As near as anyone can make out, the Marvel Universe is infinite. (And if it’s not, it really SHOULD be.) So there’s this woman named Lyla. Her husband was accidentally killed due to actions associated with Gwen Stacy. Now, Lyla wants to kill every Gwen in every universe. And there are...an infinite number of them. So it’s a hobby, right? One particularly prominent Gwen meets Lyla for a final showdown in Spider-Gwen: Shadow Clones #5. Writer Emily Kim closes out her series with pencilers Kei Zama and Geoffo. Their work is embellished by colorist  Triona Farrell and inkers Oren Junior and Belardino Brabo.  

There’s a whole lot of Gwen in Lyla’s lair deep beneath New York State Cemetery. There’s just...a lot of Gwen. There are versions of her crossed with nearly every major recurring villain Spider-Man has ever faced. Some have remained loyal, but some of them are looking to stop Lyla. This is HER lair, though. And it’s not going to be easy to get to her. She was the one who brought them all onto this particular Earth, so she had to have figured on a possible mutinous Gwen-valanche. Things could get quite complicated.

There have been various plot twists. There have been various revelations. There's actually been kind of a lot going on. However, so much of it is just a Gwen-based Spider-verse conflict. It feels like an echo of an echo of a shadow of something. Not that it isn't fun. It's just weird seeing a whole bunch of people who are more or less the same fighting each other with different powers. They should be a lot more fun than they actually are. Perhaps it's not silly enough. Perhaps it is trying to take itself too seriously. Or maybe it's that sort of thing that's just been done on page and screen a little bit too often too recently. (Jessica Jones had a REALLY fun moment like this in HER most recent mini-series. Over at DC, Harley Quinn has dealt with a whole bunch of different versions of her like...twice in the past year.) 

Zama, Geoffo, and the rest of the art team keep it sketchy while maintaining a high level of movement about the page. It's really important to maintain this as so much of what needs to happen needs to happen quickly. There needs to be a sense of urgency. And indeed, there is a sense of urgency. The issue would have benefited from a bit more of a distinctive look between different Gwens, though. All the Gwens kind of look alike, and they're all so closely based on pre-existing villains that it just kind of feels like another Spider-Man book.

Gail Simone’s The Variants with Jessica Jones was SUCH a good treatment of the multiple variants concept. The trade paperback for that series came out at the end of last April. The multi-Gwen thing comes out a little too close to that particular bit of extreme cleverness. Kim has a solidly well-told story with Gwen, but it lacks enough depth to feel original in light of Simone’s still very recent work in the same universe.

Grade: C+