I’m not by any means a comic book aficionado (I leave that to Pat, who you will get to know better if I ever get that podcasting idea together), but since the outpouring of geek love for comic book movies started a few years ago, I’ve been subscribing to Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man and generally enjoying what I read while staying cautiously on the “passive observer” side of the comic geek line. Over the past half dozen issues, thought, I couldn’t help but turn into a bit of a snob as the Ultimate writers rehashed one of the most controversial stories in Spidey history: the clone saga.

In its original form, the clone saga dragged on through dozens of issues; I supposed I can count myself lucky that, in the Ultimate timeline, it seems to have been contained over a half of a year. The premise is this: Peter Parker discovers a slew of clones of himself made from DNA sampled from him three story arcs earlier. The clones pose a danger to the world and specifically to Mary Jane, and Peter has to balance trying to take the clones out with trying to avoid S.H.I.E.L.D, a government agency looking to contain Peter as the source of the danger.

Even for a comic book storyline, the clone saga feels contrived and unfulfilling. Why Brian Michael Bendis and his cohorts decided to relive it for a whole new generation of fans is beyond me. The point of the Ultimate series, to me, is to expose new fans to classic Marvel characters without subjecting them to decades of back issues. This presents the opportunity to skim over, or even totally ignore, the lesser story arcs. The failure to do this with the clone saga, and the absolute bungling of the “reinvention” of the story, has finally made my decision to cancel the subscription that much easier.

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