Hey- Steven Butler here- I just checked out your video- I'm one of the artists who worked on the Clone Saga back in the day- thanks for at least trying to make sense of it- I remember not being able to make heads or tails of it even back when I was drawing it- just drawing the plots that were given to me- still and all, I'm not going to knock it, as it provided a living for me back in the day. Even now, The Scarlet Spider is my #1 requested character for commissions. Keep up the great work on your channel!

Remember guys: Marvel didn't want Peter and MJ to be married or have a kid But, The clone saga and Gwen and Norman children are still Canon. Great job Marvel👏

Beginning: "Spider-Man is getting too serious!" 24:20: "What if Mary Jane had a miscarriage?"

"How Marvel's Editors Botched..." could be a whole series unto itself.

"They could have the current Peter Parker retire with Mary Jane and start fresh with a Spider Man that wasn't married" I really don't understand why Marvel doesn't like the fact that Spidey got married.

You cloned yourself so hard it made your house shake. Impressive.

I was working in a comic shop while this debacle was going on. I'm actually amazed this video is only a half hour long. Marvel screwed this one up in every conceivable way, it's just an incredible story of doing everything wrong you possibly could. Lost 85% of our Spider-title readers over the course of two years or so and they did NOT come back.

Such a coincidence you posted this because just last week I was trying to explain to my nephew what the Clone Saga was. Then I kind of trailed off and said, "It gets complicated."

I maintained the Spider-Man clone saga could’ve worked if the marketing department didn’t take over the entire story and hijacked it from the actual writers and ruined the entire story to the ground.

Growing up in the 90's, I always just assumed that the comics I read were good. Looking back, I'm not sure what I was thinking.

Aunt May’s death story was so good that I was upset when they brought her back.

Damn those are some heavy sodas, the entire house shook.

When you’re struggling so hard with fake Mountain Dew that you start warping reality

90s Spider-Man: This is starting to sound like a bad comic book plot.

Ah the nineties, a strange time to be into comics. My cousin was buying a mess of comics with variant covers. I didn't mind the clone saga at first. Then it kept going and going and going. I also hated what they did to MJ. True that 400 was good. I legit cried when Aunt May died but I was okay with it. The series did get better eventually until One More Day. I quit after that and I haven't gone back.

15:50 Spider-man is a successful character with a rich history that eclipses his one instance of domestic abuse. Hank Pym's most notable story line besides building Ultron was backhanding Janet.

Clone saga: who is peter Parker? Me: I’ll do you one better, why is peter Parker?

When Kane first revealed his face all I could hear in my head was "hey yo Adrienne"

It was later revealed that Norman told Peter he snapped his infant daughter's neck because he detested Peter and Mary Jane so much.

It's great how Zdarsky simplified the whole debacle to a single issue that really works in Life Story.

THE CLONE SAGA can be summed up in one word: avoid.

*AT LEAST* Mayday Parker/Spider-Girl came out of the Clone Saga

If I had been at the writers meeting in 1995, I would have thrown something at Brevort for even uttering the phrase 'time travel' as a means to pull us from our convoluted hell.

I’ve been reading Amazing Spider Man for over 40 years & the idea of having Ben Riley being the one true Peter Parker & the Peter we’d been following since 1974 reviled as a clone has to be the single worst idea in the history of comics. How that ever got approved is still astonishing.

Spider-Man’s greatest enemy will always be editorial and their refusal to let him grow up

I'm still trying to figure out why its the Marvel editors who are the "never MJ" crowd while outside it, the world at large, it's "Peter and Mary Jane, always". Sure, it's an impetus for more "romance " stories... or "look, this is my girlfriend and she's dating Spider-man now" self insert one... but at the cost of Peter Parker's character. He's a swinger, sure, but he's not that kind of swinger. He's a wallflower wallcrawler, a one women Spider-man. Sorry, you were talking about the Clone Saga, the OTHER contested Spider-man story, please continue...

I had a friend who described the zombies storyline in Call Of Duty: Black Ops as being similar to the Clone Saga. It just keeps going on with no clear end in sight. A different team adds more to it every game, to the point where it's now just a mess. What started out as something light-hearted and fun turned into something weird with a plot that is so complicated it becomes off-putting for new fans of the series.

