Spider-Man General Discussion

I admit my interest in the series has vanished with another dead Gwen story. I think the last Spider-Gwen TPB summarized my opinion—Old Gwen calls out the readers for nothing more than martyring Gwen as a perpetually static character who died long ago as a perfect martyr and that they should be glad they're doing something new with her across the multiverse now.

It's different here, The Gwen we saw in issue #1 and issue #2 was the clone all along and she survives. The real one was gone a long time ago.

It's the Anatomy Lesson, "He isn't Alec Holland. He never will be Alec Holland. He never was Alec Holland."

Yes, Gwen is dead, though. Also I suspect she's out of the story now. I could be wrong, though.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 17th 2019 at 1:26:05 AM

What I like here is how MJ is there for Peter through a divorce/annulment rather than just a death, either way, drama involving Peter and Gwen always forces her to step up and mature

Edited by Zarius on Apr 17th 2019 at 1:01:02 AM

Given how misleading issue 2 of Life Story's summary turned out to be I wonder how issue 3 and 4 will subvert our expectations.

Warren is creepy as all hell.

Also, Peter did not let Harry destroy the clones. He tells Harry to wait, but Harry had already thrown the bombs by that point.

Edited by Hobgoblin on Apr 17th 2019 at 4:08:56 AM

Chip Zdarsky wrote the solicitation paragraphs himself and he wanted it to be as vague and allusive as possible. Issue #2 is not inaccurate, "Can Peter and Gwen find happiness as the world of the Seventies dances around them?" is not inaccurate in describing the action.

Miles Warren was always a creep. Go back and read The First Clone Saga. He's a necrophiliac and basically a Humbert Humbert type. And this comic is quite clear what Warren's real deal was.

Fair enough. Also, I love how Norman calls Harry to see him so he can ask for a favor and the first thing he says is "You look like shit."

Never change, Norman.

Norman: Also you're a disappointment and Emily never loved you. Harry:But dad- Norman: Also i cloned your best friend because you're so useless. Harry: I'm still naming my son after you. Really sums up their relationship huh?

If anything is a multiversal constant, it's that Peter is always responsible for Gwen Stacy dying somehow. 616 Main verse: Needs no explanation, especially if you subscribe to the SNAP theory, Ultimate Verse, Peter donating his blood creates Carnage and it kills her, Life story verse, Peter is pretty cool with Harry blowing up the clones until Gwen pushes him and then it turns out real Gwen died. I know Peter is slightly against clones, but esshh.

https://comicbook.com/blog/2012/10/03/gerry-conway-blasts-gwen-stacy-criticizes-stan-lee-in-new-book-on-marvel/

In the Spider-Man Essay books, not the one above but this is a story that has made the rounds multiple times, they actually talk about how the Jackal was introduced as a Take That! against fans. There were constant letter write-ins about "when are you bringing Gwen Stacy back" and other stuff. Stan Lee was all for a resurrection of Gwen Stacy and felt that coming back from the dead would be a great story arc, especially if she got superpowers in the process.

The problem was that Gerry Conway, who the story was given to, HATED Gwen Stacy and considered fans who liked her to be body-pillow hugging basement dwellers (he actually used much harsher language but that was the general gist for the time). So he wrote a story about a creepy Squick obsessed weirdo bringing her back as a clone.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 18th 2019 at 7:11:36 AM

Conway remember got actual death threats, which Marvel in that time actually printed in the letters' pages (read the letters page for #124-126) for some reason. And Conway at the time, and even now to some extent, was genuinely angry at Lee. When the Gwen Stacy controversy broke out, Lee was harassed at college campus lectures where he gave speeches about why he let Gwen die, so Lee went out and said, that he knew nothing about the story and so on. Which is again a lie since he definitely knew about it and approved it. Marvel's then EIC Roy Thomas (and remember that Thomas was then and is now, Lee's very close friend) wrote out a letter saying that Lee definitely knew and supported it tacitly, and didn't think it was a big deal at the time. So Conway, who was remember early 20s at the time, and Lee was in his 50s and an older man felt that a senior was stabbing a junior writer in the back, and he complained about that in Marvel Untold Story.

