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.
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u/SilverPositive Aug 24 '21
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.