The biggest problem with this story was that there were too many cooks in the kitchen. All the changes in leadership seriously hurt this story leading to a LOT of plot holes and cheapening characters that could have been mainstays like Judas Traveler and especially Ben Reilly. This was the storyline that made me drop comics for a while, and One More Day made me bail again, but that is another story.

The clone saga was in retrospect a very bad story, but one of my guilty pleasures. There are many panels of Romita Jr & Bagley's art of Ben Reilly as Scarlet Spider & Spider-Man that I really loved. Also that original goal of bringing "Spider-Man" back to basics in Ben, WAS reached...albeit in small slivers...& short-lived.

First rule of clone saga: We don't talk about the clone saga. *_Never_*

Thanks for finally simplifying this for me after 25 years.

When I was younger, my mom use to buy me random comics from the flea market and I got a comic from the Spider-Man Clone Saga. It was one of the reasons I got into Spider-Man because all the characters looked cool but I had no clue who Kaine was.

Kaine ended up taking on the "Scarlet Spider " name and had a 25 issue series around 2015. I rather liked it as he was trying to redeem himself and all the evil he did by being the hero of Houston, TX. I liked it enough to own the whole series and found his struggle to be a hero compelling. It had a good cast of supporting characters as well and would read further issues if published.

Comictropes plus Clone Saga? I’m in for a treat today !

That was a crazy time for Marvel. It was a sinking ship. No clear vision, and top tier talent abandoning ship.

I remember I explained this to a friend of mine. After the explanation, she got mad. Then I got to talking about Sins Past, she got disgusted. Then I got to talking about One More Day, she just couldn't care anymore 😂

I mean at least we got the Spider-Girl series because of the clone saga

"The saga of the clones" was the reason why I gave up Spidey for years ... and then "One more day" happened, they should never have existed.

"Let's just hope no one notices" is never a good design/writing decision. Just don't.

this is why i hate "events'. a useless cash grab that results in zero gain.

"The Clone Saga" also known as "How to lose a loyal following"

Thank you for the Hank Pym shout out. I bring that one up all the time when Pym gets crap.

no one: absolutely no one: Marvel: DID SOMEONE SAY MoRe ClOnEs?!

Wow, it's exhausting just hearing about that convoluted mess of a Saga! But hey, another great episode and you did a heck of a job explaining all the behind the scenes stuff that readers from the 90's may otherwise never have known about. But the real question remains...which Chris is the real one and which is the clone?!?

So good One of the reason I follow you man is because you don't spit hate all over the media of comics, your last bit saying that you can stop reading and come back later with a honest smile made remember what a good fan can be. Thanka again and I'm looking forward for your next video.

You should be proud of the work you put into this video. It's really good at making sense of what's regarded as a confusing mess. Thank you for everything you do here on your channel.

The Clone Saga,or as many fans back in the day called: Just End it Already.

I was a huge Spidy fan. Collected so many of his comics and got so many from older uncles and family members. BUT the clone saga broke me. I was 13 when i read it and it just left me confused and not liking any of it. I can not understand why they thought replacing Peter Parker would work. Despite the struggles, despite the dark issues and story lines, we were there to see him through it. Finding out that Ben was the "REAL spiderman" felt like I had been cheated. And by this time it didn't matter who Ben was, because Peter or the Peter that Marvel wanted us to think was a clone, is the hero I had invested in all these years. He was now the Real spiderman to me. BUT then it turns out the fake Parker WAS the real Parker? Argh, my head huts thinking about it again. Hardly read a Spiderman comics since. Edit: It's such a nostalgic trip seeing those comic covers and panels. Reminds me of being a kid again, running around collecting them. We got comics a month late here in Fiji, but that didn't ruin anything.

This knock off mountain dew Chris bought WAYYY too much of is gonna be featured in intros for the next several years. He is not flushin them dollars down the drain.

This saga was definitely Spider-man's darkest timeline.

