10 Terrible Mistakes That Almost Ruined Spider-Man For Everyone‏

10. Replaced By Ben Reilly

Ben Reilly first appeared in a Spider-Man comics all the way back in 1975, but it took until 1995 for him to finally usurp the Spider-Throne he'd long had his bright blue eyes on. Introduced as part of a storyline which saw minor Spidey villain Miles Warren, aka The Jackal, producing multiple clones of Peter Parker for...reasons...Ben Reilly, one of said genetic identicals, decided to keep his head low for twenty years, until he got coaxed back to the Big Apple for personal reasons/the Spider-Man editorial team had run out of ideas and were really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Through a series of entirely too complicated events that we'll get to in due course, it transpired that the Peter Parker whose stories we'd all been enjoying since 1975 was actually the clone, and Ben Reilly the original. Warren had implanted false memories in all the clones, so nobody could tell who the actual real Peter Parker was any more. Regardless, Ben figured the clone Peter had made enough of a life for himself that he'd carry on under the Reilly name, but took up the mantle of Spider-Man. For a entire year the Spider-Man titles all starred a totally different character. We're used to these sorts of shenanigans nowadays, what with the Superior Spider-Man and all, but in the mid-nineties it was all a little too much to take. People who had grown up with the character, or come to him with the success of the animated series, were totally thrown off. Ben was a distinct character, and an okay one, but he wasn't the real Peter Parker, was he? Just imagine how many readers dropped the books whilst all this was going on. Now imagine if they'd never turned things back to normal. Ruined forever for everyone.