Please give me your thoughts on the Clone Saga

[IamnotJudasTraveller]

So, maybe a 5-10% chance there's a Gathering of Five epic announced this month. The renaissance could be nigh

At the risk of ruining a perfectly fine joke, it was just to the point that Clone Saga was a wild swing for the fences with some good ideas, and then you have stuff that at best is a wild swing for the fences and little else. I think you'd be hardpressed to find anyone who still said they liked elements from the Clone Saga not to say the story was riddled with problems (I'm sure you'd still manage to find some, no less) when Marvel did their utmost to not touch it with a ten-foot pole, but eventually we did get a revival with Kaine, Ben and even the Jackal making it back to current continuity.

We've never really seen any sort of push of the sort for GoF (or Chapter One, for that matter, though they are each their own thing despite being inextricably linked). And while I'm just giving my own biased two cents here, if we skip out on Satellite collections which are filled with goodies that weren't still collected so they can get to GoF first... well, let's say they could have picked better material to collect!

[bob.schoonover]

To respond mostly on topic, the Clone Saga was definitely a mess, but it was an additive mess. New characters, new costumes, new status quos. Gathering of Five (and the stories around it) was ...subtractive (is that a word?) or at best neither. Bringing back May didn't move the story in a new direction, demystifying the Scriers functionally ended them as characters, etc.

[hbomb450]

I really enjoyed the ride at the time, the Clone Saga had me going to the comic shop every week cuz I couldn't wait for the next part of the story. I was high school age at the time so I'm totally nostalgic for that era of comics even though I grew up reading as far back as the Stern era (with Marvel Tales filling in the Lee/Conway era).

My only problems were that the art started suffering as it went on like when Sienkiewicz started inking Spectacular and made it practically unreadable. The main titles still had decent art teams but Unlimited was pretty bad. Maximum Cloneage Omega as it was published was inexcuseable.

I never felt it was a slap in the face to reveal Ben was the real Peter Parker. It's comics, they can always undo that, and they did
If anything, they could've disconnected the 4 main titles more, let each creative team do their own thing more often before coming together for one of the bigger stories like Trial of Peter Parker or Blood Brothers

[Alan2099]

There are a lot of people who talk about Sienkiewicz as a great artistic talent, but I have never liked anything he's done.

[Huntsman Spider]

I really enjoyed the ride at the time, the Clone Saga had me going to the comic shop every week cuz I couldn't wait for the next part of the story. I was high school age at the time so I'm totally nostalgic for that era of comics even though I grew up reading as far back as the Stern era (with Marvel Tales filling in the Lee/Conway era).

My only problems were that the art started suffering as it went on like when Sienkiewicz started inking Spectacular and made it practically unreadable. The main titles still had decent art teams but Unlimited was pretty bad. Maximum Cloneage Omega as it was published was inexcuseable.

I never felt it was a slap in the face to reveal Ben was the real Peter Parker. It's comics, they can always undo that, and they did
If anything, they could've disconnected the 4 main titles more, let each creative team do their own thing more often before coming together for one of the bigger stories like Trial of Peter Parker or Blood Brothers

The real slap in the face was having Peter flip his s*** and actively try to kill Ben for "stealing his life," compounded by then knocking a very pregnant Mary Jane across the room when she tried to stop him from killing Ben, realizing he'd regret it for the rest of his life once he came to his senses. The less said about Maximum Clonage, which immediately followed that particular s***show, the better.

[charliehustle415]

as a kid I thought it was the coolest shit ever even though I didn't understand what the hell was going on.

as an adult I feel the same way, I don't know what is going on and how did this ever last as long as it did.

[IamnotJudasTraveller]

the Clone Saga was definitely a mess, but it was an additive mess. New characters, new costumes, new status quos. Gathering of Five (and the stories around it) was ...subtractive (is that a word?) or at best neither. Bringing back May didn't move the story in a new direction, demystifying the Scriers functionally ended them as characters, etc.

