was also a total dork about it.
Peter Parker also received cosmic powers during the Acts of Vengeance event until he lost them. Harry Osborn flailed back and forth between sane and insane as he struggled with the side effects of the Green Goblin serum he had taken to empower himself. He would eventually die saving his loved ones from his own death trap in the touching Spectacular Spider-Man issue 200.
Peter Parker’s parents, believed killed during their time as secret agents for the CIA, were found to be alive. They would join the cast and be an interesting take on the parental figures Peter had in his life versus Aunt May and Uncle Ben. Venom would spawn a child symbiote, Carnage. Latching onto serial killer Cletus Cassidy, he would exemplify the excesses of the early 90s in the weirdest ways and even get his own event that ate up pages in every Spider-Man book at the time: Maximum Carnage.
Not long after this event, it was revealed that Peter’s parents were still dead. Instead, these parental figures were robots made by Harry Osborn and the Chameleon as another form of revenge and torment. And in true 90s fashion, they were hilariously hideous.
And if this wasn’t enough, the stress of life gave Aunt May a stroke. This put her into a coma, and Peter could only blame himself.
These events were really wearing on Peter’s sanity. In retrospect, it might have been to try and capitalize upon the trends of the 90s without going ultra-violent. You see, comics at this time featured characters festooned with guns, pouches, and horrifying fashion choices. Image Comics built their brand upon this, though creator-owned comics eventually became their focus. Since Spider-Man would never kill, I’m sure someone well-meaning in editorial decided to make Peter more like the also-successful Batman comics from DC. Angsty, dark, broody, and calling himself The Spider.
It was about as bad as Todd McFarlane’s attempt at writing for Spider-Man.
Now, before we go further, there’s a rather large elephant in the room at Spider-Man’s editorial office. Nearly every single person working on the book hated the marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. Interviews at the time in the pages of hype magazines like Wizard and Marvel Age never touched upon this, because it just wouldn’t do to fight against the current status quo so publicly. Many fans were enamored with the relationship finally reaching a proverbial happy ever after, but many creators felt it placed a massive restriction on the kind of stories that could be told with Peter.
David Michelinie might be the one exception in the research I’ve done, however. While he was hardly a fan of the marriage, it was an editorial decision. In an interview from much later, he would state:
“I hated that. Hated, hated, hated it. I wanted to write the Spider-Man I loved when I first got back into reading comics in college, the poor guy who has human problems and always struggles to do what’s right--just like me! It was one of the reasons I think the character had become so popular, because he was so easy for young readers to identify with. But how many 15-year-olds (the median age of comics readers in the 1980s) were married, let alone to a fashion model turned actress?!? ... So I fell back on my core perspective: what would a real human do in this situation? And by looking at Peter Parker’s troubled past, and the true love he felt for MJ, I decided to do something rather daring: make the marriage work! Most marriages in comics fall prey to the cliche of putting the marriage in trouble: infidelity, misunderstandings, jealousy, etc. This is likely due to the pressure of coming up with new stories every day, week or month. So I decided it might be different--as well as challenging--to give Peter Parker something of a happy life for a change. And I found it was a lot of fun. And with both Peter’s and Mary Jane’s non-standard “careers” to play with, it wasn’t all that difficult to come up with reasonable and believable conflicts to create action and visual interest."
Credit where it’s due: The man wrote a fantastic portrait of a married couple who were happy in their relationship, if not in life overall. They still had job issues, they had money problems, Peter’s former romantic interest in the Black Cat would come back into their lives with the intent of trying to make Peter jealous. And he also made the comic about as risque as you could get away with under the Comics Code Authority.
And again, it worked. However, other writers weren’t as enamored with the marriage. As 1994 arrived, many of them just plain wanted MJ to leave the book. However, the tale as old as time also states that the higher ups in charge didn’t want to “age” Peter Parker too much. A separation would still leave them married, and no one wanted to be the person who widowed Spider-Man. And somehow, despite it becoming more common, divorce was a taboo subject.
