Casualties of Retcon VII: Spider-Man

While most of the previous casualties of retroactive continuity vanish, stop mentioning the offending stories, or suffer with a burden of vile inherited storytelling baggage, Spider-Man represents a unique situation. Yes, readers (and non-readers) still howl in righteous indignation at the offenses of the universally reviled "Spider-Clone Saga."

Spider-Man, however, enjoyed a rare good fortune. He nearly vanished into a retcon that would have stripped him of his own identity, replaced him with a clone of himself, and shipped him off into the land of comics footnotes.

Building upon, or Breaking up, Foundations

Between 1968 and 1974, Spider-Man enjoyed what we might call a Romita-flavored Glory Day, enjoying the vital treatment at hands like Stan Lee, Gerry Conway, John Romita, Gil Kane, and Ross Andru, all of whom pushed the character just a bit outside Steve Ditko's vigorous treatment into a territory with enough optimism that the dark moments could cast truly black shadows.

If Uncanny X-Men has the "Dark Phoenix Saga" for its opus, which subsequent plot twists would divest of its impact by undoing its important consequences, Spider-Man had the death of Gwen Stacy. This story dated from a different era in comics in which very few characters died (except villains, who die as part of their idiom), and in which dead characters (except, again, villains) did not reappear after the passage of a few issues of stories on another subject.

Death did not occur casually in the early seventies. In modern comics, we may have incidents like the Kyle Raynor Green Lantern finding his girlfriend, in pieces, in a freezer, in a crass story that would not seriously impact the development of the character. Such things meant an opportunity for a real storytelling event, and Conway, Kane, and Romita did much with this tale to wrench the reader around. The story centered on the loathesome Green Goblin's never-ending campaign to inflict suffering on Spider-Man, a war that had raged almost ten years (with interruptions) since Steve Ditko introduced the character in the earliest days of the book.

Formulaic comic-book deaths include things like jumping in front of an attack in order to sacrifice oneself to preserve another; slow and histrionic deaths from disease; tragic subtractions from the timestream; and even the occasional death from old age. Marvel used none of these when they decided to shock readers senseless with the demise of Gwen Stacy.

Instead, they set up Spider-Man to kill her. The acidic irony of the situation unravelled when the Green Goblin, aware of Spider-Man's secret identity and his attachment to Gwen, caused her to fall off a roof (one of the pat situations that happen so often to the girlfriends of flying superheroes that it has become a joke in that context). Spider-Man, however, represented a departure from the flying-hero model. He travels by leaping and by swinging from lines of webbing that he squirts out from devices on his wrists. So, when Gwen went over the edge, Spider-Man cast a web to catch her.

Rather than creating a rescue line, however, the cord of webbing caught Gwen like a noose and snapped her neck.

Comics, though, has a hard time letting stories stand. Later stories have to reference and fiddle with the earlier, without regard to where they stand in the canon or their affect on readers. Each revelation poses a launching point for a subsequent counter-revelation.

Marvel, therefore, subjected readers to a tale in which Gwen Stacy seemingly returned from the dead. The new Gwen, however, turned out no more than a duplicate, or (dare I say it) a clone. This launched a whole series of clone stories, first involving a Peter Parker clone in the seventies (quickly killed off, and so much the better), then other Spider-Man clones, and ultimately a series of tales sometimes called "Clone Wars."

Stories involving clones as plot twists do enough, by themselves, to keep the repute of comics low. Marvel, however, found a way to dig down below previous nadirs in a tale that initially began as a tale some readers found compelling, but ultimately decayed into incoherence.

Thus, we have the "Spider-Clone Saga."

The Jackal and the Clones

Story accretions had revealed the efforts of a creator of clones. This man we may call the Jackal, and note that, for all the harm clones do to stories, such a man deserves our contempt even where his motives seem pure. Said Jackal, however, brought about both the dreadful Gwen Stacy clone (as part of an effort to play with Spider-Man's beleaguered consciousness) and the aforementioned, and departed, Peter Parker clone (as part of the same or another effort to inflict misery on Spider-Man, and probably also upon his readers).

This Jackal, person, then, meant bad news wherever he appeared, and he and his machinations began tainting Spider-Man books. Worst of all, the Peter Parker clone, thought (and hoped) dead by Spider-Man readers, resurfaced. Evidently, he had spent years wandering after others had left him for dead where his mortal remains had purportedly perished in an industrial smokestack somewhere (note to self: Always go back to make sure the clones have died).

The Revelation Heard 'round the World

Most of us, if faced with all the problems inherent in the return of an unwanted clone to the bearer of the DNA that created him, would find some means of coping. You might find the clone a job somewhere and invite him to family reunions; or you might get a restraining order to make sure he comes nowhere near where you live and particularly nowhere within a mile or so of your girlfriend. Alas, clones stick like superglue in comics, and, once revealed, take on some of the properties of the more intractible cancers. This means one needs to kill them before they kill their hosts.

Spider-Man, though, well-versed in some thirty-plus years of comic book angst posing at this point, instead played a kind of human pinball with the principals in this ugly saga. Where a saner mind might say "Clones! CLONES! Don't you get it? GET OUT!", our hero naively continued to participate in stories which piecemeal revealed the ugly truth.

