Ben Reilly and Kaine's first encounter

[exile001]

I think I would have been preferred that to the Jackal actually coming back as I tend to believe that he died for good in Maximum Clonage

Personally, I will always believe that the original Miles Warren died in Shea Stadium and every Miles/Jackal that appeared after has been a clone. Miles regaining his sanity and saving Ned proves it for me.

That and Clone Saga Jackal, who claims to be the original, constantly tells you everything out of his mouth is a lie. He's just an augmented clone. Plus, I find it a fun irony that there's a ton of Miles/Jackal clones out there all believing they're the original when that was exactly the fate he planned for Peter.

[Marvel Man]

I don't know what Ben coming back in 2011 would've looked like... whether he would've been Jackal in 'Spider Island' as Slott later claimed, or just been Scarlet Spider in that Yost series instead of Kaine, etc. It seems to have worked out and we got an interesting series with Kaine as SS, but I do wonder.

Yes, I remember that gaffe. That said, I thought both the Spidey/X-Men mini, and the 'Who was Ben Reilly?' arc to be pretty fun reads overall and great relief after a decade long moratorium on using Ben. Around that time, we also got back-ups in the 'Web of...' anthology series, such as a neat story by JM DeMatteis where Ben was an ESL teacher in Italy who confronts the local Mafia during his 5 year exile which I liked a lot (and also one by another writer where he was calling himself Henry Jones and working as a janitor, which I was less fond of).

The story where Ben has calling himself Henry Jones and working as a janitor was also written by JM Dematteis and published in Web of Spider-Man #5.
The story with Ben in Rome working as a teacher was published in Web of Spider-man #8.
Then, there was also a story starring Kaine with a special appeareance of Ben Reilly (in dreams) also by Dematties in Web of Spider-man #1.