So someone had the grand idea of bringing back the Clone from 1975. Glad to see editors are still capable of making insane decisions based on weird assumptions.
According to interviews done for The Life of Reilly, the creative mind who had the idea to bring the Clone back was Web of Spider-Man writer Terry Kavanaugh. Bringing back a Peter who had less current emotional baggage would be a way to make Spider-Man more lighthearted (despite they themselves being the ones who darkened Spider-Man), and cut loose MJ without actually losing Peter Parker or aging him up too much. The idea was actually to mimic the Death of Superman story line that had just recently ended at DC Comics. The original Peter and the Clone would be given the fact that the Clone was actually the original, and Peter would shuffle off the book with MJ so that everyone would be theoretically happy with the outcome. The new Peter wouldn’t be married, and could be extra-down-on-his-luck with the whole I-was-a-clone thing, while fans of the marriage would know it still existed. This plan would run with a culmination in Amazing Spider-Man issue 400, a story that would take 6 months to plan and enact.
As The Clone Saga takes up 11 volumes of content, this is obviously not what happened.
With Aunt May now in the hospital, a mysterious man in a leather jacket and possessing a motorcycle was trying to get in touch with her. Upon finally hearing she was possibly on death’s door, he reacted badly.
Several issues would pass with this stranger coming into New York, and even having several chance encounters with Peter Parker where neither saw the other. However, it wasn’t until Spectacular Spider-Man issue 216 where fans got the reveal to either be confused as hell, or dread what was about to happen.
The Clone Saga was up and running, and Spider-Man would never be the same again.
Not that this was actually called the Clone Saga at the time. This would come later. Instead, Marvel would almost abuse the four monthly issue format of Spider-Man comics to feature a continual span of an ever-evolving comics storylines with their own names as this grew like kudzu and became a nightmare for all involved. Issues would flow into one another, and demand that readers pick up every single one and you best dare not miss an issue or else you’ll be totally lost.
This was also around the time Marvel was starting to go bankrupt in the 90s, due in part to increasing costs of comic production, an over-reliance on the overnight speculator boom that had people buying dozens of common issues in the hopes they would become expensive, and bad business decisions. A desperation for sales was a huge factor, and the editors in the Spider-Office would take inspiration from the other major comics line at Marvel: the X-Men.
Specifically, the fact that X-Men had dozens of characters with weird and mysterious pasts, and that it was the mystery that kept bringing readers back. Who was Scott Summers’ other brother? What is Mister Sinister? Who is Gambit? What is Bishop’s deal? Who really is Cable? These would manifest themselves in Spider-Man’s books in Doctor Judas Traveller.
I’m not gonna lie here: Judas Traveller’s design is honestly both awesome and 90s as hell. Multiple belts, cowboy boots, random gold pieces, stupid long hair and facial hair, and a long flowing cape hit a lot of the marks for “mysterious guy” back in the world of 90s Marvel. Judas Traveller was introduced in a story called Power and Responsibility that took up the pages of Web of Spider-Man issue 117, and rolled right through the rest of the issues that month. But since this is the 90s, marketing threw a gimmick at everyone. A backup story called Birth of a Spider-Man would be included with each issue. Rather than making everyone read through each issue to get to the story, the comic was printed half in reverse, with two covers and two stories that met in the middle!
It was gimmicky as hell, but it worked to grab everyone’s attention that the Clone was back, and worked as a way to make sure people knew the backstory of the Clone. Birth of a Spider-Man would flesh out some of the Clone’s history before his appearance in Amazing Spider-Man 149, as well as show off the Jackal using a jetpack for some reason.
The only new information comes in part 4, where we see The Clone realize he is actually a fake, and that he no longer has a life he can live in New York. The plot of how he would leave New York and find a new life would be told years later in The Parker Legacy and The Lost Years, which we will not cover here as to avoid spoiling most of the plot of the early Clone Saga.
Not that this stopped Marvel from putting them first and foremost in the recent Clone Saga collections.
