After having time to go through the "Complete Clone Saga Epic" here are some thoughts.
This is an interesting book. I like it, but it is definitely incorrectly named. This is NOT the "Complete Clone Saga Epic." Instead, this is the Complete Ben Reilly story, from birth to death, in exact chronological order.
To save space this book cuts out nearly entire issues among his first several mystery man appearances, and also cuts out Parker's individual issues once the saga really got rolling. It's actually not nearly as bad as it might sound; contrary to that it's extremely great and very interesting. I'm loving that we are getting an in order telling of Ben Reilly's life. It's fantastic, and I'm most curious at this point to see if things like his New Warriors appearances are going to be included in future volumes.
As it stands it starts with those great little back up stories of him waking up in the test tube and goes all through the lost years and then into the mystery man appearances and finally Power and Responsibility and The Exile returns.
Another thing this volume does is show just how damn great Reilly is, and arguably the Clone Saga in general. While this is NOT complete, I'd argue that every story in here is fantastic, with weakest link being The Exile Returns- from a writing standpoint- how much can you hate the story which delivered the Scarlet Spider costume?
But it should be noted that this is far from complete. Missing is Peter's entire side of the story, and that's unfortunate, because this was a story of brothers, of duality. It's too bad that the issues of Peter being "The Spider" are not included here, because it fails to show just how far they had grown apart, and what is truly at stake. And while Maximum Clonage is definitely the low mark of the whole saga, from a design standpoint it at least makes a bit of sense that Peter decides to "go evil" in it for a bit when you see what has lead up to it at that point. With chunks missing, that entire dynamic is lost.
Also, I'm assuming we're going to be deprived of some other great Clone Saga material- like the Osborn Journal and 101 Ways to end the Clone Saga- in the future volumes just because they don't deal DIRECTLY with Reilly.
The book is also fairly hastily put together, and while the arranging of the exact chronological order of Reilly's tale obviously took some work, there's some fairly obvious "wtf" moments of carelessness in the design. Back covers of a few issues- like the Lost Years blurb on the back cover- are randomly thrown in at the end of certain issues- while some covers appear before their issue, other images appear in the back, and some don't appear at all. There's a real lack of consistency in everything in the book, and no table of contents or anything like that.
So overall, I'm very glad we have this. In fact even if there were an ACTUAL "Complete" set of Clone Saga volumes out there, with every issue, every image, interviews and covers and extra art in the back, I would STILL want this book. Just because the idea of the Clone Saga- through Ben's eyes and Ben's eyes alone in chronological order- is a very good one, and a great way to tell the story that gives it an entirely different vibe from the sweeping release schedual of multiple characters and various minis.
A great addition, but it would still be great to see some super elaborate cloth bound slipcover gigantic Clone Saga volume with ALL the trappings, rather than a collection with a great gimmick.
