With the Irredeemable Ant-Man joining the cast next issue, I picked up Av engers: Initiative #7. Story features three badguys calling themselves the Vulturians stealing a briefcase with America's top secret crap on creating gamma bombs or something, and they're persued over the NY skyline by the Scarlet Spiders, three men in Iron-Spidey armor that "don't officially exist" as part of the Initiative.

Street-cloths-Peter joins the battle, pissed as hell that Tony made multiple suits, and that he's continuing to use them. Bad guys go down, Peter has the briefcase. As a show of good faith, all three Scarlet Spiders use their suits' camo function to perfectly mimic Peter's current look, and tell the gathering press/crowd that all FOUR of them are members of a govt-affiliated group, and that ALL of them were given special suits that mimic spider-powers while allowing them to look like whatever they want, AND that Peter was kicked out for recent actions. Peter then promptly gave them the case, saying loudly that his suit was in it.

...so just like that, the world at large has whole new doubt on weather or not Peter Parker was ever really Spider-Man, without going back and changing a single thing. Why the hell isn't Dan Slott an editor?

YES! HA! Now that's how it should be done! Pure Marvel-Style. None of this "magical world-wide memory erase" crap, that's just lame, even for DC.

What I like about this is that it's not automatically taking it back, either. It's just enough to take people from sure to 50/50, so there's still room to play with it. Kinda like how for a while, people have been pretty sure Matt Murdock is Daredevil, but haven't been able to expressly prove it (from what I understand...I don't read Daredevil).

That issue rocked so much I may actually marry Slott and have his children to ensure the world is full of serious but fun writers.

Okay, this is somthing probably only me and Joe are going to care about...but are all three of the Spiders...and the guy the professor grew them from...you-know-who?

You just say that because you want to boink all of them.

All three are his clones, yes. Notice that they're named after his first, middle, and last names.

Four of them. Unless that guy in the weird crystal bubble bath thing is Ben, but I doubt it.

...wait, no. They're clones of MVP, an Initiative character who apairantly died a few issues ago. He's the dead guy in the tub. All the powers come from the suits.

Right.

I wasn't sure if you guys thought it was Ben Riely in that tub, and that they were his clones.

Okay so...who's clones are they?

:ph43r:

From what little I've read recently, it was a matter that the US gov't couldn't prove conclusively in court that Murdock was indeed Daredevil...or something along those lines. It was murky but quirky.

But yeah, pretty ingenious way to throw doubt onto the Peter's whole identity thing without backtracking over it.

Even better for Peter if the public believes that Spider-Man is a position held by several people... although not so great for Spider-Man who may not be believed he's the Spider-Man.