Ben Reilly's New Identity Chasm Is Doomed to Fail
Goooooooooooood.
Reading/buying the Clone saga, and while I’m not quite there yet, why did Dan Jurgens only staye on Sensational for only 7 issues?
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Comic-Watch Reviewer
Titles:
/Doctor Strange/Captain Marvel\Scarlet Witch\
/Iron Man/Captain Britain/Wasp\X-Men\
/JSA\/X-Treme X-Men\/WILDCATS\
https://comic-watch.com/author/baradtzgmail-com
Memory's a bit fuzzy but Life of Reilly details he was working under the impression that editorial was running with the "Ben was always a temporary Spider-Man" endgame, and that he would eventually get to write Peter. Then they shifted to "Ben's the real Peter" and back again, and the padding and general workplace toxicity around Spider-books at the time burned him out.
It’s ironic since Jurgens wrote one of the best characterizations of Ben. Anyway, he’s doing covers for the BR mini now, so it seems like he’s come around on Ben since then.
He knew that going in, but according to Life of Reilly like someone else mentioned, he could tell the powers that be were getting cold feet about making the change long-lasting and he also did his part in trying to sway the Spider editor at the time to change things. The resulting mess of no one managing to settle on a status quo and how to get there as well as Bob Harras demanding the storyline last 6 more months or so burned him out, so he left.
Also, just from the things I've pointed out about Spencer's run - anytime you see your PR arm publish stories saying one of your current things "isn't going to last", well... they're more or less just setting the stage.
Last edited by IamnotJudasTraveller; 05-21-2022 at 11:39 AM.
Discovering/CONFESSING! the nature of evil... one retcon at a time.
Weirdly enough, I think things worked out for the best. I recall the two plans were either Ben literally replaces Peter and adopts his ID, or Ben is killed off. If they tried to make Ben adopt the "Peter Parker" identity like nothing happened, that would have been out of character and a huge mistake imo. If they killed off Ben back in March or April of '96 as some were pushing for when it was clear that sales were beginning to tank, then it would have robbed us of an extra 6 months of Spider-Ben stories... and some of those were his strongest adventures since most weren't connected to the overall clone saga mythology.