THE LIFE OF REILLY

Spidey’s clone wars

The Clone Saga stands as the definitive Spider-man storyline of the ’90s – and one of the most provocative in the character’s history, designed as Marvel’s counterstrike to such mythology-shaking DC Comics epics as The Death Of Superman and Batman’s Knightfall arc.

Riffing on a plot point from 1975, it threatened to reveal that readers had really been following the adventures of Peter Parker’s clone for the past two decades. While Ben Reilly, aka the Scarlet Spider, ultimately proved to be the lab-bred doppelgänger, the increasingly convoluted uberplot twisted on for years, through multiple titles and spin-offs.

“The Clone Saga – which for a long while increased Spider-man comics sales when pretty much everything else was declining – became a lightning rod for the collective nervous breakdown the superhero comics business was undergoing,” says Danny Fingeroth, former group editor of Marvel’s Spiderman line.

“The extreme reactions to it had, in my view, little to do with the actual content of the comics, but rather with an anxiety people in and around comics were feeling due to a variety of business decisions and related economic developments.”

So how does Fingeroth view the saga now? “It was an exciting storyline that was eventually dragged out too long for marketing reasons outside the creators’ and editors’ control,” he tells SFX, “one that, though ultimately undone – like a hundred other comics storylines over the decades – provided the basis for many future storylines and countless collected reprint editions. It was risky and thrilling for creators and readers alike.”