Ah, the joys of trying to explain comic book continuity from the mid-70s for the edification of my fellow bookworms in case they stumble across this trade paperback in a used book store and are wondering if it's worth reading. If you're a Spider-Man fan, it probably is. If not, it might still be interesting and even entertaining as long as you can tolerate a few assumptions about the nature of cloning which the author had to make for his plot to work.
As you will recall from my recent review of The Death of Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker (Spider-Man) lost his first true love in issue #121 of his monthly comic book, The Amazing Spider-Man. This set off a firestorm of criticism leveled at Marvel Comics, and in large part leveled at writer Gerry Conway who had scripted the infamous tragedy. In an introduction to this compilation of a follow-up storyline, Conway wryly comments that the rumor got around that he had gone berserk and turned in a "Death of Gwen Stacy" script while editor and Spider-Man creator Stan Lee was out of town, and that Stan Lee never would have approved such a vile deed. Conway assures us that Stan had approved the whole thing before they went through with it, but apparently those wide-eyed Spider-Fans preferred not to believe that the man who had written all those great Spider-Man stories in the 60s could ever be an accessory to the murder of Spidey's girlfriend. In any event, there was so much nasty mail coming in that Stan finally ordered Conway to find a way to bring her back. Considering that she had been declared dead and buried in a nice cemetery with a tombstone marking the spot, this was going to take considerable ingenuity unless (as a co-worker suggested) they wanted to bring her back as a zombie or some such. Conway says he wracked his brains for months before finding a compromise he could work with.
This time, I might mention, he stretched out the buildup across nearly a year of continuity before this "sequel" storyline would finally reach its own climax, guaranteeing that whatever he did to the apparently-resurrected-Gwen, the fans would get their monthly dose of her in the Amazing Spider-Man comics for several months and would hopefully stop sending in all those nasty letters about her death. Also, they were getting near the point where Spider-Man would celebrate his 150th consecutive issue, and it's customary in the superhero biz to let every issue ending in "50" or "00" have something "special" to make it stand out from the common herd. The climax to the return-of-Gwen-Stacy storyline would seem to fit the bill to a T.
Accordingly, a villain called the Jackal started making Spidey's life miserable in stories not reprinted in this book. As near as I can tell, we get a few pages from issue #141 (showing the Jackal gloating about his plans to get revenge), followed by the contents of 142-151 inclusive. In the first story, Spider-Man starts seeing things that aren't really there. It turned out that a supervillain was deliberately using advanced technology to project illusions right before our hero's eyes. The problem is: before Spidey got all this worked out and tracked down and subdued the villain, he thought he caught a glimpse of the late Gwen Stacy walking down the street, but didn't catch up with her. He assumed it was another one of the illusions that had been making his life miserable.
Which was great, until after he defeated this villain. In the start of the next story, he thinks he sees Gwen a block away heading down into a subway station, and tries to convince himself it's his subconscious getting troublesome and exaggerating a faint resemblance into a carbon copy. He resolutely does not chase that girl into the subway station.
Which was great, until after he defeated yet another villain (in Paris, this time) and came back home to his apartment in the Big Apple, he found Gwen waiting for him and wondering in perplexity why he didn't seem thrilled to see her, considering how close they were! Apparently her memory only went as far as shortly-before-the-time-when-she-supposedly-died. Peter started showing signs of severe psychological strain, as one might imagine. After wondering if he was going mad, his next reaction was that she was some sort of impostor, running a swindle or some twisted psychological game.
(Have you ever seen Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak? I'd bet money Gerry Conway had. We've got the beautiful blonde who died in a long fall, the sincere hero who devastated by seeing it happen, the mysterious encounter with what's either the same lady he was in love with, or else a doppelganger . . . the only difference being that this time the hero is the one who denies she could be the same person, and the lady is the one who firmly claims that yes, she is!)
As it turned out, both of them were wrong. Gwen (to call her that by courtesy) wasn't really the same woman Peter had been madly in love way back when, but she wasn't a totally different woman putting on a big act, either. On the one hand, the grave was exhumed (offstage, thank goodness) and the body was still there. On the other hand, this new Gwen's fingerprints were a perfect match for the ones which had been taken at the autopsy. As you could guess from the title of this volume collecting the storyline, Gwen v2.0 was a clone of the original but didn't know it herself. A supervillain called the Jackal, who had apparently nursed a secret passion for Gwen Stacy for quite some time before her death, had managed to turn an old cell sample into a full-grown young woman. Since the cell sample was about two years old, the clone only had the memories of the woman of two years ago. (This was one of the weaker parts of the concept, to my way of thinking. A few skin cells or blood cells or whatever contained so much RNA that the complete memories of the donor could be reconstructed in the clone via hypnosis?) On a similar note, the Jackal also had access to an old sample that Peter Parker had donated to the campus genetics lab, and grew himself a new Spider-Man and managed to get the two of them to fight each other, almost to the death. In the end, however, the Jackal and the Spider-Clone both died in a terrible explosion, but the real Spidey (and the Gwen Clone) came through unscathed. Having realized she wasn't really Gwen, however, Gwen v2.0 decided to leave town and seek out a new life somewhere far from New York City. (This decision may have been influenced by her realization that Peter had found someone else to get serious about during the couple of years following the original Gwen's death, so picking up where they had left off was no longer a convenient option.)
I summarized all that plot development because I knew all of it myself before I ever bought this book. Since it all happened in the 1970s, there's been plenty of time for the key events to be referred to in other Marvel comic books over the years. If you do happen to buy this, I don't want you to do it on the theory that it's the only way to know how the return of Gwen Stacy was finally resolved. (Heck, I had a pretty good idea of the plot of Hitchcock's Vertigo before I ever got around to checking it out from a video store, but I went ahead and watched it anyway!) I will say that although Conway was still in his early twenties at the time he wrote this storyline, I feel he did an excellent job. The writing style of the dialogue does not bore me to death, the suspense builds at a nice pace, the moral quandaries and self-doubt that assail Peter are developed in a plausible fashion, and finally we have a happy ending as he regains his self-confidence after the whole mess has been resolved.
Incidentally, credits at the front of the book claim Ross Andru and Gil Kane did the pencil art for these comics, with various other people inking over their pencils. The art is fine; quite worthy for a Spider-Man storyline, and I just didn't mention it before (or in any great detail now) because graphic art is not my strong suit, and thus I tend to obsess over the writing instead. I don't buy comics just to look at the purty pitchers, unlike some.
Footnote: In 1975, this clone of Spider-Man supposedly died and was deposited in an incinerator. In 1994, Marvel brought him back. He hadn't quite died after all, and had gone out west and used the name Ben Reilly for the past few years of comic-book time. After awhile the comic books even produced the revelation that the "clone" who had been living in exile for all this time was actually the "original," and the guy who had been running around in the Spider-Man costume for the past two decades was actually the carbon copy. This caused so much outrage among Spider-Man fans (and rightly so!) that Marvel finally killed off the Ben Reilly guy (after he had taken over the superhero identity for a spell), reversed themselves by revealing that "our" Spider-Man actually had been the original Peter Parker all along, and thus tried to sweep the whole messy idea (which had been dragged out over two years in several monthly Spider-themed comic books) under the rug and forget about it. It was during those days of the "Clone Saga" that this volume was produced by reprinting the original storyline in which all this cloning had gotten its start. As with many ideas which get endlessly recycled, it appears that the first time had been great and the later efforts to go back and strip-mine the original to get something controversial and call it a new and exciting concept were just pathetic. Not that super-hero comic books are the only form of story-telling that falls into that old trap again and again.
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