Amazing Spider-Man #608
Portland: Then[1]
Doctor Damon Ryder interviews Ben Reilly for the position of a lab assistant.[2] During the interview, Ryder jokes about his last lab assistant dying in a terrible accident, but then says he left to move upstate with his girlfriend. Impressed by Reilly’s credentials, Damon hires him on the spot.
New York: Now
Spider-Man is on the trail of Screwball who has just stolen ten million dollars worth of bearer bonds. When Spider-Man catches Screwball, he is busy lecturing Screwball’s online viewing audience for encouraging the activities of a super-villain when suddenly, Screwball dumps all the bonds onto the street, forcing Spider-Man to gather them all up, allowing her to escape. When Peter Parker later turns in these humiliating photos to Ben Urich at the Front Line, he is unsure if he can use them since the story is already all over the internet.[3] That’s when Norah Winters points a visitor to the newsroom to Peter Parker. This man turns out to be Damon Ryder, whom Peter remembers attacked him in Boston thinking he was his clone, Ben Reilly.[4]
When Raptor calls Peter by Ben Reilly’s name, Peter acts like he doesn’t know what he is talking about. As Ryder tries to get rough with Peter, Norah Winters asks Peter who this guy is and what he wants. For a brief moment, Peter thinks about telling her the truth, that Raptor is confusing him for Ben Reilly, his dead clone, but decides against it.[5] Peter instead tells Norah that this is just a crazy person who should leave before he calls the police. When Raptor instead threatens Peter’s family, Paker gets angry and punches Raptor, knocking him to his feet.
When Raptor fights back, the other Front Line staffers pull him off. When Ben Urich tells Ryder that the police have been called he agrees to leave, but not before giving them a print out of an old Portland newspaper article about the fire that killed his family which includes a sketch of Ben Reilly. As Damon leaves, Ben Urich demands some answers from Peter,
Portland: Then
One day while working in the lab, Damon Ryder asked Ben Reilly what his story is. Ben thinks about his complicated origins, being a clone of Spider-Man, and opts to tell Ryder that it’s complicated. Taking a liking to Reilly, Damon invites him home for dinner to meet his wife and children. There, Damon’s wife Laura asks Ben what it is that he and her husband are doing in the lab. Explaining things in layman’s terms, Ben tells her that they are trying to prove that there is a missing link between man and dinosaur by proving the connection in a lab environment. Hearing this is fascinating, but Laura thinks it’s crazy. Later, having an after-dinner drink, Ben expresses his concern about further funding. Damon assures Reilly that they have nothing to worry about showing him that their latest test batch just came up positive and they are in the process of creating the first dinosaur/human hybrid.
Morocco: Now
Having lunch together, Aunt May tells her new husband, Jay Jameson, that while she is having a wonderful time on their honeymoon she is starting to miss her nephew and her home in Queens. Jay is more than willing to head back home but tells her that this is not the end of their honeymoon, just an intermission as he plans on taking her to other places in the world.
New York: Now
That evening, Spider-Man is on the hunt for the Raptor, after deflecting all of Ben Urich’s questions and losing Norah Winters who started following him the moment he left the office. He at least had the good sense to plant a spider-tracer on Ryder when they were scuffling making his search easier. He follows the signal to an abandoned building but he only finds the coat Damon was wearing earlier and no sign of Ryder.
At that moment, Ryder has arrived at Peter Parker’s apartment where he is greeted at the door by his roommate Michele Gonzales. He tells her that he is an old friend of Peter’s and is invited inside.
Portland: Then
When Damon returns to the lab with a hangover the day after his dinner with Ben, he discovers that Reilly had arrived early to look over the results of their last test and has learned that Ryder didn’t recreate a dinosaur/human hybrid in a Petrie dish, but has been injecting himself with dinosaur DNA. He ignores Damon’s warnings and demands to know why Ryder would experiment on himself.
New York: Now
As Spider-Man tries to figure out where Ryder has gone, Michele Gonzales is turning her back on him unaware that large dinosaur fangs begin emerging from her guest’s mouth. At that same moment, someone ambushes Spider-Man in the abandoned building. As he is lifted off the ground, Peter is shocked to discover that it is another one of his clones, the madman known as Kaine.
Recurring Characters
Spider-Man, Raptor, Ben Urich, Norah Winters, Michele Gonzales, Aunt May, Jay Jameson, Screwball, Kaine, Ben Reilly (flashback)
Continuity Notes
The flashbacks in Amazing Spider-Man #608-610 take place prior to Spider-Man: The Lost Years #1. In that story, Ben Reilly had been on the road for three years following the events of Amazing Spider-Man #151. Per the sliding timescale of Earth-616, that would place these flashbacks as happening around seven years prior to this story.
Ben Reilly’s resume lists a pager number. This should be considered a topical reference as pagers are practically obsolete.
Ben Urich mentions how the DB! is struggling. Formerly the Daily Bugle, the newspaper was in financial trouble even after it was bought and rebranded by Dexter Bennett in Amazing Spider-Man #547. The paper was still struggling as we saw in Amazing Spider-Man #591.
Spider-Man’s encounter with Raptor in Boston happened in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #36.
When Peter imagines his explanation he explains that he was cloned by a mad scientist and that his clone, Ben Reilly is dead. Ben Reilly was created by Miles Warren aka the Jackal to destroy Spider-Man in Amazing Spider-Man #149. Ben Reilly was killed by the Green Goblin in Spider-Man #75. Despite this, Reilly has cheated death, as explained in Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 4) #22. He will resurface again in Free Comic Book Day 2016: Captain America #1. He says Ben is one of two clones of himself. The second he is referring to is Kaine. However, there were many clones, as we saw in Maximum Clonage (Spider-Man: Maximum Clonage: Alpha/Omega, Web of Spider-Man #127, Amazing Spider-Man #404, Spider-Man #61, Spectacular Spider-Man #227)
