Peter Parker’s life has been fraught with lies, secrets, and hidden truths – and one of the biggest is the true story of his clone.
Back in the 1970s, Professor Miles Warren, one of Peter’s college teachers, became obsessed with cloning Spider-Man, even succeeding in pitting his clone against Peter Parker in a seeming fight to the death, leaving Peter victorious and the clone having died in the fight.
But the infamous 1990s “Clone Saga” twisted the story – it supposed that the Peter Parker whose adventures fans followed since the original clone fight was in fact the clone, the genuine article seemingly having died with the clone taking his place. The original Peter, now calling himself Ben Reilly, returned with the plan to take his rightful place as Spider-Man.
From here, things just get more and more complicated, with multiple clones, threads, twists, turns, and revelations coming to the surface over the ever-expanding (and seemingly unending) Clone Saga.
In the end, the one true Peter Parker won out, with the guy we all knew being vindicated as the genuine article when Ben Reilly’s body disintegrated.
As for Miles Warren, he’s returned time and again as the cloning-obsessed Jackal, even cloning almost everyone from Peter’s life in 2016’s Dead No More: The Clone Conspiracy – which permanently returned both Doctor Octopus and Ben Reilly to life.