Not all clone stories work out well– I’d say that most are pretty lame, to be honest. While we end up sometimes with a Kaine Parker Scarlet Spider who is like Spidey but is a bad man trying to be good, we also can end up with a Ben Reilly Scarlet Spider, who is sort of like a cup of plain oatmeal in a sleeveless blue hoodie.

And the award for Worst Dressed Goes To…

A sleeveless blue hoodie, you say? Surely you must be joking. If you aren’t familiar with Ben Reilly, this is what he looks like dressed up in possibly the dumbest costume in the Marvel Universe, one that has inexplicably stuck around for years, one so bad that he’s regularly mocked by other characters but not so bad to be funny. It’s just as lame as Ben Reilly is as a character.

I will try my best to sum up the convoluted nature of Ben Reilly’s deal: Back in The Amazing Spider-Man #149 (October 1975) a seemingly nice but really crazy mad scientist/college professor Miles Warren aka the Jackal cloned both Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy for reasons. The Spider-Men fight, Peter wins, the Jackal perishes after realizes the error of his ways, the Gwen Stacy clone wanders off. All in all, a perfectly serviceable story for the era.

But wait! Ben survived being dumped in a smokestack by Spider-Man, then wandered the earth like Kaine in Kung Fu then hooked up with Peter Parker in New York.

And then the Clone Saga. The short, short version is that the Jackal wasn’t dead, made a bunch of other clones, made Peter think HE was a clone and Ben was the original, Peter retired, Ben took over as Spider-Man and disintegrated when the Green Goblin killed him.

But wait, there’s more.

The Jackal brings him back, Reilly clones the Jackal, makes the Jackal believe that he is a clone, becomes the Jackal himself, clones a bunch more people, blah blah blah. Moves to Las Vegas to start over yet again, makes friends with Death herself, and a bunch of more stuff happens.

That’s the short short version, and I am aware it didn’t make much sense. Reilly is basically fake Spider-Man with no defining features of his own, a stupid costume and a convoluted backstory. Even when they gave his costume an update it still looked ridiculous, like a third-rate Spider-Gwen knockoff.

Peter Parker is a good man who is often confronted by tough choices that regularly test his ethics– most good Spider-Man stories revolve somewhat around this theme. Reilly is…well, a clone of Parker. He is also a good man trying to navigate the world, but since he’s basically Parker without the history it leaves him as a character with nothing to prove or show, so instead it seems he’s used as a blank canvas for each writer to try and do something with. There’s no consistency, there’s no character growth or potential for it.

Compare him to Kaine, the other Scarlet Spider (yes, I know: Kaine is a dumb name and there’s another Scarlet Spider?). Kaine is also a clone of Peter Parker, but had an incredibly traumatic creation and was fighting against his own mortality as his body crumbled around him. That hardens a person. He was a monster (sometimes literally) and that’s understandable– when you have nothing but pain it makes it difficult to empathize with others. But the character grew and developed and tried to change his ways over time, and his growth from villain to anti-hero to genuine hero has been fascinating to follow. When he threatens to kill someone, there is the very real chance he might. Ben Reilly? Whatever the plot dictates, I suppose.

Anyhoo, that’s all I ever want to write about Ben Reilly ever again. There are other lame Spider-Man clones (a lot of other lame Spider-Man clones, in fact) but at least they have the good sense not to be shoved in our face all the time.

So Edgy

If you read comics in the 90s you were familiar with Rob Liefeld’s butchering of New Mutants into the comically inept X-Force (which to be fair, did become pretty good not too long after Liefeld exited the book). He managed to take a book that was full of compelling characters and complex situations and emotions and strip away all of the good stuff. He even killed Warlock! I know Louise Simonson wrote New Mutants #95, but I’m still blaming Liefeld, as she was in the process of being kicked off of the book.

Liefeld’s concept for new characters seemed to be thus: Add as many pouches and blades as you can. Give them all mysterious backstories that you clearly haven’t thought up yet. And make sure they scream constantly. His worst creation was Cable’s clone Stryfe, a character that comes in as a runner up for Worst Costume and certainly would win Most Likely to Have Pigeons Pooping on Him. He first graced us with his shiny armor and shinier eyeball in New Mutants #87 (March 1990).

I mean, just look at that thing. How does he get dressed? How does his head hold up that enormous helmet? How does he not constantly slash open his couch every time he sits down?

