Marvel Comics teases Miles Morales’ own Spider-Man Clone Saga

Just how many Miles Moraleses are there? Maybe more than you think. Marvel Comics teased that the Spider-Man from Brooklyn will be getting his own iteration of his mentor’s most infamous storyline: The Clone Saga.

The Marvel Entertainment account tweeted just one cryptic but unmistakable image, including the logo of Miles’ solo series, Miles Morales: Spider-Man and the title “Clone Saga.”

The company did not offer any information on whether the storyline will be a crossover or just the next arc of Miles’ solo book, presumably after the conclusion of the delayed Outlawed event. But either way, things will kick off in April 2021 — which means that this tweet is definitely not about the upcoming sequel to Into the Spider-Verse, the animated film that put Miles on the wider cultural map. That unnamed sequel won’t hit theaters until 2022.

What is the Clone Saga?

Running between 1994 and 1996, the Clone Saga is technically a story about Peter Parker coming face to face with a clone of himself — the Spider-Man known as Ben Reilly — and working through various trials and tribulations about which of them is the real Peter Parker and which of them has manipulated memories. Also there was a clone of Gwen Stacy. Also he and Mary Jane got divorced. Also Norman Osborn turned out to have come back from the dead and had been secretly manipulating all of their lives for years.

Created during the last convulsive upheavals of the 1990s Speculator Boom — as well as Marvel Comics’ declaration of bankruptcy — the Clone Saga was a meandering, confusing, often contradictory, but paradoxically best-selling Spider-Man crossover storyline. It’s almost universally reviled today, except perhaps among folks who have a soft spot for Ben Reilly, who did turn out to be just a clone all along and heroically sacrificed his life for Peter.

Miles Morales, as a character who began life in a parallel universe from the main Marvel one, is a character with some doubles baked in. It remains to be seen if this Clone Saga will draw from a pool of parallel Mileses, or if we’ll be seeing some tried and true genetic manipulation. We can expect more information before the end of January, when Marvel releases its official summaries for its April comic releases.