Clone Saga Musings

I think about 90s comics megaevents far more than is healthy, and today, spurred on by this amazingly hilarious article, I got to thinking about the infamous late 90s Spider-book super event, the Clone Saga. For those of you who don't know (Pedro), the Clone Saga centered around the return of Ben Reilly, a clone of Spider-Man that Spidey had fought with back in the early 80s and thought was dead. With him came the original perpetrator of the clone saga, the Jackal (the one who had died in the 80s was a clone) and a bunch of crappy new villians, most of them also clones of Spider-Man. I know you're already sick of clones just from this paragraph, as they're about as boring a plot device as magical mind-wipes.

Thanks to a total lack of editorial control and orders from marketing to keep the surprisingly profitable storyline running for as long as possible, the thing took two years to finally finish with four or five aborted endings, eventually revealing that it was all the most elaborate practical joke in history perpetrated by the surprisingly not dead original Green Goblin Norman Osborn, who decided to kind of passive-aggresively dick around with Spidey with angsty clones instead of flying through his window and shoving a pumpkin bomb up his ass.

The main (well, one of the main) points of contention comes roughly a fourth of the way through, where the Spiders finally get an extensive battery of tests done and it is revealed that Ben Reilly is the original, and the Peter Parker we'd been reading about for 15 years was the clone. Naturally, fans HATED it, for reasons that should be obvious. The clone's Spider-adventures didn't count, they were just essentially reading about some guy who had dressed up as Spidey.

It was Marvel's intent to move Peter and his pregnant wife out of the books so they could have the REAL Peter Parker go back to being single and silver-agey without 20 years of crappy late 80s/90s baggage pulling him down, and I must say it makes a little more sense than changing reality by selling your pregnant supermodel wife to the devil. It didn't work out, they pulled Peter back as the original out of their asses and spent half a decade weighed down with the baggage, and now we're roughly back on track and never ever EVER mention it.

But think of it this way. What if Marvel had planned in advance for the massive fan backlash at Peter being a clone? This could have been some of the most meta shit in HISTORY.

Peter's a clone. Fans are unhappy. His adventures, accomplishments, his life didn't count because he's not the real guy. Well guess what? THAT'S HOW PETER FUCKING FEELS RIGHT NOW. It could have been an AMAZING way to get readers to identify with what Peter was going through. And, if they kept it going for awhile (like, say, two years) with good writers (yeah, the 90s) then slowly but surely Peter could have come to terms with his clone blues and become someone who liked himself and cared about himself again, regardless of his origins or what he was made for or all those other cliche clone dillemas, and at the same time the fans would come to accept him too. The writing would have to be really good though, surprisingly better than expected, "bring Bucky back from the dead as a cyborg soviet killer and make it awesome" level good. In the end, readers could identify with Peter getting back on his feet because they too would have accepted him.

Now let's look at his wife, Mary Jane. At this point, she was pregnant with Peter's child (don't ask how that turned out), but she has to know, as much as she loves Peter... he's NOT the same guy who was with her for the first 20 years of Spidey continuity. In the future, one of them is going to bring up a "remember that time" and then get really uncomfortably silent, because at that time Peter didn't exist, it was Ben. As caring and accepting and awesome as MJ is, there's some little part of her that's not going to accept it and taint the relationship. And this is ANOTHER GREAT WAY TO IDENTIFY WITH THE READER. Because as good as Peter as a clone is written, as many fans who have grown to love and accept the new status quo, there's still going to be that tainted feeling of getting screwed.

And finally, we have Ben. He's going to be picking up his life after Peter leaves with his wife for a happily ever after. But he's missed five in-universe years of experiences. He can't just walk in and have it be the silver age again. His friends are going to say "Hey Peter, where's your pregnant wife?" and be pissed off and suspicious when he can't remember relatively recent events. And Ben himself isn't just silver age Peter. He's spent five years on the road having god knows how many kinds of new experiences. He's still technically married to Mary Jane. The point is, if done intentionally, it goes to show that you can't just go back to the past. Things have changed, the world has changed, the characters have changed, and have to work with that.

These three characters could form an amazing meta-textual examination over the reality of ficional characters and change, which would be cool as christ.

Unfortunately, in the real world it would never happen because:
1. No writer is that good.
2. Marvel would much rather go back to status quo with Spidey as opposed to accepting that 50 goddamned years of stuff has happened to him that might change him a bit.
3. Their entire premise would rest on fans being utterly disgusted with a major plot development, which isn't good from a sales standpoint.

Still, I think it could have been interesting, given a decade and a half of retrospect.