[Meeting…] Scarlet Spider (Ben Reilly)

As I have commented several times on this page, the 90s were a strange time for the most classic comic book superheroes. Superman died, Batman was paralyzed, Aquaman lost a hand and completely changed character, Bruce Banner stopped turning into the Hulk and became Mr. Fixit (a smaller, more intelligent version of the Hulk), Hal Jordan (the most popular Green Lantern) went crazy and became evil, the Ninja Turtles suffered unnecessary mutilations and changes, and Spider-man found himself surrounded by various clones of himself created by an old enemy of his, the Jackal.

Among those clones appeared characters like Kaine (deformed clone of Parker) and Ben Reilly (exact clone of Parker) who, as it could not be otherwise, became a superhero, because despite knowing that he was a copy of the original, he had all the memories and experiences that the original had until the moment he was cloned.

These types of situations occur when scriptwriters try to modernize a character or when they run out of ideas. After all, it must be difficult to innovate in the stories of a character as old as Spider-man and that is why sometimes scriptwriters resort to recovering old, totally forgotten characters, to create some innovation (although it may sound paradoxical).

Recovering ideas from the 70s

Ben Reilly is one of those cases, since technically his first appearance was in 1975, in a comic where Spider-man faced an exact clone of himself. The clone was defeated and presumed dead for 20 years, until someone came up with the idea of ​​making one of those sagas that supposedly come to definitively change a character's universe, but then stay halfway through everything.

In 1994 the clone reappeared in the comics, but without the Spider-Man costume and under the name Ben Reilly (using the name of the deceased Uncle Ben and the maiden name of Aunt May). Apparently he had been living as a vagabond for all those years, because upon discovering that he was not the real Spider-Man he preferred not to spoil the life of the original Peter Parker.

However, in that story Aunt May was very sick, torn between life and death, which made Ben Reilly go to see her, after all being a clone of Spider-man meant that he had the same memories and feelings of the original, so Aunt May was also like a mother to him.

The return to New York of the Spider-Man clone and the reunion with Peter Parker made Reilly think that he was wasting his life wandering and that he could help others by becoming a superhero. After all, two Spider-mans are better than one, right?

With the new identity of Scarlet Spider, Reilly and Parker collaborated on some colorful situations, such as when the symbiotes invaded the earth in Symbiote Planet (1995).

However, things were going to get complicated in every possible way. On the one hand, a deformed and terribly powerful clone of Peter Parker named Kaine decided to kill Spider-Man's enemies, which made him an anti-hero and a potential villain.

And on the other hand, the bombshell news that In reality Peter Parker was the clone and Ben Reilly was the real one. In other words, when both Spider-mans faced each other, the clone won over the original and the one who was wandering for 5 years of his life (and 20 of the readers) was the original Peter Parker, while the one who continued wearing the Spider-man suit for the following years, faced Venom, married Mary Jane and participated in the Secret Wars was the clone, convinced of being the original after having defeated the other Spider-man. It sounds absurd but... if they both had exactly the same memories, how could one be sure that it was truer than the other?

True or false?

This plot twist was not very well received, neither by the readers (who had been told "for the last 20 years you have been reading a fake Spider-man") nor by the characters, as both Parker and his wife Mary Jane did not react very well to the news. So that there was no doubt, Peter Parker (now the clone) lost his spider powers which led him to move away from the life of a hero and focus on his wife and his future daughter. At that time, Ben Reilly He became the new Spider-Man and continued the path he began many years ago when a radioactive spider bit him on the hand.

Marvel had managed to return Spider-man to his origins in a rough but effective way, since the married Peter Parker without financial problems was not as attractive to new readers as the classic Spider-man. Now Spider-man was single again and had no money to pay the rent, so he worked at anything to survive, while at the same time he dedicated himself to being a hero.

The response from the public was immediate and sales fell at an alarming rate. I imagine that the gentlemen in suits who make decisions at Marvel did not understand why, but I will explain it in case there is someone in the same situation.

Imagine that you follow a collection of comics like Spider-man, every month you see characters suffer, fight, laugh, cry and die in its pages, over time you have spent several years seeing how that character, the clumsy Parker, has managed to achieve some of his goals, marrying his childhood love and achieving economic stability. In short, he had matured, just like the reader who had started reading him when he was a teenager. From one day to the next, another Peter Parker appears and they tell you “this is the real one, there was a change in 1975, everything you have read during these years happened to a fake Spider-man.”

