Well, if replicating success works out so well for movie franchises, why not apply it to people, too? For one thing, it’s highly unethical, but when has that ever stopped a supervillain? Cloning may be a rare and restricted process in the real world, but for your average superhero, it’s almost as common as those movie sequels and remakes. Our heroes never know when the person they bump into on the street will turn out to be their artificial twin — and whether that twin will be out for blood. Because again, cloning is usually a supervillain thing. Like anybody would, our heroes tend to freak out when they discover their DNA has been repurposed against their will. And when heroes freak out, the fists generally start flying. So for today’s #SuperheroProblems, I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the most infamous ways our heroes have reacted to meeting their genetic equals. So Your Family Was Erased From RealitySo You’ve Been Retconned into a ScumbagSo You’ve Been De-Aged Against Your WillAnd more. The marriage was not a happy one, as Madelyne felt she and their son came in second place to Cyclops’s X-related activities. So when Jean came back from the dead, Cyclops wasted little time in abandoning his family while failing to tell Jean he even had a family. Things went swiftly downhill from there, culminating in Madelyne becoming the villainous Goblin Queen. But after nearly one hundred unsuccessful attempts, in Teen Titans #37, Robin finally has to accept his friend is gone. And then he, uh, smashes the tube with the failed clone in it and makes out with Wonder Girl in the clone sludge. Is this really cheaper than therapy, Rob? This clone, informally dubbed Clor, did not exactly do Thor proud. When Thor eventually came back and found that his faux-self had murdered people, you can bet it took quite a long time for him to even consider forgiving Iron Man for the breach of trust. Nightwing, feeling bad for other reasons that are also not the point, tried to square things by politely asking some Russian scientists to clone Cyborg a new human body. After learning about this in Titans #20, Cyborg was initially angry that Nightwing seemed to be trying to micromanage his life. But he got over that in short order, and his super-alien brain was implanted in his own human body. Guess how long that lasted. What’s so bad about that? Nothing. In fact, it’s a pretty interesting story. But the fact that the clone later returned under the name Ben Reilly and became the focus of the Clone Saga, which Marvel kept going long after it stopped being interesting in an attempt to generate sales, makes this clone much harsher in hindsight.
