Full disclosure, a lot of the behind the scenes information for this massive story arc comes from the excellent blog The Life of Reilly where Andrew Goletz and Glenn Greenberg both summarize the infamous storyline from the mid-90s and input their memories of the inner workings at the time. I highly recommend reading it, because there’s going to be a lot of cool takes and utterly bizarre side-notes that won’t be included here.

While I was working on this article, the original webpage went down. While it can still be found on the Wayback Machine, the link I have included is the backup.

It is August 1995, and Ben Reilly has been proven to be the one real Peter Parker. This means The Clone Saga that has been going on since October 1994 is done, right?

Unfortunately, no. Far from it, in fact. By this time, the marketing team had started to take over the Spider-Offices to some degree. While the editors in charge were still making the decisions along with the writers, there was a strong pressure from the marketing guys to milk this for all it was worth. Perhaps no better example comes from the September four part story Exiled.

After joining the New Warriors with issue 62 of their magazine for vague reasons, Web of Spider-Man 128 opens with Peter and Ben hemming and hawing over what to do. After visiting Aunt May and Uncle Ben’s grave site, they’re confronted with the news that Felicia Hardy, the Black Cat, has gone missing! As it turns out, the malevolent entity D’Spayre has kidnapped her, and brainwashed her to destroy Spider-Man. Luckily, Ben knows D’Spayre from an event that editorial promises they’ll share with us if we’re good, and Black Cat is able to break free from the curse. Peter offers to give up the webs to Ben, but Ben turns them down, because they beat D’Spayre due to being different, and decides to up and leave town.

As it turns out, Peter and MJ had been considering leaving as well, but MJ landed a job modeling maternity wear, and has changed her mind on leaving.

Ben continues to want to leave in The Amazing Spider-Man 405, only to somehow crash and blow up his motorcycle. Realizing that it was likely subconscious, Ben decides to not leave instead. Why the two of them just don’t bother working something out seems to have never occurred to either of them, which is pretty fitting with both Peter and Ben’s personalities.

Ben still leaves, heading to a small town called Rachel. He bunks down for the night, at the place his friend and confidant Seward Trainer calls home. However, he receives a call late at night from Seward to escape… just before the place explodes. Ben figures Seward is in trouble, and heads back to New York to check in on his friend. His lab is basically annihilated, though Seward can’t be found. Ben is captured by giant robot balls with tentacle arms and electrocuted, while a mysterious tentacle arm locks the door to a jail cell that has Seward inside.

Spider-Man 62 brings us part 3, with more weird mechanical tentacle arms that hint at Doctor Octopus somehow being behind Seward’s kidnapping. Since he died, however, it likely isn’t him. Ben breaks free and saves Seward, only for the plot of Exiled to take a drastic swerve into Spider-Man Unlimited 10. Ben forgets about his desire to leave, or whomever kidnapped Seward, and instead has an adventure on the anniversary of Uncle Ben’s death. The story is a nice one, with an old (never before seen) friend of Uncle Ben’s trying to keep a promise that he had made Ben before he died. The idea was to keep his kid on the straight and narrow, but the kid has fallen into a bad crowd. Further, the Vulture is back in town, having escaped from jail.

Unfortunately, this is the weird 90s rebranding that Adrian Toomes went through. Rather than just a crafty old man who was good with machines, this Vulture somehow found a way to siphon the youth away from people to keep himself young forever. Aside from the nothingburger that was Funeral for an Octopus, he’s been pushed off to the side quite a bit likely because his adventures have shown a very large body count.

Ben uses his brains to dismantle the Vulture, and the kid is able to go to college. Ben is able to keep a promise made to his namesake, and the ending feels rather good. Of course, it has zero connection to the previous chapters of Exiled, but the letters page of Spider-Man Unlimited does tease at the next story: Time Bomb!

Starting with Spectacular Spider-Man 228, Peter Parker starts to see the Jackal wherever he looks. While Mary Jane has her first photo shoot in her time as a maternity model, Peter’s mind snaps like a twig. You see, the Jackal slipped some programming into Peter Parker’s mind as he made the clone. The command was activated as he died during Maximum Clonage, and he has set Peter Parker’s brain to kill that whom he loves most.