The normal reaction to this is “that character I've read for years is the one I want, I don't care if it's the original or a clone.” This answer might have been considered obvious if any of Marvel's decision makers felt some attachment to their characters., but if you think of them as numbers, the solution is simple, a sudden change is made and the story is restarted with the most pathetic excuse we can think of (as they did again a few years ago using Mephisto as an excuse for the "total reset" of Spider-man).

To combat the drop in sales, Marvel had some ideas that gave some results. First, a collection called Peter Parker: Spider-man, which told us new stories of Peter Parker as Spider-man but placed chronologically before the clone saga. In other words, if you went to the kiosk to buy a Spiderman comic you would find a current one and an old one, a situation that could be used to get sales but also confused readers. Marvel was making the same mistakes in the 90s that DC Comics made 30 years ago, as I explained in the article original flash.

The second idea was to include Peter Parker again in the stories of the new Spider-man, doing what he did best, being Spider-man's photographer. However, now Parker had no powers and his status as a photographer made him take unnecessary risks to have an exclusive (or in other words, Peter Parker was playing the role of Lois Lane, Superman's girlfriend). Although I found this idea quite funny at first, it cannot be denied that it is relatively humiliating for Parker's character, despite this it was better than removing him from the series.

These ideas slightly improved the sales of Spider-man comics, but apparently it was not enough, so the gentlemen in suits at Marvel made the decision to arreglarlo de una vez por todas. La solución pasó por decir que en realidad, alguien había cambiado las pruebas que decían que Parker era un clon y Reilly el auténtico, engañando incluso al Chacal, creador de los clones. Para elegir ese alguien se decidió resucitar a un personaje que llevaba años muerto, Norman Osborn (el Duende Verde original) el cual había trazado todo este plan para destruir a Parker mental y físicamente.

Pero aún quedaban muchos cabos sueltos en esta historia, así que fueron un paso más alla, primero, Ben Reilly murió peleando contra el Duende Verde y al morir quedó convertido en una masa viscosa en el suelo (para demostrar que él era un clon y no un hombre real) y después se separó a Peter de Mary Jane, volviéndolo soltero de nuevo (y por el camino “desapareció” la hija que esperaban ambos). Todos los riesgos que habían tomado en Marvel para la saga del clon se convirtieron en pasos hacia atrás, matando a los personajes nuevos y trayendo de vuelta a viejos conocidos que descansaban en paz desde hace tiempo.

Sin embargo y como ya he dicho al principio, en el mundo de los superhéroes siempre se recuperan ideas viejas, así que si os pensáis que no se volvió a hablar de esta saga estáis muy equivocados, pues hace relativamente pocos años, Kaine (el clon defectuoso de Parker) se convirtió en la nueva Araña Escarlata (con un traje distinto a la original), tomando el testigo del fallecido Reilly. Para rizar el rizo, en algunos cómics de la nueva Araña Escarlata vemos aparecer a la original, en un intento de llamar la atención de los que conocieron al personaje en los 90. ¿Se habrán atrevido a resucitar a Ben Reilly?

Conclusion and Recommendations

Puede que tras leer todo esto, penséis que Ben Reilly era un mal personaje y que a nadie le gustó, pero os puedo asegurar que estáis muy equivocados. El personaje de Reilly gustó, la Araña Escarlata gustó y puede que haya un cierto número de personas al cual le gustó la idea de los clones de Parker. Lo que no gustó fue la manera tosca y chapucera de Marvel de intentar reiniciar a Spider-man, el maltrato que se le dio al personaje de Peter Parker y sobre todo el ritmo confuso y el final atropellado que se le dio a esta saga.

Reilly será recordado por muchos como el Spider-man innovador, pues no solo creó variantes de sus inventos clásicos de arsenal (como la telaraña de impacto o disparar aguijones por los lanzaredes) sino que también se tuvo que enfrentar al hecho de que, al llevar tantos años alejado de la vida de héroe, desconocía a los recientes enemigos de Spider-man, lo cual llevó a ver como resolvía situaciones de una manera totalmente distinta a como lo hacía Parker. Reilly también tuvo su momento de gloria al participar en el histórico crossover Marvel VS. DC, donde le tocó enfrentarse al Superboy de los años 90, que casualmente también era un clon de Superman.

Como recomendación, solo puedo recomendar la Saga del clon (que se repartió entre las diversas colecciones de Spider-man durante los 90, pero en España se publicó en tomos recopilatorios) donde nos cuentan toda la historia que he resumido aquí; la serie limitada que tuvo la Araña Escarlata en los 90 y sus aventuras como nuevo Spider-man, además del ya citado Symbiote Planet, donde Scarlet Spider, Spider-man y Venom tienen que enfrentarse a una invasión de simbiontes al más puro estilo película de zombis.