At least, that’s the way the rumour mill is heading at the moment…
From my point of view, its something I would be very excited about. It’ll be no surprise that this character is where half of my domain name comes from. For me, the big mistake in the clone saga was introducing the whole “one, true Spider-Man” guff. While I understand that the writers desperately wanted to give the series a clean slate (in a similar way to One More Day), they eventually ended up in such a mess that killing Ben was obviously seen as the only way to put the Clone Saga behind them.
The thing is, Ben was popular. Very popular. Ok, not so much as Spider-Man, but as a character in his own right. As the clone of Peter Parker who’d wandered the US trying to figure out his own identity, and then later, as Peter’s brother. It put a great new spin on the series, with Aunt May’s death, it still gave Peter that other family member, but with a very different spin. Someone who knew him possibly better than he knew himself.
So if Ben is coming back, then I’ll be a very happy reader. I just hope it all doesn’t end up some cheap trick, and if its done, its done well. I can’t really see them keeping two Spider-Men around as they were doing at the time of the Clone Saga though, so if Ben is brought back as the Scarlet Spider, he’d end up heading off into the sunset to have adventures of his own somewhere, but its something I’d like to see. And as someone who has generally avoided the Spider-titles ever since the terrible Gathering of Five (honestly, never mind the Clone Saga, half the stuff that happened afterwards was worse), Ben Reilly is probably the one character they could bring back that would get me to buy Amazing Spider-Man again.
Heck, it could be very interesting, given that Norman Osborn was the one who killed Ben all those years ago, to see exactly how Ben would react to Dark Reign.
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