Why does everyone hate Clone Saga?

[bigbird]

I love Scarlet Spider, he used to be my favorite superhero.
Spidercide looks incredibly cool!
And Kaines precognitive version of "spider-sense", too.

All in all, I am a big fan of Clone Saga.
But Whenever anyone mentions it on-line everyone acts like they do when you say "firelo**"'s name.

Why don't you like it? Or do some of you like it?

[Wyldstaar]

I hated it. I felt it simply went too far. I didn't find the story very interesting. It took every typical comic book cliche' and multiplied it! It was mindless nonsense that severely cripled Spider-Man's popularity at the time amoung readers. I stopped reading Spidey after that bloody storyline. It wasn't until Ultimate Spider-Man was released that I once again began to check out Spider-Man comics. They've recovered well now thank goodness.

[bigbird]

OK, that was a good, clean flame, but it fails to address the purpose of this thread:
WHY don't people like it?
(heh heh, ifyou feel you just did, i guess i just didn't under stand all those bigb words)

[Ramplate]

It was just too strange - it ended strangely for me at least.
I liked it a little better than the Dissapointing 6 armed Spidey story they used for issue #100 - but the clones just left a lasting bad taste in everyone's mouth I guess. To me, I think it cheapened the whole Gwen Stacy death story and was a bad Idea to try to recapture that whole feeling, and it just fell apart.
Just kinda reminds me of the Spider-buggy story that was there and went no where.

[SpiderClone]

Big Bird,
Go vote for Scarlet Spider in the Marvel voting thread:

Click here to vote. (http://www.hcrealms.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25732&perpage=15&pagenumber=1)

He's up to 20 votes. Hopefully we can get him enough votes that JonL will make the figure. Remember, characters like Scarlet Spider need all the votes he can get, so cast your ballot now, and help push for the figure.


Thanks for your support,
SpiderClone

[KaiserSelroc]

The whole clone saga, ending with bringing Norman back after so long was just rediculous. It totally turned me off from buying any more Spiderman comics. What next? Kraven's not really dead? Spidey's parents are still alive? The Spiderman I've been reading all my life was really an imposter? The Spiderman universe was turned on its ear during that awful storyline, nearly every Spider villain I liked was killed or made peace with Peter. And in their place, villains who had been dead for decades and ####py new villains I just couldn't identify with. Spiderman, the villains, the light humor, the simple story of a kid who had been given a bad break in life suddenly having amazing powers. Gone! Everything changed. It offended me and alienated me as a reader. I could never trust Spiderman comics again, after all, who knows? Next issue I could find out that the comic I've read since I was 10 was really all a dream of Flash Thompson's after a night of binge drinking, and Peter's still a bullied nerd in high school!

So in my opinion, the Clone Saga would have been ok, just another subpar story arc, had it only been shorter and not had such long reaching implications, that only made no sense. I just could not swollow Goblin being alive and pulling strings from behind the scenes for so many years. The clone saga would ahve made a great "What if?" mini-series. But being a part of the real Spiderman story? Another thing I did not like about it was that Spiderman never gives up, he never lets his immense personal problems stop him from living his creedo- "With great power comes great responsibility." In the clone saga, he gave up. And so did the story writers for the comic. That's why the Clone saga is hated.

Consider this...imagine it were revealed in Detective Comics that Bruce Wayne's parents weren't murdered, and that they were alive and well? Then kill off all of Batman's rogue's gallery and replace them with "the Scoutmaster", the "Riddlette" and Al Capone's grandson-in-law? Then have Bruce hang up the cape and cowl and have the second Robin that nobody ever liked (oh yeah, he's still alive too!) become the new Batman.

As bad as all that sounds, make it 10 time worse and you have the Clone Saga.

[shin-goji]

Well said, KaiserSelroc.

[Wyldstaar]

Originally posted by bigbird
OK, that was a good, clean flame, but it fails to address the purpose of this thread:
WHY don't people like it?
(heh heh, ifyou feel you just did, i guess i just didn't under stand all those bigb words)

First, I don't think I flamed you. Not even cleanly. I also don't see how you cannot tell that I did nothing BUT answer your question. I wasn't vague about what didn't appeal to me. I'll try and break it down further still.

It wasn't interesting. The point of reading a story is to enthral and entertain the reader. The Clone Saga didn't do this for me. This is bad.

It took every typical comic book cliche' and multiplied it! The entire story was centered around re-writing history, reviving long dead characters, the 'evil twin' clone, etc. All of these are horribly overdone comic books over the years. These are the sorts of stories attributed to lazy writters who can't be bothered to think of anything original.