Awesome underrated channel. You know comics and dont make mistakes in all your videos like other comic book uploads on YT

This is actually a really well timed video since in my deep dive of reading all the spiderman titles from the beginning I just finished the clone saga. Any issue with the jackal and the end where mj loses the baby and ben dies are the low points for me in this saga

Wow. That’s all I can say. The 90’s clone saga was always rough to read due to how wacky things went. But this really puts it all into prospective. Thanks for the good video Chris!

I've always loved Spider-Man but I was a kid when this came out and I've always wondered why people hated the clone saga so much but this just sounds so painful to have to live through

I still come back to this video and rewatch because of the insanity this storyline is and how many comics you had to buy in order to simple keep up. Jesus

Doc Oc: gathers the boys to kill Spider-Man The Boys: You want us to kill Spider-Man? Doc Oc: Well yes but actually no.

I was just a kid back when this came out and I thought it was cool as heck as it tied into the old storylines which I had read already from the collections of a friend, who had inherited them from an older brother. I didn't stop reading Spider-Man comics until One More Day and the erasure of Peter & MJ's marriage, that was way too much as it ruined entire decades of their love story. When you've read 40 years of these stories you DON'T need to hear that nothing of that ever happened!

Getting a lot of mileage out of that soda.

Life of Reilly is my all time favorite blog, can't even count the number of times I've gone through it

I really liked ASM 400, and thought it was a fitting end for Aunt May. Pity it was thoroughly invalidated. And God Help Me, I really liked Kaine as a character....

I'm also happy with the way Dan Slott brought back elements of the Clone Saga and made it work like having Kaine become a hero as the 2nd Scarlet Spider

I like the Scarlet Spider redux in the recent years. I also like how Scarlet Spider and the entire confusing time was built into MC2 Spider-Girl.

I liked what you said about how you can jump back on in comics. After Stracynzki's run and One More Day, I didn't like Dan Slott's writing of Peter Parker, so I let the story go. I came back for a few interesting arcs like Superior Spider-Man and Renew Your Vows, as those were interesting story lines. But not really reading Spider-Man properly again until Nick Spencer took over Amazing Spider-Man. Also, nice nod to Hank Pym there. The character has spend the last thirty-plus years trying to atone for that, and all because Jim Shooter left the book before he could resolve it then and there.

I, for one, really liked the Ben Riley character and thought it was fun and fresh when they brought in a new supporting cast around him. He was horribly short-changed by the powers-that-be.

This was my era of comics, onslaught, age of apocalypse and clone saga. I loved it really. I was always a Ben Reilly fan both Scarlett spider and his spider costumes.

Ive been waiting for you to touch on this saga for a while now!

Just in time for my lunch break, bless you and your wonderful vids Chris!

Honestly the whole Ben being the soul of Peter and this whole confusing diabolical reminds me of Kingdom Hearts with Roxas and Sora. They are both equally confusing and convoluted.

Its hilarious that you made the split screen right where there's a reflection of yourself. I feel like that was almost on purpose.

Tom Defalco wrote a 6 issue simplified version a few years back that was much better than any of this Tevya Smolka reminds me it was called Spider-Man The Real Clone Saga if anyone wants to search it out

There's something about those retro drawings (from 30's until late 90's) that makes this stories special

I was listening to this in the background and was shocked to hear it just go on and on! So many missed oportunitys where they could have ended it. Definetely a treat to have a long video of yours though!

May you please do a Jhonen Vasquez episode??? He's really good.

Wow. That ending makes me want to avoid ever reading Onslaught. That writer had no business making an edgy ending like that and delaying this shit further.

I fr didn’t think your intros couldn’t get better, and this is the best one yet!!!

Awesome breakdown of such a convoluted event! Love your videos!

very well done video! I reread the Clone Saga a couple of years ago when the 'The complete...' Trade paperbacks came out. I liked some of the stories when Ben Reilly was the new Spider-Man. I liked them more than I thought I would, but overall, this was indeed a very bad time to be a Spidey-fan. I like your optimism about things turning out for the better after a dark period when a new creative team gets to write the character. I had to stop reading Spider-Man a couple of years ago, because I couldn't take it anymore how Dan Slott handled or mishandled the character, but I really liked Chip Zdarsky's run and getting into the stories by Nick Spencer.

