Slowly making my way to the Clone Saga from the 90’s.
Slowly making my way to the Clone Saga from the 90’s.
Don’t, it’s not worth it...
The spider is always on the hunt.
Ignore everyone who says don’t do it. I bet most of them didn’t even read it and just know about it from reputation.
It’s one of the most epic Spidey sagas ever told and introduced the world to Ben Reilly and Kaine. It’s a long read and not everything is great, but there’s some banging stories in there like ‘Power and Responsibility’, ‘Web of Death’, ASM#400, Spider-Man: The Lost Years mini, Spider-Man: The Final Adventure mini, ‘Media Blizzard’, ‘Web of Carnage’, ‘Blood Brothers’, pretty much every issue of Sensational Spider-Man whether it’s the Jurgens run or the Dezago/Wieringo (R.I.P.) run, ‘Spider-Man: Redemption mini and of course the climax ‘Revelations’ and the Osborn Journal one-shot epilogue.
Those that don’t want to read it.... well, it’s their loss.
Two words.... Maximum Clonage
Speaking of The Lost Years and Redemption, I think J.M. DeMatteis was probably the best writer on The Clone Saga years, followed extremely closely by Tom DeFalco. That said, I did like Web of Death, if that was the one with Doctor Octopus's first attempt at redemption that culminated in him saving Peter's life after learning who he was before dying himself --- of course, he came back later. Something to do with the Hand, the Master Programmer, and Lady Octopus, maybe?
Yes, Maximum Clonage sucked. No argument from me there.
The spider is always on the hunt.
Right on!
Agreed with a lot of your picks. Mark of Kaine also holds a special place in my heart as it was the big first crossover I collected all the issues for when I first started collecting, before that I had just picked up some single issues here and there.
The Clone Saga had JM DeMatteis writing Amazing early on. All his stuff is quality. Espeically when combine with Bagley on art!
Last edited by Vortex85; 08-08-2019 at 06:41 PM.
Clone Saga is a very wild ride indeed, I was 10-11 in the 90's when it was new and I was just getting into reading Spider-Man because of the Animated Series. Maybe it's nostalgia from the times speaking but the Clone Saga isn't THAT bad, and I'm not going to try and convince anyone that it's the "magnum opus" of the Spider-Man books but it is a fun and interesting journey. If anything it's worth reading it for the artistic and emotional depictions of popular characters today, back then.
The city I once knew as home is teetering on the edge of radioactive oblivion
The only things that are worse than Clone Saga are sins past, one more day, and that fiasco with alpha, spiderman annoying sidekick
Convoluted plot lines (Judas Traveller), character misrepresentations ( Peter hitting Mary Jane), Bringing Norman Osborn back out of freaking nowhere, Jackal coming across a psycho villain to a joke and back again. Hell, I even read the life and times of Ben Reilly blog where the creators themselves express how corporate mandates and high sales forced them to keep the clone saga going even when they knew that they were writing themselves into a corner.
Ben (pre-clone conspiracy) and Kaine are great additions to the spiderman mythos, however the clone saga as a whole doesn’t work because it was running on at least 3 different books with writers that wanted to do anything other than write the damn thing. Their where some great stories mixed in there, but they are forgotten and will never be referenced because Marvel themselves don’t want readers or writers to be constrained by the actions their characters took while the Clone saga was happening. For example, Peter thinking he was a clone made him evil, no one thinks that’s Peter but it happened.
I’ve read the clone saga, what was good about it can’t wash away all the bad.