It was mindless nonsense that severely cripled Spider-Man's popularity at the time amoung readers. I happened to like the character of Spider-Man, and I couldn't bear reading what the Clone Saga was doing to the character any more. I wasn't alone in this either. Ordinarily a bad story is something you just have to ride out until the next one comes along. Because the Clone Saga radically changed everything about Spider-Man and his mythos, it wasn't even possible to just ride it out.

If you still can't understand why we hate the Clone Saga, then you never will. I can't break it down any further than that. It's giving me a headache as it is to bring it down to this simple of a level.

[Flinch]

I myself have never read the whole clone saga because I kind of fell out of comics for a while back then. But what's all this about a bunch of spidey villians getting killed off? Those were my favorite bad guys, who got killed, and who'd they replace them with?

[Klarc Quente]

I'd like to add a few good words about the Scarlet Spider: he looks very nice with that different spider clothes. In another circunstance he would make a great "alternate" spider man. (or alternate spider man uniform like the unique spidey)

But that's all... other than that KaiserSelroc pretty much wrote most of my feelings about the saga. Nice job KaiserSelroc... you spared me a lot of writing time... thank you!

[dplanas]

I was gonna comment, but KaiserSelroc put in better than I ever could.

The Batman analogy was awesome

[KaiserSelroc]

"Those were my favorite bad guys, who got killed, and who'd they replace them with?"

Venom agreed to bury the hatchet with Spiderman after he saved his ex-wife. Dr. Octopus was killed, and replaced by a female Octopus who stole his technology and was about as interesting as watching lenolium peal. A few other mid-level Spider villains were killed by Kaine, I think (I stopped reading at around this point in the story). Vulture was killed. Sandman had become a good guy at this point and was part of the Avengers. Who knows what happened to Elektro, Mysterio, Rhino, ect. as the clone story was all consuming. Scorpion retired, but an uncharacteristic Spiderman decided to beat him up for no good reason. Power and responsibility? Died in the clone saga. Demogoblin was killed. New villains took center stage, such as DK, Swarm, Kraven's son and others who were about lame and contrived as I can imagine, but I'd rather not. Jackal came back. There was a reason why Jackal died 20 years ago. His character blew!

[Paradox Factor]

Sandman, IIRC, had reformed well before the whole clone sage. I recall Doc Octopus blackmailing him into joining his new Sinister Six by threatening the family Sandman was living with. Also, Swarm wasn't a new villian. He was a lame old villian that Marvel brough back from super-villian limbo. Didn't the clone saga also give us the female Scorpion and the young Vulture?

The most insulting thing about the whole clone saga was all the retro-conning Marvel did. Jackel, Norman Osborn, and the Spider-Clone were all brought back, after being "dead" for 20 to 30 years. Personaly, I liked the Scarlett Spider, just not the way he was retro-conned into existance.

[spiderboy]

As for me, truthfully speaking, i dont hate the clone saga. I just found it long winded. I gues im a patient person. I dont really like the idea of bad guys being cloned or being brought back from the dead but the idea of Norman Osborn coming back to me was an interesting idea. I mean,who else could have been behind it all than one of spideys worst villian? Plus it brought some interesting and emotional storylines ever like the Gathering of Five which spidey battled the Green Goblin and had to support the whole collapsing Daily Bugle on his back! Plus along with the clone saga came interesting spidey costumes and im not only talking about Scarlet Spider.

[Valandar]

If onlyy "Ben Reilly" had been introduced as a Spider Clone who had somehow survived to the modern day... and not "revealed" as "the original Spider-Man". Scarlet Spider would then be as viable a member of the marvel Universe as Beta Ray Bill is. We might also discover that "genetic drift" or other pseudo-scientific gobbledigook means that SS's powers are slightly different from Spidey's. Maybe he's not quite as strong or fast, but is more resilient, even capable of resisting small caliber firearms unharmed. Not a lot of difference, mind you, but enough that the existance of both characters, while similar, is enough to justify.

However, noting much else in the storyline is justifiable at all, IMHO. It's just so much garbage written as sensationalism, with the intent of "They'll never guess what we're gonna do next! Err, what ARE we gonna do next? I know, let's say that the clone is really the original Spidey, and Spidey is the clone!"

[bjmc1975]

The first two "big gimmick" storylines - Knightfall and Doomsday - worked in part because they were planned out carefully, had a point, and respected the characters involved.

The three that get the most flack - The Clone Saga, Superman Blue, and Emerald Twilight - both suffer from a host of problems. They never really went anywhere. They seemed like they were done primarily to jack up sales, for another. Mainly, though, none of them seemed to make a lot of sense - in the clone saga, the implications of Spidey being a clone for 20+ years of continuity were never really thought out, and there were too many plot holes that it brought up.

