My disgust for this storyline aside, I’m glad that you’re covering it even if it’s small doses at this time. It’s important that we don’t forget the past. To date, none of the people involved with this have been prosecuted so we need to continue shedding a light on their horrific crimes.

It occurs to me that this is the second of Marvel's big attempts to provide a sales boost to one of their franchises that goes sprawling out of control and is eventually retconned into submission by revealing that the whole thing is a deliberately confusing mindgame of some kind.

Glad to see Our Pal Sal getting some props in the midst of all this awfulness. He might not have been the most beautiful artist, but his ability (along with others of his era) to tell a coherent story with his art is something I took for granted before the 90s.

Fnord, note that Peter comments on how easily he and Ben defeated Carnage. I think the idea was that Traveller was influencing Carnage since he didn't want them killed and that's the only reason why Carnage was defeated so easily. That could have come across more clearly.
I think that Traveller is supposed to be putting Peter and Ben to sleep the first time and putting Peter to sleep the second time, not teleporting Peter and Ben away and later teleporting himself away. I think that he's also putting you to sleep. :)
Note the class ring on Ben's finger- another hint that Ben is the real Spider-Man.
In the backup story this issue, Ben awakes near the smokestack but has no clue how he got there. We'll find out how he survived later.

this is the second of Marvel's big attempts to provide a sales boost to one of their franchises that goes sprawling out of control and is eventually retconned into submission by revealing he the whole thing is a deliberately confusing mindgame of some kind.

What was the first attempt then?

My guess for the first attempt is the Crossing from the Avengers, retconned by Busiek/Brevoort in Avengers Forever to all be an Immortus/Space Phantom plot rather than an Avengers one.

I too am happy to see Sal Buscema getting praise, it's sad he left right when DeMatteis returned once more to Spectacular. I think the Chameleon and Kraven stories that were done at that time would've benefited from his art style. The angularness is very compelling to me. He draws the best Green Goblin. And his Doc Ock is also masterful.

I think making Ben "the original" would in no way invalidate the issues between ASM 150 and now, because the clone is as real as the original, that is the entire point. In Farscape, they made it such a point that they killed one of the John Crichtons and you couldn't tell if he was the first one or the copy. Because the copy is indistinguishable.

What it would do in Spider-Man's case is give us a Peter Parker who did go through a lot of the Stan Lee/Gerry Conway stuff, but didn't have endless fights with his own rogues gallery. So you could put a fresh spin on his interactions with all the villains new and old. Of course Mackie, Kavanagh and DeFalco were the last people that would've been able to do so, but the sentiment was a good one. It probably never would've happened if not for ASM 400 looming though.

I would think "the second" implies that the first one had come before this, which the Crossing didn't, but there isn't really anything else prior to this that would fit Omar's description that's coming to mind.

I think making Ben "the original" would in no way invalidate the issues between ASM 150 and now, because the clone is as real as the original, that is the entire point.

The original plan was for Peter to retire and Ben to become Spider-Man again, so those issues would've been invalidated in the sense that the new protagonist of the series wouldn't have lived through any of those events, and they wouldn't have any effect on his character.

But isn't that the perfect kind of invalidation? Because in practice, most of the events since ASM 150 didn't have much effect anymore on his character either, because of the nature of the sliding timescale. So you get a "back to basics" approach that doesn't require the rejiggering of the universe, since "our" Peter Parker would still exist and have MJ and a child, so the marriage wouldn't have to be dissolved/undone either. Everything happened the way it did, and the person it happened to, exists and counts, but he gets to live happily ever after (with the ability to return eventually) without the actual series Spider-Man needing to end. Of course you need to commit to that idea, and neither the company nor the writers could. It could've given us Ben Reilly the Spectacular Spider-Man while Peter Parker gets to be his brother who advises him, the person Peter himself never really had. So much potential squandered, really.

I should have called it the second one I could think of, not the second chronologically.

Wild Whip might be the worst possible advertisement for clone-on-the-lam adventures, but I think Spider-Man: The Lost Years is pretty good. It probably should have been a four-issue mini instead of three to give the story more room to breath, however (issue 0 is just a collection of the flipside stories mentioned in the review of Web #117).

A flaw in the plan of replacing Peter with ur-Peter, though, is that Ben couldn’t take Peter’s identity, not without explaining to all his old supporting cast what happened to MJ. So ur-Peter becomes Ben, but Ben Reilly and his setup are much farther removed from classic Peter than married Peter ever was.

But maybe Traveller gives us the true explanation for the clone saga and all its madness: it’s all just a psychological experiment gone badly awry...

By the way, I took the forged letter to be a real letter, not a forgery, that implied the Traveller we see here was someone or something that had stolen the real Traveller’s identity. Maybe he’s a clone, too!

I need Sturky...

Walter, Traveler specifically orders Chakra to forge a postmark- it was definitely the letter that was fake.

That's how you knowo they're major villains: only the worst of the worst commit mail fraud.