No way to run a comic: Al told me about this site at the weekend, it may have been linked here before but I don’t remember it. It’s an exhaustive (35 long pages) examination of the Spider-Man “Clone Saga” – the storyline that ran for two years in Marvel’s Spider-Man comics, revealing that Peter Parker had a clone, then that he was a clone, then that he wasn’t again. On its own this would be no reason to click the link.
But the writer has access to one of the then-editorial staff on the Spider-Man books, who provides behind-the-scenes information about what exactly was going on – and this is interesting if you remember the mess that ‘event-driven’ storytelling became in the 90s. The overall impression is of a completely rudderless ship, veering from place to place on editorial whim and the directives of Marvel’s sales department. The number of occasions where a plot development (usually an extra clone, I mean why not eh?) shows up in one Spider-Man comic and is simply not communicated at all to any of the other writers is eye-opening even if you were fairly cynical about the competence of people at the ‘House Of Ideas’.