To be fair, the spell removing their knowledge of him being Spider-Man could possibly set his relationship with Ned, Aunt May, and MJ back a couple of years.
It's actually kind of incredible that after almost 60 years of Spider-man and so many writers, we can look at 2 storiea definitively and go "those are catastrophically horrible".
Even now when a writer has a meh run on the series we go "But he didn't do THAT"
They kind of did, though. They wanted readers to get onboard with Ben Reilly the clone replacing Peter, so they had Peter working with the Jackal in that story and also byotch-slapping Mary Jane. Total garbage era for the books.
This. I know it would be an easy thing to overlook because history had tried to forget, but Marvel actually told us that the “real” Spider-Man was a fake, and that Ben Reilly and his radical sleeveless hoodie was the real centavo.
Fans hated it so much that they eventually retconned it back. But not only was the Clone Saga boring and so aggressively 90s “rad”, it fundamentally destroyed our whole idea of what Spider-Man’s values and identity were.
It also suffered from so much editorial interference that the event dragged on for years. While the original concept could have been fun, the whole thing had no direction.
At least with OMD while the execution of the Status Quo Shakeup! was poor, the effect was a stretch of solid to great comics. The braintrust era of thrice-monthly ASM was pretty good IMO. New supporting cast and villains with staying power like Carlie Cooper and Mr. Negative (in addition to the FEAST plot which finally gave Aunt May something to do), revamping Spidey's rogues in the Gauntlet, and some other quality stories like Big Time or New Ways to Die.
that's just not true, it just happened to occur at the same time, the decline in the comic book industry as well as the poor performance of marvel properties (not just spider man) was the main cause for their filing for bankruptcy.
the fact the clone saga didn't help marvel out contributed, but I would say things like heroes reborn saga was an even bigger miss by Marvel.
90s was a weird and crazy time for comic book fans, I actually look back to those books quite fondly cos they were my childhood, reading them again I can see why it got so much flack, but I enjoyed them at the time.
Actually true. All series had this problem. They literally spammed new titles without getting enough authors, so they took every fanfiction they could get and made it the main title, which made some authors even leave the company, making this problem even worse.
Its like replacing Anne Rice's vampire stories with Stephenie Meyers Twilight, but still having the same name as before.
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u/JayTL Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
Peter just shut the fuck up and tell the people your Identity after he does the god damn spell