Ultimate Spider-Man: Clone Saga

[cyberghostface]

So here the title crossed a fairly big milestone, it's 100th issue. While USM was far from an 'underdog' it was something that many people wrote off as a gimmick from the getgo and the idea that it would get to a 50th issue, let alone twice that, was seen as laughable in 2001. Fortunately the title not only surpassed that but Bendis and Bagley would also later go on to break the record for longest uninterrupted run by two people on a Marvel title (previously held by Stan and Jack on Fantastic Four).

And what better way to celebrate such a momentous occasion but a take on one of the most maligned stories in Spider-Man history?

#97...







The mall is attacked by someone in a Scorpion uniform.










Later with MJ...




#98...

Spidey takes the clone to the Fantastic Four.





Peter says he's lying but Reed's equipment detects that he's telling the truth. Fury isn't involved.

Later Peter hears MJ has gone missing and goes to the warehouse where she ran away from before.










Later at home Peter sees a light in his old house...






#99...



Back with MJ, we see her kidnapper's face:




Peter brings Gwen to May.




Peter climbs the wall for her, she tells him to get down.









#100 (which was double-sized)...





Back with Kaine (he's never identified as such but that's who he is) is attacked by another Spider-Man, the Tarantula.





Peter wants to know how Richard is still alive. Richard tells them he got into a fight with his wife before the plane went off and he didn't leave with her. He was assumed to have been on it when the plane crashed.




Gyrich thinks Fury is getting too powerful and wants Richard to work for the CIA away from Fury's eyes.








At this point Gwen starts to freak out and...



At all of this, May clutches her chest; she's having a heart attack.


#101...




Sue takes May out of the house and Carnage is blasted back to Gwen.


Back with Kaine and MJ, it turns out he's injected her with OZ.





#102...












The Gwen/Carnage hybrid has escaped and in the process Jessica and the other clones are freed.




Jessica assumes Kaine took MJ to the facility.






#103...








Peter is devastated to find out that 'Richard' is a clone. He tells Fury that he will go quietly if he gives them ten minutes alone with Otto. Fury agrees, and he and the rest leave Otto alone with clones. They attack him when...




#104...













During this time MJ has turned into the monster again but the Fantastic Four manage to subdue and cure her.






#105...

At the hospital with Aunt May, Fury comes to Peter to apologize.




Outside Kitty (who was following the news) asks Xavier to erase May's memories. He refuses.



Later Peter meets up with Jessica. He asks what she's going to do now and she jokes that she's going to attend Midtown.






Peter's house is being repaired and S.H.I.E.L.D. is giving everyone a cover story about what happened.




Later with MJ...

Comments

[doctor_spanky]

I remember reading this arc and being super bummed out that they killed that cool looking four-armed clone. Also how dumb shaggy-goblin Mary-Jane looked, and was as a concept.

[scorntx]

It's even worse because they kill the poor guy, and no-one really gives a rip... even Pete and Jess are just "welp, he's dead. Moving on...!"

[silicondream]

That's the main thing that kept me from really enjoying this title. There were all these cool sweet kids in it, and horrible things kept happening to them constantly. I mean, I like Ultimate Peter Parker. I don't need to see him getting tortured and brutalized on a monthly basis, and I don't need to see alternate versions of him getting mutated, enslaved and murdered. It's fine to have some dark elements, but half the time it seemed like Bendis was writing Clive Barker's Spider-Man and that just didn't do it for me.

[cyberghostface]

Now I want to see Clive Barker do Spider-Man.

[lordultimus]

This. Loved his design so much, then gets killed off in two seconds.

[fra080389]

Poor MJ.

Otto-Magneto. Yeah, nope.

[glprime]

"Isn't this sooo coool???"
"NO! NO, BENDIS! IT'S STUPID!"

[donnblake]

So was it one of these clones that ended up on the Ultimates, or an as-yet-unseen one?

[mrstatham]

I thought it was the Scorpion clone that got inducted into the not!Ultimates, but I could be wrong.