I'm pretty sure it is - my job requires me to do a bunch of graphic designing for it, and "Additive"/"Subtractive" show up often as overlay options to add effects to images. I agree big time with the other points as well: I think besides Marvel doing what it did for like 2 decades, no small amount of messiness in the Clone Saga comes from its reset button of an ending. Gathering of Five was just an extra reset button on top of a reset button: since Marvel didn't want to pursue baby May, but couldn't work up the guts to say she was gone, the fact they just gave a cop out answer with AUNT May being alive, and then MJ just going back to modelling (since they couldn't much ignore the fall out of a dead child, no matter how much they might have wanted) might have been too much to ask even for comics (also: Osborn goes nuts and gets taken down by Spider-Man in an embarassing display as he's literally gone insane, but the creative team didn't think we'd WANT TO SEE IT after multiple years of Lex Osborn parading his figurative shlong on the Daily Bugle's office.)

I think it'll always bear repeating how Marvel didn't want to commit to the plot point, but kept teasing it; next thing you know, DeFalco's Spider-Girl volume 1 manages to make it to a 100 issues.

My only problems were that the art started suffering as it went on like when Sienkiewicz started inking Spectacular and made it practically unreadable.

Somehow, I thought Sienkiewicz elevated Buscema's art in my eyes. Only reading it older I can appreciate how kinetic his angular stylization made everything look, but that approach brought a very much painting like approach to the images.

Of course, I'm not going to say it might make for good cape comics reading. It did feel a whole lot more authoral than the book'd demand, like you'd see on a Vertigo book instead.

There are a lot of people who talk about Sienkiewicz as a great artistic talent, but I have never liked anything he's done.

I always thought this In Memoriam portrait of Adam West is about all kinds of lovely.

(You might mean it more in the lines of sequential art, odds are)

[Alan2099]

I always thought this In Memoriam portrait of Adam West is about all kinds of lovely.

(You might mean it more in the lines of sequential art, odds are)

That is lovely, and I'll admit he could do some good pin-ups and covers, but yeah, I meant his sequential stuff. It never felt like his strong point.

[MisterTorgo]

I personally didn't care for it. I tolerated it fine until they had an angry Peter knock a pregnant MJ across a room when he thought he was the clone. I literally threw the book across the room and quit comics until the ems of the story.

[ZeroBG82]

For my money, the first part of the Clone Saga is really good comics. Then it starts to drag, repeat and finally go completely off the rails. Everything up to Amazing #400? Gold. But by Maximum Clonage it has completely lost the plot and is just thrashing about because marketing told them to. In between is a mixed bag, with some really good stories and some not so great ones standing side by side.

The ship gets righted by Sensational #1, however, and Ben's tenure as Spider-man is actually really solid.

[Triniking1234]

Does anyone have a reading guide for Clone Saga?

[HypnoHustler]

Does anyone have a reading guide for Clone Saga?

The Epic Clone Saga and Ben Reilly collections put them in order, but basically the first comic of the month was ‘Web of…’ or ‘Sensational…’ (depending on the year), followed by ‘Amazing’, then adjective-less, and finally ‘Spectacular.’ All the comics crossed over into each other.

[Tuck]

The Epic Clone Saga and Ben Reilly collections put them in order, but basically the first comic of the month was ‘Web of…’ or ‘Sensational…’ (depending on the year), followed by ‘Amazing’, then adjective-less, and finally ‘Spectacular.’ All the comics crossed over into each other.

You forgot the first step in reading it: get drunk.

[Mister Mets]

It's a very mixed bag, with some of the worst Spider-Man comics ever and some decent material.

The Life of Reilly blog series is excellent commentary for anyone planning a reread.

https://lifeofreillyarchives.blogspot.com/

[godisawesome]

I’ve got a bit of a “lateral take” on it - that it’s sort of an evil twin to DC big events for Batman and Superman, the Knightfall Saga and Death of Superman Saga.

All three were triggered by editorial ideas, had a plethora of good writers take a shot at its events, introduced “family” members who could do spin-off books of their own, and had marketing embrace the story…

…But The Clone Saga was driven by bad editorial ideas, overworked and eventually overwhelmed it’s writers, sort of hated the idea of spin-off “family” books as any kind of long term strategy, and allowed marketing to take over at the worst moments.

You could even sort of look at Knightfall versus the Clone Saga as being a case study in “conservative, conventional superhero writing” being smartly defended and reconstructed on one hand and being twisted into a toxic cancer for the other: Denny O’Neil and co. pretty cleanly and effectively eviscerated the 90’s Anti-Hero and proved that “super hero families” were a great idea, while Bob Harras and co. showed how much havoc a fanatical obsession with outdated formula could wreak on a successful story.