The tale of Power and Responsibility has Doctor Judas Traveller show up at Ravencroft, the Spider-book’s answer at the time for Arkham. Again, showing that perhaps Marvel editorial thought the best thing to do was to make Spidey into a knockoff Batman. Traveller and his trooper of mysterious underlings were at Ravencroft to analyse and hopefully help the inmates there, but Traveller’s real objective was to test Spider-Man and his moral compass. This would be done with bizarre magic and mental probing that make the 1960s Steve Ditko drawn Doctor Strange comics look logical. When he found out that the Clone existed, the plan was changed to test the two of them.
Around this time, the Clone admitted to Peter that he had taken the name of Ben Reilly, after Uncle Ben himself and using Aunt May’s maiden name. Not that he wouldn’t be tempted to take the name of Peter Parker once more, but the story made it obvious that Ben was making some kind of life for himself. This is especially highlighted when a new villain for Peter shows up that Ben himself has some familiarity with, after the two put their differences aside for the moment.
While the character seems just tossed together for the story itself, it’s still a great example of how Ben has his own past outside of being just a Clone. As mentioned above, there would be a few books that took advantage of that lost past to look into Ben’s history. The story ends with Judas Traveller and his people vanishing and leaving Peter wondering if the whole thing was a demented dream, and Ben wondering if he should just leave and go on the road again.
As an introductory story, it works well. The backup feature of Birth of a Spider-Man reminds readers that, yes, the Clone exists. It also clearly side-steps the entire retcon of The Evolutionary War we covered last time and ignores the retcons from those books entirely. Ben is, so far as the books are concerned, a clone of Peter once more. It also helps bring Peter down from the Batman-esque “THE SPIDER” mantle he’d been shoved into, and begins to bring back some of the cast of Spider-Man who’d been shuffled off to the side.
The books for Spider-Man would actually split their focus at this time. Web of Spider-Man and Spider-Man would take up the tales of Ben Reilly, while Amazing Spider-Man and Spectacular Spider-Man would follow Peter Parker. The quarterly comic Spider-Man Unlimited would show up once in a while to share stories between Ben and Peter whenever possible. As such, we will follow how the official collections actually unfold. The last full story collected in the first Clone Saga volume is from Web of Spider-Man 118/119 and Spider-Man 52/53: The Exile Returns!
Since this is American cape comics, and it was the 90s, Ben couldn’t go more than a few issues without an original costume. This is it, and there is a part of me who will always love and adore this stupid grunge-inspired costume. A full-body spandex suit looks awkward, but the exposed web-shooters help break up the red. The hoodie’s blue also looks striking against the red, being a brighter shade of blue than Spidey normally uses. The belt is also solid, but the ankle-pouches are certainly bizarre. Having read through the whole beast of The Clone Saga before, I can promise that Ben never uses those things, much like almost any other 90s creation and their pouches.
There’s also a nice split between Ben’s life as Peter and his time as Ben here. Where he had made the Spider-Man costume himself as a teenager, the hoodie Ben uses actually comes from a museum exhibit gift shop about Spiders.
Ben is there, trying to forget the drama about Aunt May and simply live a decent life. However, a crook trying to rob a hot dog stand, as well as someone trying to commit suicide off of the Brooklyn Bridge, makes him realize that it couldn’t hurt to try and still be a hero. Meanwhile, Venom has shown up in these pages as well, being his newfound anti-hero self. A few years earlier, Spider-Man had struck up an uneasy alliance with Venom, that the two would just leave the other alone. Ben, however, has zero memories of this alliance, and has decided that Venom is just too dangerous to be left to his own devices.
Amusingly, Spider-Man Unlimited issue 7 would also make their own origin story for the costume, which is slipped in the collections right after Web of Spider-Man 118. It side-steps the Venom story running at the same time, and claims to be Ben’s first time with the webs. It’s silly, but it works. A cop gives Ben a nickname of Spidey II, which won’t stick.
The rest of The Exile Returns unfolds by introducing Ken Ellis, a newspaper reporter with The Daily Bugle who has dedicated himself to covering Venom’s return to New York. Ben meets with him to try and get information on Venom, and confronts the murder at the tram terminal to Roosevelt Island.
