MILES MORALES: SPIDER-MAN #28 - The Clone Saga Ends

 This story is written by: Saladin Ahmed, with visuals from: Carmen Carnero and David Curiel.

I would hardly call this a “Saga” in the traditional sense of the world, as this was not exactly sprawling epic, told over multiple years, or even generations of people. It was simply just a four-issue story, that I felt was rather a boring read for the most part, albeit boredom that was very well written on the part of Saladin Ahmed. A much better use of the Clone Saga name would likely just to have had all of this run leading up this moment be considered Miles’ Saga, obviously further down the line in the collected volume of course, as that is what we have been dealing with for quite a bit of this stint for the character.

This finale issue really followed the same formula as all of the previous instalments of the arc, only this time with the threat of a months old baby girl being lobbed off of a bridge (seriously, not every Spider-Man needs to have a bridge threat in their lives). In my opinion, throughout this entire story arc, I feel that Selim has been kind of a terrible big bad, and while his plan is certainly a suitably maniacal one, it never really felt as though his motivations for what he was doing were ever quite there. Despite their clear physical difference to both Miles and Selim (which I just now realised is just Miles backwards), Shift and Mindspinner still seemed to be a little bit more reasonable than the man that we assumed was the leader of the group, as Shift was ultimately the one that aided Miles in rescuing Billie Morales from Selim’s clutches, while Mindspinner helped to take him out once and for all, sacrificing himself. Selim, ultimately, was only really out for himself, as proven by wanting to determine that he was the “pure one”, with no real thought of what his “brothers” wanted from their shortened lives, perhaps they didn’t want to spend it following him around and ruining Miles and his family’s lives.

Something that I noticed during my two readings of this issue was that the more regional/ethnic slang that Miles has been using throughout Ahmed’s run seems to have completely have disappeared during this story, aside from when he was talking about his mum, calling her “Ma” and “Mami”. I don’t know if this was just Ahmed forgetting about it in a brief moment of blankness, or something, but considering that it was one of my favourite aspects of this run, it was incredibly noticeable. I would posit that it was perhaps something to make Miles seem more as though he was taking this “seriously”, as he was facing his own potential death and that of his sister against a potentially vicious foe, rather than hanging out with his buddies from school, or his parents at home. Whatever the reasoning, it made the book feel a lot less unique than before, giving it less of a reason to stand out against the pack of other books being released at the current moment.

There isn’t much that I really feel that I can say about the work of Carmen Carnero and David Curiel this time around. Really the only thing that actually comes to mind, which I only really started to think about after my first reading of this issue, was that it really just feels that they are trying way to hard to emulate a much older style of visual, that made the original Miles Morales comics stand out on their own, and it really isn’t coming off as I believe they had intended for it to go. Many of the panels seem incredibly flat to me, with little heft afforded to them by Curiel’s colours, while Carnero’s pencils themselves are far too inconsistent for my liking. The sad thing is, I have seen Carmen Carnero do some excellent work in other title in recent times, and it is a shame that this particular title has been the one to suffer such a poor spell.

To conclude, while I thought that this arc could have had some promise, it didn’t quite stick the landing as well as it possibly could have. Slapping the story arc with the Clone Saga moniker likely did not do the creative team all that many favours either, burdening them with the sins of the past, and attempting to atone for what others have wrought. In doing so, they have distracted themselves from the task of actually producing a good arc, that stands out from anything else going on, and have ended up simply with something that can only really be considered between average, and perhaps even below average, at certain points of the last four issues.

I AM CHOOSING TO GIVE THIS ISSUE OF “MILES MORALES: SPIDER-MAN” A “C+” GRADE, ALTHOUGH I FEEL THAT I NEED TO GIVE THE “CLONE SAGA” AS A WHOLE A “C-” GRADE.