Marvel has been cloning its characters since before Star Wars ever appeared on screen. I haven’t been able to pinpoint the earliest clone to appear in print, but Spider-Man’s first of many, many clones was Ben Reilly who appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #149 in October of 1975. That was a year and a half before the words “Clone Wars” were ever spoken. There have been boatloads of clones since.

I’d like to share some of my favorites without delving too deep into Spider-Man’s clones and the Clone Saga, an event that went on for so long that Marvel actually made an apology series streamlining it (I’m not even kidding, I’m totally serious). He deserves his own post about clones…maybe his own website. He has a LOT of clones. I won’t be talking about children, alternate universe version or time displaced versions, just clones here– I’ll save the rest for future posts.

Wolverines

The most successful Marvel clone is X-23, aka Laura Kinney, aka Wolverine (or she was, it’s a long story). She was cloned, raised in a lab and taught to be a killer. She has two adamantium claws in her hands and one in each foot, but otherwise is flesh and bone, though she is a super quick healer. I’m not sure why her claws are in different places but as she was cloned from a doubled X chromosome of Wolverine (the Y chromosome was damaged) I’m willing to let that slide. Her backstory isn’t as convoluted as Logan’s but has a lot of tragic elements that you can best explore in Marjorie Liu’s run of X-23 beginning in 2010.

Laura also took over the mantle of the official Wolverine while Marvel pretended that he was dead which led to the absolutely awesome All-New Wolverine series written by Tom Taylor, which I can’t recommend enough. I do have to say, calling her by her lab designated number as an adult is certainly a good way to give someone PTSD, but I guess she’s okay with it? Oh, and she was in Logan as well, I almost forgot! Even though she is portrayed as a child it is still a tremendous adaptation of the character.

Okay, so then Alchemax (the second best evil Marvel Corporation besides Roxxon) cloned Laura. So now we have clones of clones. Fortunately, this worked out a lot better than it did for Michael Keaton in Multiplicity and long story short, out of ten of them we were blessed with Gabby, aka the motherfuckin’ Honey Badger, quite possibly the most relentlessly cheerful character in modern fiction.

For some reason, the clones don’t have the same claws as Laura, some don’t have any, Gabby has one in each hand, some have claws artificially implanted. I guess they were doing some tinkering with the genes? Who knows. What we do know is that Gabby is delightful and also has a pet wolverine (a real one) named Jonathan that was given to her by Squirrel Girl and it’s yet another long story. He also has a costume.

Maddie

Have you ever seen Vertigo (the Alfred Hitchcock film, not the DC imprint)? Remember how Jimmy Stewart is obsessed with a dead woman and forces his current girlfriend to dress up like her? We’ll get back to that in a moment.

In an effort to keep the confusion going with cloning, Mr. Sinister cloned Jean Grey and named her Madelyne Pryor, one of the best characters ever written in X-Men and in my humble opinion one of the most ruined by bad writing and editorial decisions. After Jean Grey died, was resurrected (sort of) as the Phoenix and then died again, Cyclops met a super rad cargo plane pilot in Alaska after running away from his problems as Mr. Summers was wont to do. Somehow Scott didn’t realize she was identical to his dead girlfriend and teammate, which totally makes sense because what?

Scott falls in love with her because he has issues, marries her, has a child with her and then dumps her after the real Jean returns. No one tells Scott that she is identical to Jean because what? Her child (who grows up to be Cable after…sigh…it’s another long story) is kidnapped, she contemplates suicide as her life has completely fallen to shit, and then she dies with the X-Men in Fall of the Mutants. Of course, she is brought back to life with the X-Men and is part of the whole team in the Australian outback situation where she is the Guy in the Chair for the team.

Talk about someone who has been through a lot. She’s not a mutant, but her life is now intertwined with them. Here’s where things go sour for me and for Ms. Pryor. She goes evil, seduced by a demon named N’astirh and becomes the Goblin Queen and is for some reason willing to sacrifice her own child for…reasons?

The good side of this is that we get Inferno, one of my favorite X-Men events of all time, but the bad side is we lose a compelling character, the only mother in the series, whose personality completely changes so a crossover can happen, and worst of all she gets put in what is possibly the crappiest costume of all time, trumping the boob window by sporting an underboob, which she must keep supported by black magic because I can’t figure out how else they stay up there.

She came back in the most recent Secret Wars but as the stupid Goblin Queen in that same stupid outfit and I just want my Maddie back, okay?

There are a lot of weird parallels to Vertigo, ones that I think were unintentional. Scott is obsessed with a dead woman and finds one that looks like her without realizing it’s the same woman (I mean, a clone, but still). He is obsessed with the image of his dead wife and tries to recapture it soon after her death by marrying her doppelganger. (oh, the name of the woman in Vertigo? Madeleine.)

Here’s the difference, though: Madelyne Pryor was never satisfied at being a pawn in someone else’s game. She strove for her own agency (and at sometimes it seemed that she was fighting the writers themselves), and when her initial role as Scott’s new redhead sputtered out, she found new avenues to explore.

She’s a fantastic character who is essentially only remembered for her underboob. I really wish Marvel would take the time to explore her story with a writer who understands her tragedy.

Someone make that happen, please.

Kid Apocalypse

Here’s the short version: Evan is a clone of Apocolypse, the second clone who was created because Fantomex felt bad that he murdered the first one in cold blood. The second clone was raised in an idyllic virtual reality farm in Idaho because comic books. He was raised to be a good kid by his fake parents and came out as exactly that.

What does it mean to be cloned from one of the most powerful and evil men to ever exist? Does nurture trump nature? This has been explored in brief, but Evan is woefully underused despite his multiple appearances. He’s a character that would make a great miniseries, exploring free will vs fate.

Mean Spidey

I think my favorite clone in the Marvel universe has to be Kaine Parker, aka the Scarlet Spider. As I said before, I’m not going to go into the whole Spider-Man clone thing, so let’s just say Kaine was created to be an evil Spider-Man but decided eventually to be a better person. As he was a pretty terrible person to begin with this means that he’s not exactly a nice guy but at least his heart is in the right place. He began life as a monster, and the climb up from that is substantial.

He’s sort of like a mean, more violent version of Spider-Man, who might not kill people anymore (not usually at least) but certainly doesn’t have a problem getting the job done by any means necessary. He was created with a great evil in his soul and even though there’s a whole demonic spider god thing going on within him (long story) he is still struggling to be a good person. What does it mean to be the dark shadow of a good man who always tries to do the right thing?

Kaine is a fascinating look at a bad man trying to be a good less bad(?) one. My favorite series with Kaine is Scarlett Spider Vol.2 written by Christopher Yost, which takes place in Houston, which doesn’t have its own superhero and is subsequently very excited to have their own Spider-Man.

I’d like to see more of Kaine, especially when he doesn’t have to have Ben Reilly around, who is kind of a snooze.