That "boom" was one of the WORST things to happen to comics! I ended up losing a lot of my enthusiasm for a lot of titles at that time.😔😖

Well done Chris. I look forward to your show every Sunday

A new video always makes my day

Chris you gotta make a video about daredevil great vid btw

I can't watch this right now but I liked it because I know it'll be great. Hopefully I'll be able to watch it later. Great channel Chris. Thanks.

Man I'm loving all your videos

i love how much i learn in this channel. awesome stuff man!

- Ben found out about May from Mary Jane - Doc Ock’s actual moment of death might be anti-climactic but the story preceding it certainly was not. One of THE best in Spider-Man/Doc Ock history - Otto didn’t call the Sinister Six because he wasn’t trying to kill Spider-Man nor protect himself from Kaine. He was trying to save Spidey and didn’t know about Kaine at all - Kaine’s visions of MJ’s death are featured MULTIPLE times across the stories and Kaine’s suit keeping him alive is written into Spider-Man: Redemption which is part of the Clone Saga - The reason people forgive Spider-Man is because they know he was so obviously out of character in this situation whereas Hank Pym was such a poorly defined character up until this point that his fall from grace was practically his defining story and as such seemed in character. In fact in different circumstances Hank Pym hit Janet TWO different times in the 1960s! - Peter and Venom never teamed up with Carnage they teamed up AGAINST Carnage - Spidercide means killing spiders. Like homicide - Maximum Clonage wasn’t chasing the success of Age of Apocalypse the Scarlet Spider months were. - The title Web of Scarlet Spider made sense because the Scarlet Spider in question was a new evil character - Gaunt wasn’t ‘deep sci-fi’ he was a glorified cyborg, those had been around in Spider-Man since the 1980s! - Making Ben blonde wasn’t about a lack of faith in committing to a rebooted Spider-Man, it was just something to buy time whilst they figured out HOW to get a rebooted Spider-Man - Spidey and MJ’s baby HAS been referred to in main continuity since the Clone Saga it’s just infrequent - ASM #400 had a lot to do with the Clone Saga. Ben, Spidercide, the Jackal and Traveller all appear in it

Great you made a video about the Clone Saga!

Just discovered this channel and loving it. I have to say I was a long time Marvel fan and this storyline was the straw that broke the camels back. I still have not read many Marvel books to this day.

i read hours of material on this very subject online. thank you and great job.

I would love to see a Dan Slott tropes video and I think Superior Spider-Man is a great series to look at. Keep up the great work!

This is the best comic channel on KZfaq hands down

I hardcore got into Spider Man because of the new cartoon that was brand new in the 90's. But when I had a friend try and catch me up, I abandoned the idea of reading the comics... because I saw how convoluted it was.

Thank you for the great passion and the great theme as well!

The Clone Saga was my first introduction to ‘proper’ Spider-Man comics. I was reading them via the Marvel Uk reprints, which were about 24 issues behind the US story, meaning we didn’t start getting the storyline until about 97 or so. Think my first issue was the one were Peter is dying and Doc Ock saves him. I think I made it as far as the issue the video thumbnail is from before I lost interest

Also the Clone saga made a comeback recently with another awful sequel called Clone Conspiracy which was somehow even worse then the 90's clone saga.

You're a really funny guy, these videos just have a great fun vibe about bad comics without being too mean or snarky.

Nice video summing this mess up. I stopped reading Spidey right before the Clone Saga kicked off and it wasn't till late 2013 where I stumbled upon the Life of Reilly blog. I knew the Saga was a mess from hearing about it over the years, but the depth and detail that Life of Reilly goes into,especially with interviews with former artists,writers,interns,whatever is astounding. I must admit part of me clicking on this video was just to see if LoR would be mentioned as a source. Thanks for the content.

I'm just a bit younger than you, and I had really just started reading Spider-Man a few years when this started. I remember hating that they started screwing with who was the real Peter Parker. I read for a bit, but stopped when I couldn't be sure who was a clone. Great coverage of this clunky story.

I’ve always thought someone should go back and, starting after the events of ASM 40”, rewrite a readable clone saga that works within the continuity.

Just found your channel ..I’ve watched a good few videos the last day or two .. Great mix between the history of the story & the publishing of the story ..

Glad to see your chanel grow, great video by the way