I just read the Spider-Man Clone Saga. The artwork was good, but the actual story was pretty flawed. Note this contains extensive spoilers so don’t read if you haven’t read the Clone Saga.
The early Spider-Man stories could easily be read stand alone. This is almost retarded. I picked up the Lost Years mini which did explain some of the characters, and without that I would have been totally lost. It seemed like we had a collection of clones for no real reason. I would have rather had to read about of 2-3 Peter Parkers with each story fully explained. For example, just a story about Ben Reilly trying to find where he fits in the world.
The bad guy’s motivation is very unclear. Why does the Norman Osborn manipulate the Jackal when there was no relationship in the first Clone issue? Why would the Jackal from ESU be that easy to manipulate.
Repetitive death scenes. Both the cloned Ben Reilly and the 2nd Parker clone from the sewers degenerate in exactly the same melodramatic way.
Too obvious “we need to do some house cleaning†killing off of minor clones. The deaths also seemed to have an “X-Men 3†with Cyclops effect, where no one seems to really acknowledge these people being killed. It really feels like the main characters share the reader’s contempt for these minor clone.
The main plot seemed like the editors sat around and came up with a bunch of cool ideas – “what if Parkers powers were super advanced? What if Spider-Man's been a clone all these years? What if we threw in a mysterious guy who knows everything?†- and instead of narrowing these ideas down just went with them all. This made the story very hard to follow, and the final explanation that Norman Osborn was behind it all seemed a bit of a stretch. They should have focused on one main plot and fleshed it out instead. Also, it was never really clear what the Jackal was planning and why.
The whole "replace our hero with a hipper version" thing has been done to death. Give it a rest already. His new inventions and joining the New Warriors seemed like a bad story and forced into the Clone Saga.
The ending with the Green Goblin. The main thing ruining it was the too obvious homage to the characters original great death with the glider impaling Ben.
All in all the major problems was the whole Saga being impossible to follow since so many stories and lead ups were retconned, and lack of follow through in the later issues.
To be fair there was several cool scenes.
Kaine - Spider-Man's powers on crack. He killed Doc Ock without breaking a sweat.
The whole Ben Reilly approach to Spider-Man - cool costume, impact webbing and stingers were a nice touch. Seeing him learn the ropes and try to make his life work brought back memories of simpler Spider-Man stories.
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:winky:
Anally.
oh wait
Ha ha. This a response to the "Infinite Crisis sucks thread." Yay. I get things :P
Yeah well uh
HIS MOM SUCKS AM I RIGHT GUYS BACK ME UP ON THIS ONE
The Life of Reilly
35 part series!?
It is.
I have to give it to the Clone Saga for at least ending that retarded "THERE IS NO PETER PARKER THERE IS ONLY THE SPIDER" bullshit.
READ THIS.
It's great, especially for the insight into just how much was made up as they went along.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
It seems like the execution was pretty cool, until the marketing department took control.