All language subtitles for Slugfest s01e09 Send in the Clones.eng

- NARRATOR: Following
the death of Superman,

the comic book industry was
experiencing a boom in sales.

Publishers began courting
the collector market

by introducing variant covers
with fancy printing techniques

and special editions.

Feeling the pressure from the
enormous success of Superman,

Marvel had to come up with an
idea that would attempt to garner

the same level of
frenzied reader and collector interest.

- So they killed Superman.

And the whole world
loses its shit.

You turn on the TV, you open a
newspaper, and it's Superman, Superman, Superman.

So, my question is,
how do we respond?

[triumphant music playing]

- REED: So, over at
Marvel, they decided

they were going to try to
do something with their most popular character.

- Who's your most favorite
character? - CHILD: Uh, Spider-Man.

- REED: And one of the
problems that the Marvel editos had with Spider-Man

was so many stories had been
told about him by the 1990s

that he was starting to
feel a little bit older.

- Why did you decide now
that they should get married?

- Oh, just look at this
couple. How can you keep them apart?

- By the time
we came to 1994,

he had a regular job and
he was married to Mary Jane Watson,

and they had a
penthouse apartment.

- TERRY: As the writers
and editorial aged

and got families
and mortgages, et cetera,

we sort of wrote
Spider-Man along with us.

But then we found
ourselves in this situation

where we had written him
away from our core audience.

He no longer had a
16-year-old's problems, and now he had our father's

- And so, when we were tasked to
come up with our counter to The Death of Superman,

part of it was to get Peter
Parker back to the young version

that we had all known
and grown to love.

We were brought together
in a conference room

with the editorial staff
and a few of the artists.

- TERRY STEWART: Sales are down.
Readers aren't relating.

We got Peter Parker
all grown up.

He's married. He's
doing grown-up stuff.

So, what's our next story-line
for him gonna be?

Is he gonna get a prostate exam?
Maybe he falls and he can't get up.

- HOWARD: It was just thrown
out to the table, if anybody hd any thoughts.

Probably what I did was throw
Terry under the bus and say,

"Terry's got an idea."

- I am very shy, so I didn't say
anything until Howard forced me to.

- Anybody?

- We have... I have an
idea. I mean, we... we have.

- Clones.
- TERRY: Clones.

- Clones?

- NARRATOR: Since the
beginning, Spider-Man's tights

have always been filled by
a guy named Peter Parker.

But in the
early '70s,

writer Gerry Conway
wrote a story where Spider-Man meets his clone,

another web-slinger who
went by the name Ben Reilly.

- ALEX: So the
original clone story

where Gerry Conway writes
about Professor Miles Warren,

who was also known as the
Jackal, who creates a clone of Peter Parker.

- I thought it would be
fun to have Spider-Man fight his clone.

And then at the end of it,

leave it kind of ambiguous of
which of them was the real Spider-Man.

- And there was in fact
a clone of Spider-Man out there

somewhere in the
Marvel Universe.

And so, their idea was,
they were going to bring that clone

back into the major
Spider-Man titles in a big way.

- NARRATOR: By revisiting
the old clone story-line,

the writers had new
inspiration to create a blockbuster saga for Marvel.

- Okay, so the
clone is Ben Reilly,

and we have Peter confront him
on the roof of the hospital

where he's visiting Aunt May at.

- What we posited was the
Spider-Man that we thought had died

was actually the
original Peter Parker,

and he had gone away,

and the character
who had remained

and who had then ultimately
had all these adventures

and married Mary Jane was the
clone named Ben Reilly.

- Since has has
all of Peter's Spidey powers,

he becomes a superhero
all on his own,

the Scarlet Spider.

- REED: The Clone-Saga
sold very well because it was n event.

You know, it was basically
introducing this other Spider-Man,

so people thought
they had to buy that.

- And similar to
Death of Superman,

this crossover multiple
issues of comics,

Spider-Man had four different
comics going on at the same time,

and they were all
leading into each other.

So, you had to buy all four
comics each month to keep up with the story-line.

- The original concept
was three months.

- Swooping down...
- Yeah, yeah, yeah--

- Guys, sales are up. We need
to keep this clone story going.

[both exclaim]

- Sales and Marketing
were coming to us every month.

- Hey, sales are still up.
We can't end the story-line.

- Okay... Um...
- Yeah... Mm...

- HOWARD: The addition
of another character,

it did exactly what Marvel
had tasked us to do,

which was to help lift
sales. - Yeah.

- And because it
was so successful,

Marketing had decided
to stretch the story out.

We were trying to
end the Clone-Saga,

but everybody had a different
opinion on how to do that,

and we just kept bringing more
and more voices to the table.

- Suddenly, it started
to spin out of control.

And they had all
these story threads.

- TERRY: I believe there
was a murder somewhere,

that Peter was framed for a
murder. The details escape me.

Actually, I was confused about
what I was writing at a certain point.

- [exclaims] - No, I am thinking
for the finale.

- You know this isn't
making any sense, right?

- Yeah, we know.
- Yeah.

- Okay.

- It became incredibly unwieldy

when we had to
string a story along

that we had conceived of
as being very tight.

And I think, in hindsight,

we started adding elements
that didn't belong in the story.

- REED: We've got clones and
evil twins and this villain,

and this wife
and girlfriends,

and it just became so ridiculous
and over the top.

- It got away from us when other
clones started popping up all over the place.

That became more problematic,
I believe, for the fans

because it got dragged on and
they didn't get the ending they wanted.

- NARRATOR: The ending
the fans didn't want finally arrived

after two years
and 150 issues.

As convoluted endings go,

Peter Parker and Ben Reilly
teamed up to defeat an old foe named Norman Osborn.

But during the fight,

Ben jumped in front of Peter
and received a fatal blow

disintegrating
him on contact.

This proved to Peter that
Ben was in fact the clone,

and that he, Peter Parker,
remained the true, original Spider-Man.

- It's an ending.

- REED: The way the
Clone-Saga ended

really, really
displeased readers.

- [swish] - Yeah, so the actual
quality of comics

and characters just.
you know, shot down the drain.

- No longer is Spider-Man
my favorite character.

- HOWARD: I like to tell
everybody it was Terry Kavanagh's idea.

- That entire story-line
became vilified in the industry

with me as the face
of that story-line,

which even my
Wikipedia entry sort of led with that for a while,

which I didn't like.

- NARRATOR: Despite the early
sale success of the Clone-Saga,

readers grew frustrated with
the long and convoluted plots

covered across four
Spider-Man titles,

and sales began to lag.

This downturn coincided
with a change in ownership,

risky mergers and the
collapse of the collectors market,

creating one of darkest
periods in Marvel's history.

- Marvel Entertainment, the
superhero of comic book publishers

has filed for bankruptcy.

- NARRATOR: To
make matters worse,

the bankruptcy allowed DC to
lure away Marvel's most famous name

for the most unlikely
collaboration.

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