Unfortunately, with Peter loving his wife Mary Jane more than anything and being a typical “wife guy,” this means that he’s now being forced to seek out the love of his life, and kill her. Luckily, MJ is not a wilting flower at the first sign of danger.

Despite being told to call the Fantastic Four or the Avengers, MJ decides to call Ben’s emergency number. This puts her through to the New Warriors, bringing them into the chaos. So far as they know, Spider-Man is being controlled and forced to kill an innocent, while Ben figures out the real story. Meanwhile, MJ still has to flee for her life.

You know what? As weird as this story is, this is a really tense chase scene. The body language has Peter as being utterly murderous and venomous, and the terror on MJ’s face the entire time really sells it. Serious props to the art team-up of Sal Buscema and the legendary Bill Sienkiewicz for selling this way better than anyone else involved in this issue. Luckily, the New Warriors show up in time for a cliffhanger that leads into Web of Spider-Man 129.

Spider-Man basically wrecks the New Warriors, with Ben barely able to keep up with the not-so-friendly Spider-Man. The terror show continues as Peter rips open a taxi cab with MJ inside.

The cab driver flees, but MJ jacks the taxi and has a plan in mind. It also seems like secret identities are flying out the window, though this won’t actually bite anyone in the butt. The New Warriors hold off Peter just long enough for MJ’s plan to work. She takes refuge in the house that Aunt May and Uncle Ben lived in. She says that, if she’s going to die, she wants to do so in a home with memories of family. This proves to be just enough for Peter to fight off the Jackal’s programming.

This, for some reason, still isn’t enough for Peter to hang up the webs or pass them along to Ben. The final story of the last volume of The Clone Saga starts with Amazing Spider-Man 406. Part one of The Greatest Responsibility introduces a new villain to the vast expanse of Peter and Ben’s rogues gallery. This one is actually a legacy character, of sorts.

This is Carolyn Trainer, the estranged daughter of Seward Trainer. How she got arms like Doctor Octopus aren’t really said, but it’s hinted that she has somehow gained the arms of the original and upgraded them. Seeing how Peter destroyed them in Funeral for an Octopus, that seems unlikely, but it works. She is one of the major results of a small movement within Marvel to update older villains. We’ve seen what happened with the Vulture’s update, and Kraven’s update was literally just killed by Kaine a few months ago. Most of these changes would generally not stick, and it’s easy to see why. Carolyn Trainer’s entire personality is just… bland here. She’s just a girl with daddy issues, which is remarkably generic and doesn’t explain her main plans at all.

The Greatest Responsibility also introduces one of the most utterly bizarre themes to run through this era of Spider-Man: virtual reality. And somehow, despite being a geneticist, Seward Trainer is heavily involved in virtual reality research. This is not the actual virtual reality of the era, with massive headsets at mall kiosks and cheap visuals, but someone’s vague idea of virtual reality if it was fed through the script writers of Tron.

Weird colors, insane scenery like a Steve Ditko Doctor Strange comic, and it just gets weirder from there. You see, the new Doctor Octopus’ plans are to make a weapon known as Virtual Reality Bombs. How these work aren’t explained, and no one bothers to mention how this could even be a thing. But work it does:

The actual story, however, has Peter nearly killed by Doctor Octopus and finally realizing that he needs to hang up the webs, or potentially leave his future child without a dad. In a surprisingly clever touch for the era, Peter is trapped under rubble while trying to find a cure for a blood disease that is affecting his unborn child. This mirrors perfectly the time he was trying to save Aunt May from a similar condition back in the Lee/Ditko days. Unlike in Amazing Spider-Man 33, however, he is not able to escape on his own. Luckily, he has help.

In a way, this not only signifies that Peter doesn’t have to do Spider-Man heroics alone, but Ben can now shoulder the burden for him instead. With this final adventure, Peter was finally convinced to stop being Spider-Man.

Ben passes on taking the actual costume, musing it would be better if it was made into a blanket for the kid. He’s going to be his own Spider-Man. And with The Spectacular Spider-Man 229, Peter and Mary Jane shuffled off the book into a civilian life.