Conway's big point was and is that absolutely none of Gwen's posthumous fans remember the character as she was when she was alive. If you want to make a case for bringing Gwen back you do need to reckon with the stories written when she was alive and try and work inside that for her character. So the Jackal is this necrophiliac. I mean it's obvious right.

In a way the Jackal and the clone story is a deconstruction and Unbuilt Trope of certain Marvel romances. Hank for instance lost his first wife and he latched on to Janet because she resembled his first wife to some extent (and she was younger than him). Then later Claremont played that straight with Scott and Maddy Pryor. In both cases, you have "heroes" latching on to lookalikes or doppelgangers of their first dead girlfriend and that was the initial basis of that relationship. And eventually that got toxic in both cases once later writers (Jim Shooter, Roger Stern in the case of Hank/Janet and Grant Morrison in the case of Scott/Jean) took a look at that setup and realized it was validating creepy behavior. So Conway basically overturned that, Peter moved on from Gwen with an entirely different girl, and the one who was obsessed with Gwen was a creepy older gentleman. The Second Clone Saga tried to make Jackal into a legit villain but without the necrophilia and Humbert Humbert fetish, you don't have any basis for a character aside from "Joker knockoff but mad scientist now".

The redesign made him very Jokery

It wasn’t even subtle

Joker by way of Matrix chic

Also Joker is at least a mad chemist, right? Designed his own Joker venom and there was that thing with fish

Edited by Bocaj on Apr 18th 2019 at 10:52:30 AM

Proto-Matrix chic since it came out a few years before the Matrix. Matrix-Chic is Dr. Octopus in Spider-Man 2 (one wag pointed out that Molina' Ock is cosplaying as every character in the Matrix — the Agents, Morpheus, Trinity [his glasses] and the sentinels [his robot arms]) which seeped back into the comics in Jenkins' runs where Ock's green and yellow outfit (that he worse first in the Master Planner arc) had become his default look (and to me is still the best looking design of Ock).

The Clone Saga certainly did tackle themes that the Matrix movies dealt with come to think of it. You had Cyberspace, you had masterminds giving speeches in rooms and expositing for long pages and so on. You also had clones and people in pods. It's a good example of how The Matrix caught lightning-in-the-bottle and you could see Clone Saga, in its own preposterous and incoherent way, tackling '90s fears and concerns...I wonder if Zdarsky will go there in Life Story #4 (The '90s).

EDIT: And of course Return of the Joker made him touch into cloning and Mind Rape too.

Edited by Revolutionary_Jack on Apr 18th 2019 at 7:57:47 AM

I guess the thing about a multiple choice past is that Joker can pull skill sets out of his butt

Joker said that "He stole the tech from here and there" and Justice League said that Joker got it when he robbed Cadmus. And Joker being a chemistry genius was a big part of his character with that Joker gas of his making people smile wide and then die with his face plastered on them. So he did have scientific chops. And the Tim Burton Batman movie said that Joker knew a lot about chemicals.

Interestingly, Gerry Conway wrote Spectacular Spider-Man Annual #8, "Return to Sender" in I think 1988, and he basically wrapped up the mystery of how an ESU professor made clones. Turns out Warren didn't. He used a gas and procedure to make random test subjects into lookalikes. And that's even more Joker-esque, since Joker's gas tends to distort and make his victims look like him, similar to Red Skull's "dust of death". I personally think Conway's retcon made the cloning stuff more interesting. Instead of pod-person and so on...you now have regular people having their identity and sense of being hijacked and overwritten. That's got a lot of surreal possibilities. I also think that you should ideally make Jackal's main backer and partner...Chameleon, since he also disguises himself, and his new versions tend to allow him to disguise marks. Superior Foes of Spider-Man and its finale depends on that gimmick for Boomerang's last getaway.

I wouldn't use the words gentleman and Miles Warren in the same sentence. It's kinda messed up that later writers would try to make Miles Warren more likeable in the 90s version, at least in a love to hate way like the Joker.

How did warren give the Peter clone powers if it wasn’t even clone?