He’s not here for his terrible fashion sense (although it doesn’t help him any) but for his unnecessarily confusing backstory. If you’re unaware, he is the clone of Cable who is the child of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor, who herself was a clone, who was sent into the future to cure him of his techno-organic virus infection and grew up to be a time traveling vigilante and freedom fighter. Stryfe made as a backup copy of Cable for by Rachel Grey/Summers, the child of Cyclops and Jean Grey from an alternate dimension. Deep sigh) in case Cable died of his infection and was taken by Apocolypse to possess to take over the world sometime in the future.

Right.

He initially doesn’t know he’s a clone and is mad at his dad and the woman who is not his mother that he was sent to the future as a baby, and so he kidnaps them amongst the other incomprehensible chaos that is the X-Cutioner’s Song crossover from 1992 and tries to force Cyclops to eat food like a baby?

Stryfe is OP AF, spends his time either complaining about his life like a sullen teenager, screaming at people or concocting elaborate revenge fantasies that no one really cares about. His character growth is zero– the most recent thing I saw him in he was still complaining about things. Compare that to someone like Magneto, who went from a mustache twirling supervillain to someone who had real motivations for what he does. Magneto is a man who makes all of the wrong decisions for all of the right reasons (I stole that from somewhere but I can’t remember where). Stryfe is a big baby who cries and is covered with sharp objects. That’s about it.

Ugh, everything about this guy is the worst. In the almost 30 years the character has been around nobody has ever been able to a) fix his costume or b) make him compelling in the slightest.

Scrappy-Doo

I can’t think of a character with a solo series running 75 issues that is less beloved than Nate Grey, aka X-Man, who first appeared in his own eponymous series in March of 1995. Jeph Loeb apparently thought, “What if we took Cable, made him younger, more powerful and techno-organic free?”, which is about 75% of what made Cable initially interesting as a character before being fleshed out by better writers.

He’s like the young Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars prequels. We don’t need to see Darth Vader young and handsome because it adds nothing to the character. He’s Scrappy-Doo. I’d call him Poochy the dog, but the Poochy of the Marvel Universe is either Adam-X the X-Treme or Night Thrasher.

via GIPHY

This is how bad he is: Warren Ellis wrote a chunk of the run, and even he couldn’t make soup out of Nate.

The series inexplicably resurrected Madelyne Pryor (who I should note was not his mother, even in the alternate reality he hailed from… oh yeah, I forgot to mention, he is from the Age of Apocolypse. Le sigh), killed her off again, resurrected her again only to have that one be from another reality as well.

It’s just a bunch of nonsense. He’s popped up here and there, but never to any consequence. I can’t even work up the proper vitriol to really hate him as he’s somehow such a negligible character, which is saying a lot considering he is an Omega level mutant and therefore should be somewhat important in the Marvel universe. I’m not sure if he survived Secret Wars, so maybe he’s finally be laid to rest permanently, forgotten to the mists of time by everyone except nerd bloggers.

Oh man, I almost forgot about Joseph.

Let’s say you met Magneto, but he was young, like in his 20s young. Any other character in the Marvel universe you’d assume that he was either a time-displaced mutant (it’s more common than you think), from another universe or a clone. All of these options follow the sometimes baffling logic of the 616. Magneto, though? It could also be him de-aged. It happened before, when he was turned into a baby by a space alien, and then used that as an excuse in the Hague to explain he wasn’t guilty of mass murder because you see, that was old Magneto. Current Magneto grew up from Baby Magneto and so technically never did those things.

X-Men, amirite?

So there’s a precedent there. You can forgive the X-Men for that one. A young Magneto, with long flowing locks out of a shampoo commercial, killer abs and apparently no shirts in his possession shows up in South America in Uncanny X-Men #325 (December 1995). He has amnesia, but is friends with a nun and helps out the local orphanage. What a guy, right? They’re not even mutants! How could that possibly be Magneto?!

Lots of stuff happens. He meets the Acolytes, joins the X-Men, and goes off in space to fight the Phalanx. He dies saving the earth, is resurrected by his creator Astra, starts his own Brotherhood of Evil Mutants with cloned versions of other villains, and really none of this is interesting, and neither is Joseph.

He suffers from a lot of the same problems that Nate Grey does, namely once you take the darkness and the complexity from a character and try and sex them up a bit you end up with a character so sanitized that they could be on ABC Family. Who wants to pay any attention to that? Not me.

Mention Joseph to any X-Men fan who has read the run with him, and I’ll almost guarantee they’ll respond with “Ugh, Joseph.