And then the Marketing department went insane.

You see, Ben was still the Scarlet Spider. And all the books were still called Spider-Man or some variant thereof. So why not milk this for all it was worth? In a “genius” move from the same people who relaunched every X-book for four months during the Age of Apocalypse to hype up the event, Marvel would launch Amazing Scarlet Spider, Scarlet Spider, Scarlet Spider Unlimited, Spectacular Scarlet Spider, and Web of Scarlet Spider and carry them on for at least two months. This would be done to set up an excuse for Ben to stop being the Scarlet Spider and become Spider-Man again, even though there was no reason to do this as Ben was dedicated to becoming Spider-Man.

The first volume of what Marvel has released as The Complete Ben Reilly Epic opens with a one-shot coda to the time of the Clone of Peter Parker as Spider-Man in The Parker Years. Unlike The Clone Journal from months ago, this was a well-drawn and fantastically written short that explains how Peter’s dealing with no longer being Spidey. There’s a moment where it looks like he’s going to burn the costume and web shooters with some of his other memoirs, but decides against it. It’s a neat little snapshot of what’s happening at this time in the Spider-Books, and a great shot to what could have been Peter Parker’s final adventure.

The Scarlet Spider-fest opens up with the quarterly one-shot Scarlet Spider Unlimited, with a tale called You Say You Want an Evolution. Ben comes across a bunch of intelligent beast blends that are actually from the High Evolutionary, sent out to destroy any remaining evidence of Miles Warren’s cloning experiments. This also somehow resurrects Kaine, who had been resting in a cryo pod after allegedly being killed in Maximum Clonage.

Scarlet Spider is dragged to Wundagore, the home of the Animen, and it looks like some of his old sense of humor is leaking in.

However, it turns out that the Jackal somehow has a temple dedicated to himself up near the High Evolutionary’s people, and this mess is just best left forgotten. It’s just another attempt to explain why Ben and Peter weren’t really Anthony Serba adjusted to look like Peter Parker from the 1988 retcon to try and get rid of clones.

Meanwhile, Web of Scarlet Spider kicked off the first of the two major story lines under their banner. Virtual Mortality would bring back the virtual reality gimmicks with a vengeance. The new Doctor Octopus is back with attempts to make virtual reality bleed into reality, with the same results of becoming a confusing and convoluted mess. 

Somehow, this was considered high science at the time. It’s somehow less scientific than the X-Men comics that Pizza Hut put out in 1992.

This weird quirk of treating computers as magic only seems to have been focused within Marvel Comics. Despite reinventing Superman to become an electronic being for several years during the 90s and using many high-technology characters, none of them ever fought Virtual Reality beasts or fell into Cyberspace. It’s weird.

Somehow, Seward Trainer’s brain winds up trapped in virtual reality, which grants him the ability to show up in any computer. Almost as if he was actually trapped in the internet instead of a dead-end technology from the 90s.

Still, this rolls over to have the second month-long Scarlet Spider story unfold. Now it’s Doctor Octopus vs Alistair Smythe and his recent 90s reinvention in… Cyberwar!

For those who don’t remember Smythe, I don’t blame you. His father was hired by J Jonah Jameson in the early days of Amazing Spider-Man to make robots that would hunt down and capture and/or kill Spider-Man. This somehow mutated into a die-hard vengeance against Spidey, and this Smythe would pick up the revenge kick and was now in the middle of a 90s revamp like Doctor Octopus, the Vulture, and Kraven before him.

It genuinely was not pretty. It did, however, get used with a streamlined design for the Alistair Smythe from the 90s animated cartoon of Spidey to great effect. 

The mullet, strangely, seems to be instrumental to the design.

Cyberwar does a lot of wheel-spinning, and introduces a new villain to Spider-Man. A woman decked out in gold and black, she goes by the name of Joystick. To prove she’s a hip and modern creation, she references Mortal Kombat!

