{"id":9641,"date":"2021-07-08T00:00:08","date_gmt":"2021-07-08T04:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=9641"},"modified":"2020-06-16T20:37:48","modified_gmt":"2020-06-17T00:37:48","slug":"maximum-clonage-omega","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2021\/07\/08\/maximum-clonage-omega\/","title":{"rendered":"Maximum Clonage Omega"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I can do this, I can do this. Can I do this? I don\u2019t actually know. The Alpha & Omega issues cost $4.95. FIVE DOLLARS! In a time when comics cost $1.50, these utter pieces of shit cost $5. They should quite literally be ashamed of themselves. But, then, I bought them, so there\u2019s plenty of shame for me, too. Having made it through 5 issues of utter trash by seasoned pros, it\u2019s time to let some rank amateurs wrap the whole thing up. It has already been made clear that Tom Lyle is not ready for primetime as a writer, but they let him close this out, anyway. He was apparently heavily rewritten by several people in an attempt to make something salvageable out of this debacle. And he was writing for 4 pencilers, and 2 of them are guys who can barely draw and only got hired because they can ape McFarlane\u2019s Spider-Man. We already saw Roy Burdine, but now we get to see Robert Brown, who has a perhaps more convincing McFarlane impression and an even worse literally everything else. They\u2019re joined by Mark Bagley & Tom Lyle on pencils. Sam De La Rosa, Randy Emberlin, Roy Burdine, Al Milgrom & Scott Hanna all pitch in on inks. John Kalisz inks. Things are looking pretty stupid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ah, this one\u2019s chromium cover is going to make it impossible to photograph, too, excellent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sigh. What an idiotic storyline. The Jackal was just an elderly college professor who was driven insane when a student he had a very inappropriate crush on died, and that somehow let him caper around in tights trying to punish Spider-Man for her death. That didn\u2019t make sense, either, but it was small potatoes. A revenge story. Now it\u2019s world domination. Why? What\u2019s his deal? We never know. No one cares enough to describe it. And Ben. Ben is like \u201cI can\u2019t kill this mindless, headless, writhing mass of body parts, this unholy abomination has rights!\u201d This is so, so utterly terrible. Ben pulls himself out of the crap, webs up his ankle for support, and sets out to save the day. Want to see this Robert Brown guy try to draw regular people? Probably not, but\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Oh, so we\u2019re having Gwen be a totally different person from last issue, sure thing, no problem. So, yeah, Marvel really would hire these guys because they could sort of copy McFarlane\u2019s Spider-Man even though they couldn\u2019t draw a human face. Just desperately grasping at straws as their industry goes into a tailspin of its own making and all their star talent left the company. Anyway, The Jackal now has an army of little \u201cJacks,\u201d like in ASM 399, and he\u2019s at The Daily Bugle as the first stop in a plan to replace everyone in the media with clones so they won\u2019t tell the public the virus has been killing everyone. I\u2019m not even going to both talking about how stupid this is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ugh. Terrible. And, again, he already knew Spidercide was betraying him, but this comic seems to have been scripted in a vacuum.  At the lab, Spider-Man & not-Gwen find no one home, and then an automated security system attacks, but Spidey handles it. Ten they find The Jackal\u2019s computer, and a shocking revelation, which I guess is just The Jackal\u2019s plan, which we\u2019ve known the whole issue, but which is left as a cliffhanger as we switch scenes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How do you study McFarlane so intently that you can do a pretty passable approximation of his weird texture style and stuff and still not pick up any pointers on drawing human beings? The bad guy fight explodes into the newsroom, so JJJ goes to help people evacuate while Ben joins the scrum. Meanwhile, plainly exposing the stupidity of Jackal\u2019s plan, MJ sees a TV news report about the fight at The Bugle. The newscaster even helpfully says \u201cit looks like Scarlet is almost out of webbing,\u201d which is a mindbogglingly lazy way to have MJ grab some web cartridges and go down there. Regular people have no idea what\u2019s up with how the web works. Come on, guys. Back at The Bugle it\u2019s fight fight fight, terrible dialogue, revelation that Scrier turned Spidercide on behalf of Judas Traveller, etc. Honestly, who cares? Eventually the 2 bad guys go out a window and Ben, who \u201clooked like he was running out of webbing,\u201d saves them with his webs. But Spidercide cuts the web, falling to what should certainly be his death if there\u2019s any mercy in the universe, but I honestly don\u2019t recall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What an incredibly weak and halfhearted explanation! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is so stupid it\u2019s almost physically painful. Roy Burdine jumps in for the next bit of this seemingly endless issue as Spidey starts fighting Jackal, leaving ben to go to the roof to try to disarm the bomb. But then the fight instantly comes to the roof, somehow, so that\u2019s not gonna work, and then Jackal is about to drop Spidey to his death (Goodness, what would he do?), so Ben tackles him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cDon\u2019t you want to hear our retcon of the retcon?\u201d \u201cNope!\u201d \u201cOh, cool, thank you!\u201d This is the laziest thing I\u2019ve ever seen. The spiders get to work disarming the bomb, the little Jacks show up, Ben takes care of them, whatever. No one working on this comic cared, why should I? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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They try to talk her out of it. MJ comes running in somehow. Gwen gets knocked off the roof and is hanging by a powerline, \u2018cuz falling off stuff is what Gwen Stacys do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Jackal hits the pavement, and really dies. He never came back, to my utter shock and amazement. This stupid mistake has not yet been made again.  Gwen says she realized she couldn\u2019t actually kill him, who cares, then the Spiders\u2019 danger senses go off. And the grown ups take over the art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bagley handles Ben heading to the river and swinging the canister in a big circle to chuck it out to explode harmlessly over the water, and then Tom Lyle starts drawing from his own terrible story for the finale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Immediately after saying he should give the virus to someone he trusts, Spidey hands it to the first EMT on the scene and says \u201chandle it carefully and dispose of it properly.\u201d Sigh. Then Gwen escapes into the crowd. Sigh. Then the Parkers go home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m not even gonna say anything. Peter suddenly decides he has to settle things with Ben right now before he can relax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Seems like this would be where Ben takes over as Spider-Man. And yet, due to the way the marketing department wanted the clone saga to go on as long as possible, it\u2019s not. There\u2019s an improbable 4 more months between this issue and his first as Spider-Man. Just wringing every penny they can out of this terrible premise.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the biz, they say every comic is somebody\u2019s first, so every comic should be great. Clearly, this storyline is the biggest failure to achieve that ever posted to this blog, and I believe it will remain so. But, there\u2019s some truth to the saying. And due to the fact that every comic is somebody\u2019s first, there is a small but loyal bunch of delusional psychopaths for whom Ben is \u201ctheir\u201d Spider-Man. I sat through this stuff in utter disgust, wishing I had the old Spider-Man back, but these people think this is the real stuff. These people inspired Marvel to publish giant, expensive collections of this terrible shit, and people bought them. There is truly no accounting for taste. Anyway. Next post, we take a pretty big detour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I can do this, I can do this. Can I do this? I don\u2019t actually know. The Alpha & Omega issues cost $4.95. FIVE DOLLARS! In a time when comics cost $1.50,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[153,455,13,339,21,432,927,914,598,417,462,2,923,605,416],"class_list":["post-9641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-al-milgrom","tag-ben-reilly","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-mark-bagley","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-randy-emberlin","tag-robert-brown","tag-roy-burdine","tag-sam-de-la-rosa","tag-scott-hanna","tag-scrier","tag-spider-man","tag-spidercide","tag-the-jackal","tag-tom-lyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9641","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=9641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9661,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9641\/revisions\/9661"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}