[arthur_wynne]

Yeah, Otto-Magneto was dumb and unnecessary. But other than that detail, I thought this was a great arc.

Actually, most of USM was really great.

[scorntx]

Ah, the Ultimate Clone Saga.
Not even worth the name. It barely confused anybody!

Hey, Ultimate Scorpion!
They never said what happened to him after Reed handed him over to Fury...
(Always figured the later other Scorpion would turn out to be him somehow. Stranger things and all that.)

I like that Johnny knows to go ew about the tail implant.
Although it's probably because of the words "spinal cord". Let's face it, there's not really any instance where you wanna be hearing that word in a sentence without the words "is completely fine".

-"No cloning. It's too controversial."-
"Unless we really need a Spider-Man clone to deliver clunky exposition, of course."

Hey, Ultimate Jess!
... you know, I was coming in here with this whole speculatory thing about whether Bendis didn't like Jess for some reason, because he barely had her show up (understandably, but still...), and when he did, especially in the Miles era, had her doing incredibly stupid things, and whether he'd been meaning to kill her off at the outset.
But nope, here she is in her first appearance, making idiotic decisions for no reason, so there goes that theory.

I do like her outfit. It works pretty well, has a nice colour-scheme, keeps the spider theme... why would anyone feel the need to change it?

Hey, Gwen, you're alive. And before Peter could even get all the angst out.

-"I was trying to protect you!"
"From what?"
"From this!"-
May has a point there. That unnecessarily dramatic entrance was a total dick move.
However... she's yelling at Peter for not telling her he was Spider-Man, when she said he was a coward a few weeks / months / whatever ago.
Probably a good thing Peter didn't bring that up, actually... Aunt May would probably glare him straight to Oblivion.

You left out the bit about the spoon.
You left out the bit about the spoon!
But that's the best bit of the completely-made-up flashback!
It's so quotable...

Don't you just hate when your friends come back from the dead and then turn out to be genetic monstrosities created using your blood?
Think we've all been there, amirite?

Aww, and the "hey, I'm not done childishly taunting you" bit's not here...

I do like how the SHIELD robots decide to shoot at Susan even when Nick Fury hasn't actually told them to.
Yup, shoot at them. It's not like one of them can punch out the Hulk or anything...
Why, it is utterly impossible to think that anyone wouldn't trust Nick Fury after something like this.

-"Don't rupture your spleen"-
Jessica Drew there, abducting the lead character and making herself lovable at the same time.
How does she do it?
(Must be that sexy hair...)

Though the most of her unmasking is sort of ruined by Bagley's drawing style meaning she does look pretty much exactly like Kitty.
... and if she's a clone, with no abode, no money and she's only been around for a few days... the hell'd she get the lipstick from?
Or, like Asami Sato, does she naturally look like her makeup's always just been done no matter where or when she is?

... I was going to complain about why Ben Reilly was giving this long monologue when there's no real reason, but hey, there is. There's a reason for the Monologue. It's cool.
(I get why we, the audience, would need it, but it's still pretty silly that part of their plan involves giving a monologue. Sneaky bastards.)

Oh, hey, Madame Web!
Bye, Madame Web!
... we never did find out what happened to her. Or Ben, for that matter.
Maybe they decided to go back to the cloning board?

... and there's a thing. Here, throughout this storyline, the cloning is said to be the brainchild of the FBI.
So why does everything after say it's because of Roxxon when they aren't even mentioned in any way here?
What up with that?
(And why'd they bother just cloning Peter? Why not clone Cap? How difficult could it be to get a DNA sample from Steve? Pretty sure two people in labcoats could just waltz into the Triskellion and no-one'd bother checking their ID. I mean, Otto at least has the excuse of doing it out of spite, but why is the FBI signing off on this?)