So far as I can tell, she doesn’t show up again. The new Green Goblin again shows up and helps out the Scarlet Spider, but doesn’t leave much of an impression. To be honest, Ben doesn’t currently have enough of a supporting cast to actually build a satisfying comic right now. With Peter shuffling off, the entire Daily Bugle cast also no longer shows up because Ben has no connection with them. He doesn’t have a solid job, and the Green Goblin just comes off as a proverbial Poochie advertising his own book.

Cyberwar’s last half also brings in the point of the Scarlet Spider books: a virtual double of the Scarlet Spider is now rampaging across New York City, making him out to be a bad guy. These involve things like almost tearing down the Daily Bugle building by using an unlimited webbing cheat code, and shooting a cyber-uzi at people.

The Cyberwar ends with the name of the Scarlet Spider dragged through the mud by a virtual clone who’s now vanished, and Ben determined to become Spider-Man once again. Which he’d already done, so this feels like the comic book equivalent of an anime filler arc.

Wizard Magazine put out a special comic book at this time, which was a thing they used to do. Wizard, for those who don’t know, was basically the way to get gossip and the inner workings of comic books from a relatively independent source. Marvel had Marvel Age, but they had shuttered that comic in 1994 due to low sales. There were other companies that were covering comics, but almost none of them found themselves on the newsstands. To try and make themselves important, Wizard would also include a small comic price guide in the back of their issues, as well as an action figure price guide, and even a trading card price guide. Sometimes you’d also get a free poster, or a new half sized comic book hyping an upcoming release.

It’s rare to see these books collected anywhere, often due to printing rights. Credit where it’s due, Marvel made sure to include this mini-issue in their collection. It’s not huge, it’s just Ben reminiscing over his life so far and re-re-vowing to become Spider-Man.

Finally, the thing we had been hyped so badly for all this time: The Sensational Spider-Man issue 0. This was the book that Marvel marketing had been pushing for, the reveal of the new Spider-Man.

As you can guess, I used it for the banner for this article. The costume is honestly one of my favorites, but it is also colored by nostalgia. It keeps a lot of the themes of the classic Spidey costume, and the colors, but shuffles it up like someone hitting the random feature on a costume generator. The eyes are larger and theoretically more expressive, and quirks like the half-tone fingers and the half-filled boots help make a different color feel to the costume. The exposed web shooters keep with the feel from the Scarlet Spider, and the color almost feels like a polar opposite of Ben’s Scarlet costume.

Indeed, the only flaw is that the enlarged black spider is the same on both sides of his body. With lesser artists, this makes it really hard to tell how Ben is standing, and can make for some real awkward posing.

The issue itself feels like an overall reboot, but with forward motion. Ben has an awkward meeting with Mary Jane’s Aunt Anna, and realizes he needs to change up his look not just as Spidey. The book also takes some time to introduce a new supporting cast and a new hub for Ben to spend some non-Spidey time at. The Daily Grind is a local coffee shop, and Ben winds up getting a job there after the owner mistakes him for homeless and covers his lunch.

Ben also gets to have a time thinking up a new costume, and it firmly separates him from Peter in my book. Ben is, frankly, a bit of a “himbo.”

For those unfamiliar, a himbo is a “male bimbo,” or a handsome and well-meaning but generally clueless male. This fits incredibly well with what Ben is at this point, and it really fits his character for the rest of his time with the webs.

Ben spends his first night in the new costume fighting another random high-technology villain who also is after some weird Virtual Reality software. He’s defeated, but a redesign of Mysterio threatens to come up eventually. Ben takes the time to dye his hair and shows up at May and Ben’s graves to thank them once more, and show the viewers his new hairstyle. Close-cropped and blonde, Ben Reilly is now truly his own man.

Mostly, anyhow!

I won’t lie, these two volumes of content (which cover months of Marvel publishing) are fairly painful overall. However, there are a lot of key moments of growth for Ben and Peter that make it all feel worthwhile. It’s a new, fresh era of Spider-Man, and the writing teams now finally have their unmarried Spider-Man with which they can tell fresh and new stories! We’ll see what they do, as we continue to look into The Complete Ben Reilly Epic when The Clone Sagas of Spider-Man continues!