The ugly truth, obligingly, did come out. It came out like a blockage in a toilet pipe, with all the attendant audience appreciation. Bad enough, you might think, that Peter Parker should have to share the world with a perfect or imperfect duplicate; that position might seem akin to that of the twin who survives a childbirth in which the other twin dies. One version, after all, blessed by Fate, came out ahead, and the other had nothing. Such a pretext might have allowed Spider-Man to wallow in guilt until the millennium. But no, the writers came up with something worse.

The Peter Parker who had appeared in Spider-Man titles for the twenty years following the disappearance (and presumed death) of his original clone turned out, it seemed, to have lived a lie for all this time. The writers revealed that Peter Parker, as understood by readers, grew in a laboratory and not a womb, and that the real, original Spider-Man, had developed amnesia in the aftermath of a bogus death that caused the original and the clone to switch places.

If you would annoy a comics reader, particularly in the era in which continuity became a central defining standard for the medium, you would do well to dispose of a series of books he holds in regard. If you would invite him to mayhem, throw out twenty years of books.

Conspicuous and Heroic Backpedaling

At first, Marvel followed this line through its obvious consequences. The key players traded places; "our" Peter Parker took the name "Ben Reilly," to connect him to the adoptive parents he remembered, his uncle Ben Parker, and his aunt May (nee Reilly). To further keep the replacement Peter Parker in his role as Spider-Man, the version he replaced lost his powers.

The Jackal returned as a deus ex machina here, revealing that the Spider-Man who claimed the name Spider-Man between 1975 had not grown in a vat; that the Spider-Man who replaced him as the original, 1963-1975 Spider-Man had grown in a vat; that all this story's revelations represented a huge fraud on Spider-Man (and the reader); and that the status quo predating this story arc still pertained.

Some comics used to bear blurbs like "Not a dream! Not a hoax! Not an imaginary story!" They did this because some stories would back heroes into corners that writers needed to get them back out of, such as cases when Superman occasionally violated the all-important "no marrying Lois Lane" bylaw of DC Comics (since repealed). The three basic copouts (dream, hoax, and imaginary story) let everyone off the hook, except, sometimes, the reader.

While we can complain about the use of such ruses, consider that a tool itself does not bear the weight of what someone uses it for. Fire can cook food or can burn children to death; the evil comes from what people do with it. Therefore, we should think of Marvel's resolution to the whole clone problem in better terms. Yes, long-term readers have suffered the "only a hoax" loophole enough to resent it. But did a realistic alternative exist? The comics had backed Peter Parker and Ben Reilly so far into a cul-de-sac that options included: "leave it alone" and "reboot."

Therefore the clone went back to his clonish history, the original went back to his original history, and the duplicate created himself a short-lived niche as the "Scarlet Spider," using the "Ben Reilly" moniker and distinguishing himself from his prototype in interesting, sometimes stylish, but generally insignificant details of costuming, hair color, and equipment.

The Aftermath

Plug the name "Ben Reilly" into a search engine and you may come across a dozen or so fan sites for the "Scarlet Spider." Some fans had come to like him, whether in the Spider-books or in the New Warriors, as a hero in his own right. A small subset of these fans actively prefer him to his prototype, for whatever reasons we may glean (sympathy for underdogs? fans of a relatively uncluttered version of Spider-Man? enthusiasm for his ripped sweatshirt look?)

In general, however, the whole Spider-Clone business left a bad taste in readers' mouths, either from the way it turned sour so soon, or from the clumsy way in which writers attempted to seal off the loose ends (such as Ben Reilly's demise in Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man #75.

Two schools of thought currently coexist on the topic. One favors an approach in which breeding and manners incline the thoughtful to avoid mentioing anything about this story, in perpetuity; the other prefers a morbid and slightly naughty glee in hashing over the faults of the plotline, including it in documents with titles like "the ten worst Marvel retcons."

Yes, this story did much to lower the already abysmal standing of clone stories in comics. Such stories, one would have once thought, could not enjoy a lower status than they suffered in the aftermath of pieces like the first Gwen Stacy clone story, but that piece now serves mainly as an introductory footnote to the Alpha Offense: the legendary (and legendarily reviled) Spider-Clone Saga.

However, put into perspective, some small light does shine in the whole business. In spite of stories that linger like a bad aftertaste in comics (Tony Stark's drinking binges in Iron Man, or any favorite that might occur), and in spite of the Continuity Principle that states a printed story "happened," Spider-Man did escape a fate equivalent to oblivion. Marvel did not stand by the notion that the Spider-Man between 1975 and 1995 represented a confused clone who had usurped the place of his prototype. Marvel did not send Peter Parker away, wearing an unfamiliar name, to perhaps show up dead in some later book that needed a cold body for a body count. Maybe brutally, Marvel cut off the nonsense at the source, made the whole thing a hoax, and ended the ugly fear that they might actually inflict this piece on readers as part of the Spider-Man concept. Imagine, if you will, a page retelling Spider-Man's origin, including the one panel that says "...but then I got amnesia, traded places with a clone for ten years, got both of us confused, and then finally came back."

Peter Parker, one of Marvel's originals (and a linchpin of the Marvel Revolution that redefined superhero comics in the sixties), escaped the guillotine, and readers should feel some gratitude for this.