The 1990s Spider-Man “Clone Saga” went on, and on. Too long by many estimates, and I won’t disagree. I enjoyed it (I admit here publicly) but I certainly didn’t buy/read all of it. That would have been quite a lot by any estimate, given that the “Clone Saga” (de facto more than by intent) ultimately encompassed nearly every Spider-Man comic book published for years. Which was five or more per month at the time.
It’s a little odd, then, that—while one can point to this or that as an extension or coda or suchlike—the Spider-Man Clone Saga eventually had one endpoint which stood out from the whole mess very clearly as when it ended. Naturally, this was still a crossover with multiple comic books and one or two tie-ins.
Yet Halloween 1996 was when The Spider-Man Clone Saga ended, and 25 years later it still feels like an Event to me, as far as fictional developments go.
I don’t remember every detail. But there’s a vividness and intensity to the memory of that Autumn Wednesday, my freshman year in college, which has only a small number of comparisons in all my years reading comic books.
It was an interesting time for me, and for comic book fandom.
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Spider-Man on Saturday Night Live
So, by way of a long introduction, for a while now I’ve been thinking about posting some commentaries about some of the entertainments I own, particularly comics. While I hardly buy them lately, I have hundreds of them here, and I also have this blog… and it might be worthwhile sitting down to offer up some notes now and then, particularly on some of the lesser known items.
We’ll see how much more I feel like pursuing this idea, in time, but for now let’s open up the issue that has been the most persistent in demanding a post such as this… let’s open up Marvel Team-Up #74.
I have no idea what Belushi is saying here, to his unseen antagonist, Marvel C-list villain The Silver Samurai.*
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