The fight goes miserable for Ben, who has never fought Venom before. Venom also sniffs out that Ben isn’t Peter quickly, and takes badly to what he feels is a fake. Ben is nearly gutted in one attack by Venom, but one of Venom’s symbiote children winds up taking the brunt of Venom’s rage. I had to do some digging to find their name, but it was Scream. Ben takes the chance to try and web up his stomach wound and save the civilians in his way. It earns him the moniker Scarlet Spider from Ken Ellis, and a Lois Lane like dedication to get an exclusive interview with the red wall-crawler.
Ben is able to recover from his injuries (barely), and decides to build himself some new tech to fight Venom with. Ben claims he had these ideas in the back of his head, like he knew this would come up some day. These would become some genuinely iconic concepts for Ben. The first, Impact Webbing, was a small ball of webbing that would expand on impact and become massive cushions of web-tendrils that can either restrain or act as airbags. The other, a small metal prong he fires from the web-shooters called Stingers, that act as a tranquilizer dart. With these items, and the usual iron will that those from Parker blood poses, Ben is able to take Venom down.
It’s a solid little story, and does a great job showing that Ben isn’t some kind of knock-off or pretender to the Spider-throne. Having Ben take out Venom is a solid example of The Worf Effect, and also goes a great way to show that Ben is a “cool” character who the fans need to like. Considering the plan was also to have Ben take over as Peter, having him win where Peter often couldn’t was a big way to push Ben as a character.
The story also introduces Kaine, a mafia killer who is ridiculously beefy, also mysterious, and has another remarkably 90s outfit. A long, tattered purple cape, a dark blue bodysuit covered with black sinew and wrinkles like he’s just a little too buff, as well as red eyes and a dark blue facemask… and long, flowing brown hair.
Kaine will be remarkably important to the story later on, but he’s introduced as another mysterious man with a mysterious past. This is, sadly, a trend with Spider-Man for the rest of this article series. However, he was at least tenuously linked with Ben in some way, so far as we knew at the time.
This is actually where those buying the collections will reach the end of Volume 1 of The Clone Saga. However, we’re going to move into Volume 2 of the collections, looking at Amazing Spider-Man 395/396 and Spectacular Spider-Man 218/219. These issues make up Back From the Edge.
While The Exile Returns was all about setting Ben up as a hero, Back from the Edge genuinely feels like the American comic equivalent of an anime filler arc. The Vulture, who is now young again thanks to the 90s being the 90s, is trying to convince Daredevil villain The Owl to team up because they’re both bird-based villains. However, Vulture is completely insane, and The Owl is turned off by the villain’s use of a lethal poison made by the US Government that has no antidote. Spider-Man teams up with Daredevil, who is also in the middle of being hit by the 90s in a new armored costume and is also pretending that he’s not Matt Murdock. Unfortunately, it does end with Peter poisoned by the Vulture, and Peter realizing he’s going to die very soon.
It also could have been told in about an issue.
It should also be noted that Marvel was at this time going under some major stresses in order to somehow relieve costs and prevent themselves from going bankrupt. Rather than one editor in chief overseeing multiple editors, who all had their own books, Marvel was split into 5 major editor groups. There was the X-Men group, the Spider-Man group, Marvel Heroes, Marvel Edge, and the licensed titles group. There were even some weird overlaps, where guys like the New Warriors were shoved into the Spider-Man group despite not fitting into that hole at all. As such, The Clone Saga was now without its original editors.
After this, the comics bounce back to Ben Reilly in Web and Spider-Man with Web of Life. Another 4 part story, this one focuses on a new character introduced the previous year, the Grim Hunter! The son of Kraven, he looked to take revenge against Spider-Man, whom he blamed for the death of his father in the seminal Kraven’s Last Hunt. It also shows Ben finally easing his way into the idea of being a hero, though he still hates the Scarlet Spider moniker.
