Spider-Man Unlimited Volume 1
Spider-Man Unlimited was the fifth Spider-Man title that Marvel kickstarted in the 1990s. This was a larger format title that was published quarterly and on glossy paper. I could be wrong, but I think this title was also only available in “direct editions” meaning that you could only find them in comic shops. The title was rolled out during the Maximum Carnage event a 14 part story that crossed over into every Spider-Man title published at the time. It was the first time Marvel really gouged readers by forcing them to buy every Spider-Man book each month to get the full story. It was even more insidious that you also had have access to a comic book shop and shell out a little more money just to get the first and last chapters of the story. In the early 1990s comic book shops were growing but they were not as prominent as they are today, so if you lived somewhere that didn’t have a comic book shop, you were shit out of luck. I remember trying to collect these issues when I was a kid. During its publication period I had limited access to a comic book shop so you had to buy comic books from convenience stores mostly. It was a pain in the ass because most stores only carried select titles. One 7-11 only carried Amazing Spider-Man, while you’d have to go across town to find a Quickie or AM/PM that carried Web of Spider-Man. The added challenge of getting Spider-Man Unlimited was just an added challenge, especially this was just before the comic bubble burst so shops quickly sold out and any copies they had left were marked up and sold at outrageous prices. I remember one shop that tried selling Spider-Man Unlimited #1 for $25. That’s $25 in 1993 money which is equivalent to $45 dollars in 2020 money. A ridiculous amount to ask for a comic that cost under $4 when it first came out, but I digress.
After Maximum Carnage was over, the title seemed to struggle to figure out what the hell it was trying to tell. As such, most stories actually didn’t really add much to the Spider-Man mythos and could otherwise be skipped. An early exception to this rule was issue #3 which featured a story by Tom DeFalco and Ron Lim that told the origin of Doctor Octopus. Sure, Ock’s super-villain origin was told way back in Amazing Spider-Man #3, but actually looked back at his childhood and how he grew to become the scientist he was before the explosion that turned him into Doctor Octopus. It also provided a humorous look at what it was like writing obituaries at the Daily Bugle, introducing us Dilbert Tribly, who absolutely hated to write obituaries for superheroes and villains because most of the time they somehow cheated death and he’d have to write a retraction. Pretty amusing stuff.
The next few issues were just fluff that was written and drawn by a rotating creative team. Sometimes the title was used to tie up some loose ends but there wasn’t really much going on until issue #7 when the Clone Saga hit. Just like Maximum Carnage, Spider-Man Unlimited was the title where key parts of various Clone Saga storylines were concluded. By 1995 comic book shops were a little easier to come by but the exclusivity of this title was still a pain in the ass.
After issue #10, Spider-Man Unlimited was briefly retitled Scarlet Spider Unlimited (like the other Spider-Books of the time) for a single issue. Scarlet Spider Unlimited #1 is notable for a very specific reason. In the previous decade, Gerry Conway had written a bunch of stories saying that the clones created by Miles Warren back in the 1970s were not true clones but bio-duplicates, meaning that they were other people who were transformed into exact duplicates of someone else. Conway suggested that the Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy clones weren’t clones at all, but other people transformed into exact copies of Parker and Stacy. He went a step further by having a story where Spider-Man finds Warren’s old diaries that confirm this. By the time the Clone Saga came around, the creative teams behind this infamous storyline must have realized that this idea was more stupid than the Clone Saga itself and had to walk back everything Gerry Conway had done. Knowing that continuity minded fans would write in about this issue they even peppered references to Conway’s “bio-duplicate” plot to sow more confusion. Scarlet Spider Unlimited answered it all, and revealed that the Miles Warren learned everything he knew about genetics from the High Evolutionary who denounced the practice of cloning. When he later learned that Warren was creating clones out in the world the High Evolutionary covered up all of Warren’s work and created the false narrative about the “bio-duplicates” to prevent anyone else from trying to duplicate Warren’s work. It’s a colossal stretch, but they managed to pull it off.
When the title changed back to Spider-Man Unlimited issues #11 through 14 featured Ben Reilly the Spider-Clone as the new Spider-Man. However, since Marvel realized replacing Peter Parker was a huge mistake and were undoing all the damage done, Spider-Man Unlimited was pretty much used to tie up loose ends. Peter Parker was back as Spider-Man in issue 15 and the title went back to the status quo prior to the Clone Saga. The only noteworthy story was in issue #18, which was a follow up to issue #3. By this point, Doctor Octopus was murdered during the Clone Saga and resurrected not long later in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man, so this story was looking deeply into his criminal career, death and resurrection. We also look back in on Dilbert Tribly, who is naturally stressed out over the whole ordeal.
Spider-Man Unlimited continued until issue #22. The series was rebooted with a brand new volume. However, instead of stories about the mainstream Spider-Man, this second volume of Spider-Man Unlimited was an adaptation of the cartoon series of the same name. See, around this time, Spider-Man had a hugely popular cartoon that aired on Fox Kids, some of you 90s kids might remember it. If there was any show out there that was considered direct competition it would have been Batman the Animated Series which was just as, if not more, popular than the Spider-Man cartoon and there was a time when both shows aired on the same network. The series was about Spider-Man getting stranded on Counter-Earth and fighting all-new villains (as well as Venom and Carnage) with a new high-tech spider-suit. The official story was that the series went way out there because Saban Entertainment (who produced the show) was limited on what material they could use because Marvel was starting to work with Sony on the first Spider-Man film. However, the show came out in the same year as Batman: Beyond, a story that is set in the future with a new Batman with a new high tech costume. It seems like an interesting “coincidence” that two shows with some similar themes came out around the same time. Maybe it’s a case of parallel thought. Who can say for sure? Anyway, Spider-Man Unlimited Volume 2 ran for 5 issues before being cancelled because, if you ever watched the sow, Spider-Man Unlimited was garbage. A third volume of Spider-Man Unlimited came out in 2004, going back to basics, it featured mostly one-off stories about Spider-Man. This volume ran for 13 issues ending in 2006.
