By J.M. DeMatteis, John Romita Jr. & Klaus Janson (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-78510-202-1
(UK Boxtree edition ISBN: 978-0-75220-359-1)
If you mention “the Clone Saga†to an older Spider-Man fan you’ll probably see a shudder of horror pass through the poor sap, although many will secretly profess to have liked parts of it.
For the uninitiated: Peter Parker was cloned by his old biology teacher Miles Warren AKA the Jackal; defeated his double in a grim identity-battle, only to discover years later that he was in fact the doppelganger and a grungy biker calling himself Ben Reilly was the true, non-artificial man.
Irrespective of how that saga played out, was retro-fitted, ignored, reworked and such-like, at the time this classy little book was released, that was the web-crawling state-of-play and that’s all the new reader needs to enjoy a cracking good read.
Collecting a mini-series that ran parallel to the saga unfolding in the four regular monthly comics, this is the tale of what happened to the character who lost that Parker-on-Parker battle, going on the road across America and ending up trapped in a crime war in distant Salt Lake City.
Dark and brooding, our hero-on-the-edge is embroiled in a drama of bloody betrayal made doubly deadly by Kaine: a flawed and degenerating Parker clone also created by the Jackal, now let loose with a deadly agenda of his own.
DeMatteis is on terse, tense, top form and the bombastic art from Romita Jr. and Janson adds a rawness and gritty texture to this yarn which is utterly accessible to even the freshest Spider-phile. Well worth your time even if clones do make you shudder…
© 1996 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.