Web of Life also introduces Ben’s longtime friend and confidant, Doctor Seward Trainer. He’s a genetic scientist, who helps Ben figure out if he’s started to melt, like all clones allegedly will. He isn’t, at least for now, but he is suffering weird memory flashes of waking up in the cloning tank with the Jackal. Kaine is also suffering weird mental flashes, with Mary Jane in mortal peril. Oh, and Kaine kills the Grim Hunter to establish how badass and evil he is.
The Grim Hunter had been offered up on the slate of villains to die, and the current editorial crew wanted to use Kaine to clear the deck, as it was. To streamline the excessive amount of villains that Spider-Man now had, and show how incredible he was. Some geniuses even wanted to give Kaine his own spin-off book at the time, and treat him like Venom. Almost everyone with some form of power below them objected, thankfully.
In Amazing 397/398 and Spectacular 220/221, we had the similarly titled Web of Death. Spinning right out of Back from the Edge, Peter is still dying from the unknown poison that courses through his body. He also starts to receive flashes of being in some weird containment tank with the Jackal nearby, which he shouldn’t be getting if he’s the original Peter Parker. This causes him to pass out, and Doctor Octopus discovers his unconscious body. Kaine also discovers his body, but both leave him there to regain consciousness later.
The book also introduces a new villain who oozes 90s in some of the weirdest ways.
This is Stunner, Angelina Brancale. She is, as it turns out, an overweight woman who fell in love with Doctor Octopus, so he made her a virtual reality body to do his bidding whenever they wanted. And this means hyper-sexual brawler, apparently. Doctor Octopus comes across Peter again, this time by Peter’s wishes. Peter knows he’s dying, and needs Doc for help finding a cure. MJ is pregnant, as he has just found out, and can’t think of leaving her alone. Strangely, Doc actually accepts the plea for help. There’s even some weird foreshadowing to what would eventually become The Superior Spider-Man in Otto’s attitudes.
Otto finally cures Peter Parker after several issues of teases and red herrings. However, editorial was determined for Kaine to clear the board, and Doctor Octopus died horribly. One of the oldest foes of Spider-Man, kicked off the proverbial playing board.
Marketing made a push to hype this, with the three part Funeral for an Octopus mini-series. The only thing to come of this would be Spider-Man using Doc Ock’s tentacles for an action figure push a few years later.
I had this guy. He was really cool. Shame one of the bendy tentacles snapped in half like weak plastic.
Now that Peter wasn’t going to die (yet?), and Ben was firmly established as a hero, it was time to bring both the clone and the original together for one story. Starting in Web 122 and going into Amazing 399 and Spider-Man 56, we have Smoke and Mirrors. I feel this is the point where The Clone Saga runs careening off the rails. Why? Well, there’s a villain who makes their big return here, as Peter, Ben, and Kaine all desperately try to find out why they’re all suffering from similar memory flashes of being in clone vats.
The Jackal has returned, in a new body, and fully updated for the 90s. No longer is he wearing a mask to look like a green monster, Miles Warren has somehow changed himself to actually be a weird green monster. Why?
No one really quite knows why, and no writer has bothered to explain it. I blame the 90s.
According to The Life of Reilly, there was a push from Glenn Greenberg and Mark Bernardo on editorial to try and re-retcon away The Evolutionary War’s retcons. No one wanted to touch those comics, since the story was barely 6 years old at that point. Howard Mackie was given the job in Smoke and Mirrors, and the end result is the Jackal returning, claiming he’d never been dead in the first place, and further claiming that both Ben and Peter were clones!
Readers were even teased with images of Kaine watching the Spider-Men, being himself watched by a being called the Scrier. Scrier had been hanging around with Judas Traveller for some time, but now was nowhere to be seen. And, to drive readers insane, an extra clone storage pod was found at the end of Smoke and Mirrors, laying untouched with something within. Some of the writers had wanted to throw another curve at readers who were already wondering if Ben was the real thing, and that was their idea: that the “real” Peter had been in a storage tank since 1975!
Unfortunately,The Clone Saga would soon be filled with more twists than M. Night Shamalan’s filmography. We’ll see more of it as we look into volumes 3 and 4 of The Clone Saga.
