{"id":9616,"date":"2021-07-06T00:00:22","date_gmt":"2021-07-06T04:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=9616"},"modified":"2020-06-16T20:20:53","modified_gmt":"2020-06-17T00:20:53","slug":"sm-61","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2021\/07\/06\/sm-61\/","title":{"rendered":"SM 61"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Howard Mackie retains scripting duties this month, breaking Todd DeZago\u2019s streak. Having one person script this whole event might have been helpful if the story wasn\u2019t garbage and that scripter wasn\u2019t writing awful dialogue. Chris Ivy inks this one. Ben is still in that room with all the Spider-Men, and they attack him in a 2-page spread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ah, but Ben, you abandoned a life you thought wasn\u2019t your own, and you didn\u2019t do it to help a very poorly conceived villain kill everyone on Earth, your story is not the same. Also: You never hit your wife. Speaking of whom\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The fact that he smashed her across the room and made her face bleed is nothing now. Might as well have not happened, mere weeks later. And that\u2019s how it\u2019ll be forever. I guess I may as well quit harping on it, the past is the past. It\u2019s just so utterly disgusting, such a grim failure on the part of everyone involved. Anyway. MJ can\u2019t answer Kaine\u2019s question. Kaine says Peter had everything, why didn\u2019t he fight to keep it? MJ doesn\u2019t know that, either. Hey, we\u2019re off to The Jackal\u2019s lab, where he\u2019s being told to forget his old life and be happy here with his family Jackal says Peter needs something to focus on, and that\u2019s bringing him Gwen Stacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Elsewhere in this apparently gigantic compound, Ben subdues a bunch of Spider-Men, but there\u2019s always more to follow. The battle takes him crashing through a wall and right out of the lab. After taking out the immediate clones around him, he\u2019s shocked to realize where The Jackal\u2019s lab is, but we cut away before we can see. Um. He\u2019s been here before. He came here on his own. How could he not know where it is? Back at The Parker residence, Kaine is still asking how Peter could throw his life away in different phrasings (He\u2019s said the same thing like 6 times). MJ asks why he cares, and he says this all could have been his, and then recounts his origin. How he was the first clone, how Warren acted like a father to him and trained him to take Peter\u2019s place. Until he had his first vision of the future, and then noticed the first visible sign of deterioration. Now that he wasn\u2019t a perfect duplicate, Warren tried to kill him, but he saw that in his vision, and saved himself. Then he hung around Warren\u2019s lab in the shadows watching the clone currently referred to as Peter take his place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I maintain that Kaine being shocked Ben was the real thing would\u2019ve been so much better. Meanwhile, The Jackal enters yet another gigantic room in his compound full of Gwen Stacys in pods, who all melt to nothing as he says none of them could come close to the one Peter is out to get. He\u2019s reached her house, and she knew he was coming, or that someone would. Since her Warren clone died, she\u2019s been remembering things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sure, man, why not?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Here\u2019s the first positive thing I\u2019ve had to say about a story beat in ages: Mary Jane talking sense into Kaine works for me. Because she\u2019s right, if he\u2019s supposed to be Peter Parker, he should start acting like it. It\u2019s badly damaged by the fact that her Peter hasn\u2019t \u201calways done the right thing.\u201d He has, in fact, tried to abandon her for no reason twice in 9 months (Can you believe blocks 9, 15 & this were just 9 months\u2019 worth of comics?) and also, you know, punched her across a room. But whatever. Kaine is stupid, this story is stupid, but the tide of it has been turned by the pure force of Mary Jane\u2019s will, and I appreciate that. Then we finally get back to Ben, who has discovered The Jackal\u2019s lab is in the building with the smokestack he was dumped in at the end of the original clone saga. Again, he came here under his own power, how could he not know this? And last time he came here (In ASM 399), \u201chere\u201d was up in the Catskills, as I recall. Total crap, all around. More clones attack him, and it\u2019s lookin\u2019 bad, but…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Now they’re pals! Ok, sure. More of this dynamic duo next time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Howard Mackie retains scripting duties this month, breaking Todd DeZago\u2019s streak. Having one person script this whole event might have been helpful if the story wasn\u2019t garbage and that scripter wasn\u2019t writing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[455,415,488,418,21,599,417,2,605,416],"class_list":["post-9616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-ben-reilly","tag-howard-mackie","tag-kaine","tag-kevin-tinsley","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-scarlet-spider","tag-scott-hanna","tag-spider-man","tag-the-jackal","tag-tom-lyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9627,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9616\/revisions\/9627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}