Edited by Bec66 on Apr 18th 2019 at 12:41:05 PM

The process that Warren used at least as per Conway's brief retcon (which got deleted in the second saga) was that he did use parts of the DNA of the real Gwen and Peter to overwrite his otherwise unrelated subjects. Warren chose subjects who physically matched in key areas Gwen and Peter, same height, same blood-type and so on, to make the transfer synch better.

So it still works like cloning but the difference is that it's not grown out of a pod or any such thing.

What’s interesting is that the back and forth retcons were prompted by developing understanding of whether cloning was possible

Weird that of all the comic book science, they decided this had to correspond to reality

Definitely part of what weakened the already flimsy Clone Saga 2, having to devote time to reretconning the retcon

Which was a trend. A huge chunk of Clone Saga is going ‘nuh uh!’ at other parts of Clone Saga or clone related things

It's not so far from trying to downplay and undersell the I Love Nuclear Power stuff in more recent Marvel output and certainly in adaptations, done away entirely. Instead of radioactive, its genetically engineered spider. After Chernobyl and Fukushima and Three Mile you can't really play that straight anymore.

I do think that if you are going to do cloning in Spider-Man's corner it needs a little more believability and needs to be grounded because Spider-Man is supposed to be a more realistic and grounded corner than others. Steve Ditko was quite insistent on that especially. The biggest problem with the second clone saga aside from all the retcons is that it just doesn't feel like a Spider-Man story. Stuff like arcane conspiracies, underground labs in the middle of nowhere, psychopaths trying to tempt Peter in a plot to kill all humans and replace people with clones...none of that really feels grounded in Spider-Man's genre and theme of Small Steps Hero, gadget and tech based science-fiction villains and city-wide stakes but not global ones. There are exceptions to this, like obviously Venom and Carnage come from outer space. But both are still grounded in terms of powers and responsibility, and they are sci-fi horror and so on. The First Clone Saga worked because it was an emotional story about nostalgia, grief, moving on from first love to second love, and the villain was the guy who couldn't move on and let go. The Second one is all about...remember how cool Peter was when he was single, in other words it's governed by the exact mentality the first one was attacking. IT literally misread the message and thematic drive of the First Saga.

Cloning works in X-Men with Mr. Sinister and Weapon X and with SHIELD and its LMD and so on, because Military-Industrial Complex and so on, it fits there thematically. Logan also touched on cloning and made it a metaphor for corporate-controlled eugenics-based genocide and slavery. The bad guys wipe out the real X-Gene, then bottle it, and use it to make clone slaves to do their bidding and make a profit of it. There it means something emotionally and thematically that it never does in Spider-Man. The Clone Saga undermined the integrity of Spider-Man's continuity. Not all stories between 1962-1994 were good, not everything published during the Saga was bad, but before the Second Clone Saga, Spider-Man was a corner in Marvel where realism reigned. Characters who died stayed dead, stories and status-quo changes had consequences and moved organically from one era to the next. There was Character Development and growth. The Clone Saga absolutely destroyed those norms for good. The one great story from the era (Issue #400, Aunt May's death) was retconned in an absurd way two years later in what is essentially an act of vandalism.

Frankly, I felt the cloning retcon was moronic.

Spider-Man is still science fiction.

Star Wars and The Terminator are both science-fiction but stuff like the force and lightsabers would be incongruous in Terminator, and stuff like Skynet would be incongruous in Star Wars.

Using science-fiction for "Everything goes" is always a mistake, it ignores characters, theme, context and overall setting and texture.

Star Wars has IG-88 trying to do a robot uprising

I don’t think a Skynet scenario would be so out of place in suplimentary Star Wars, especially given how heavily it is inspired by Dune which had a big AI thing in its backstory

Also the constant never quite followed up indications that droids are an oppressed slave race

Edited by Bocaj on Apr 18th 2019 at 1:34:58 PM

Don't forget the female robot from Solo, either.

At the very least we are on the same page that the force and lightsabers wouldn't work in Terminator, hmmm? That's my point. Not all stories suit all characters and all genres.

Saying that the Second Clone Saga's arcane focus on cloning stopped made it feel like a Spider-Man story is my point. Introducing stuff like Scriers, like Judas Traveller, and having one watch the other watching Jackal watching others and so on. I am sure there are ways to do it and make it work somehow but the Second Saga was not the way to do it.