Oh, hey, MJ got injected with OZ. They sure fixed that one quick.
Yeah, sure, there were those two or three times she had nightmares or tremors, but those didn't come to anything.
(I did actually think during Death of Spider-Man that she'd Hulk Out and save Peter from Norman. But nope.)

-"It's not my place."-
...
When has that ever stopped you wiping people's memories before?
I mean, yeah, this time you're not going to do it, and you're right not to, but Professor X? You are a Terrible Person!

That is a very sweet hug, though.
They both needed that hug.

-"Reed Richards is awesome"-
"I sure hope he doesn't go crazy and evil for no real reason one day!"

Six whole panels just to show Kitty looking hurt? Really? Really?
Three would've been enough.

... while that scene with MJ having a flashback is pretty serious stuff, it probably would have been a bit more effective if Bendis hadn't had her doing the freaking "AIIEEE!"

Y'know, I taunt, but this was actually one of the better stories. Some good stuff, nice ideas, Jess, the worst of the Bendisisms either kept to a minimum or at least given some justification, and a shake-up to the status quo worthy of the hundredth issue.

[fra080389]

Bagley puts lipstick on ALL female characters. I'm still upset for the burned CHILD with lipstick.

[tugrul]

What comic did he draw that in?

[fra080389]

Ultimate Spiderman, after Peter's death.

[mrstatham]

To be fair, this is pretty common of most comics artists. I remember seeint Talent Caldwell doing Gen13 with Gail Simone and one of his big things was that he hadn't given the female characters lipstick.

[q99]

I really like Ultimate Jess, she's a great concept, but it seemed like Bendis really didn't know what to do with her.

One of my fav webcomics takes a similar concept and does a lot that revolves around the new character.... (El Goonish Shive)


-Y'know, I taunt, but this was actually one of the better stories. Some good stuff, nice ideas, Jess, the worst of the Bendisisms either kept to a minimum or at least given some justification, and a shake-up to the status quo worthy of the hundredth issue.-

It really is a fav of mine in the run too.

[chrisdv]

Love this story arc.

So damn much.

That I refuse to type this.

As a single sentence.

[balbanes]

Gotta say, Kitty is not coming off well here. At least as compared to her 616 incarnation, who seemed much more level-headed as a teenager.

Did feel a bit bad for her at the end, though.

[informationgeek]

This was one hell of a wild ride when I first read this years ago. Looking back at it now and seeing all of its parts, it's amazing it came out even close to being this good.


Also, Xavier. About you not wiping the minds of people and saying it's not your place... could have fooled me because I remember you erasing the memories of Bobby back in the first or second arc of Ultimate X-Men when he had a girlfriend and you wanted to keep your super duper secrets private. Jackass.

[lordultimus]

Bendis always wrote Ultimate Xavier as exactly the same has his 616 counterpart. (Well, his 616 counterpart pre-Deadly Genesis, but that's a different rant). For instance, during Bendis's thankfully brief run on Ultimate X-Men, Xavier was disgusted at the idea of reading people's minds without permission, where as previously, he read minds for fun.

[viridian5]

How did they give the clones the memories? Where did they even get them from?

[cyberghostface]

Probably the same way Ben Reilly got his.

[mrstatham]

Cassandra Webb - same way Jess gets her new name, etc. Octavius probably had enough access to either recent stuff in Peter's life or a full document of how things had gone down in Peter's life that he could come up with convincing programming. Programming Richard's life would probably involve just filling in the blanks, given the Parkers disappeared from the scientific community very suddenly and very publicly.

[viridian5]

Thank you!

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Wait, does this mean they could cure Osborn?

[tugrul]

Does this get touched on? Or is it "touched upon"? English is not my native language.

[coldfury]

I knew the end of Peter/Kitty was inevitably because MJ/Peter was so iconic, but I hated how Kitty got the shaft in this storyline. I know Peter's just human, and it makes him more real, but I really liked Kitty & Peter so I wish they'd had a better ending somehow.

...or they could've given Kitty eight arm Peter! That would barely even register a raised eyebrow in the mutant community!