On top of that, the story was a long, rambling, mess. Huge numbers of new characters were brought in, there were about 800 holofoil/diecut/cardstock covers that jacked the price up even further, and it went on forever. It genuinely seemed like they were making it up as they went along (and they probably were). It also never really seemed to be going anywhere - it seemed like the writers just decided to throw stuff at him until something worked. There were a bunch of idiotic story elements (wife beating, for example) brought in out of nowhere, and for the final slap in the face, Norman Osbourne comes back after being dead for a quarter century.

Possibly the worst of this, though, was that this just didn't seem like Spider-Man anymore. One of the biggest appeals of Spidey was always that he was an everyman. He was one of us, an ordinary guy who became a superhero. And, for the most part, I think it's safe to say that none of this stuff was happening to most of his fans. Admittedly, I was replaced with a clone about that time, but that's just a coincidence.

[sol]

Or you could just say.."It sucked", and that would cover it.

I love Spider-Man, and grew up with the character...that whole "the Spider-Man a generation grew up with" was the clone is and was a joke, from a period in Marvel History when the rest of the Marvel Universe was being stripmined for the benefit of the almighty D-Men, who have what Professor D called the D Factor, which gave them the power to make a lot of money for Marvel even when the stories blow...er wait..I meant X-Men.

[Noman]

Pretty much agree with everything bjmc1975 says in his post.

That, the Superman fiasco and the Emerald chaos storylines have been the weakest for decades, not because they were badly written or poorly drawn, but because they ignored the existing integrity of the characters concerned and the Universes they are part of.

This is why things like Crisis work, (internaly consistant, even though it killed Flash II) and why Amalgam and Kingdom Come prove popular (Don't mess with established Universes, do a paralel...), and why lots of Legion fans hated the "rationalisation" of the Classic Legion. The new stuff would have been better if it had been about something new, rather than trashing an existing genre comic.

Clone Saga became laughable, because we didn't recognise Spidey anymore...and being able to identify with the lead character is crucial in a Solo book like Spidey.

Consign the Clone Saga to a closed time loop bubble universe, and file and forget.

All the Best

Noman

[supergoblin]

I have a questoin, I know what emerald carp is and what the clown saga is, but what is superman blue?

[shin-goji]

Clone Saga was an era where Marvel was smoking more dope than Eminem's mother. Cheech and Chong called up and told them maybe they should tone it down a little.

[Paradox Factor]

supergoblin, the Superman Blue saga took place shortly after his return from the dead (a year? two? I don't remember exactly). Sups powers begain to change so he lost his super-strength and invunlnerability and gained energy control and transformation abilities. His physical form also changed, forcing him into a blue and white containment suit to survive. Personaly, I didn't mind Superman Blue. It was the stupid Superman Red/Blue series that I hated.

[MarkFinn]

The ONLY thing I liked about the Clone Saga was the fact that Ben Reilly was written like the Spider-Man of the seventies that I grew up reading; money trouble, girl trouble, web fluid woes. But it was a speck of a diamond in an otherwise mountainous pile of poo.

What I wanted all along was for Spidey to return to his roots. The pathos is what makes that character. The best thing about the clone saga was that it ended.

[WarHULK]

I didn't mind the whole clone thing at first... that was until they tried to tell me that the Spiderman I knew, laved, and grew up with was really a clone of this Ben guy. That was when I stopped picking up Spiderman and didn't pick another one up for years to come. I was told that they decided to say that Ben was the clone after all but by that point I had lost faith.

Maximum Carnage, now there was a story arch I liked. I've liked the symbiotes since the first time I saw them. Add some of the most dark villians to the mix (You have to admit that DemoGoblin from that time was pretty cool, being possessed and all, and I still love Doppelganger. They should make him with L/C BCF and BF) and the Black Cat and I was sold.

[MarkFinn]

Originally posted by WarHULK
I didn't mind the whole clone thing at first... that was until they tried to tell me that the Spiderman I knew, laved, and grew up with was really a clone of this Ben guy. That was when I stopped picking up Spiderman and didn't pick another one up for years to come. I was told that they decided to say that Ben was the clone after all but by that point I had lost faith.


I think that was the thing that most insulted Spider-Man fans, right there. I was working in comics at the time and it didn't sit well with anyone I knew. Frankly, I didn't get excited about Spidey again until Ultimate Spider-Man...and Spider-Man was my first comic book experience. So, it took a lot to push fans away, but somehow, they figured out how to do it.

It LOOKS like those days are over for Marvel. Thank god. (looking around frantically for some wood to knock on).