It’s one thing to lose the love of your life. It’s quite another thing to lose them twice. But the ways that Spider-Man loses Mary Jane in The Animated Series would be enough to drive anybody blind, frothing mad.

We never get to see Peter Parker really have to deal with the fall-out of “The Return of Hydro Man.” Shortly after watching helplessly as his clone wife dissolves, he’s whisked away by his fairy godmother Madame Web to lead the world’s greatest superheroes against the world’s greatest villains to liberate an alien world in “Secret Wars.” (And sure, I suppose we could interpret all the Secret/Spider Wars as one epic psychotic fugue brought on by the trauma of soaking in your dead clone wife’s residue. Like Lost Highway with less sex and more tights! But let’s just take that part at face value for now.)

We do get to see how dangerous a blind, frothing mad Spider-Man could be in the series finale, “Spider Wars.” When we meet Spider-Carnage, he’s already razed New York City and he’s less than half an hour away from destroying every reality.

The big inside joke of “Spider Wars” is that Spider-Carnage was turned evil by the Clone Saga, one of the comic’s most infamous storylines. In Spider-Carnage’s reality, Professor Miles Warren, the man who cloned Hydro Man and Mary Jane, takes things up a notch and clones himself a Spider-Man. But when it’s later revealed that the supposed clone may be the real deal, the “originaL” flips out. We’re also led to believe that the Carnage symbiote is what pushed him to go all-in on the reality ending scheme, but no other symbiote-possessed character ever had ambitions for trans-universal murder.

It’s never suggested that Spider-Carnage had the same clone-wife experience as our Spider-Man, but it would explain the massive leap between down-on-his-luck superhero to would-be reality murderer. After all, it is one thing to lose the love of your life, twice. It’s a whole different thing when they’re stolen from you – when there’s somebody to blame.

So, let’s talk about the folks responsible Spider-Man’s hydro clone wife debacle – Hydro Man and Professor Miles Warren.

Both characters deviate from their comic book versions in important ways that make their connection to Spider-Man less personal. This is actually something The Animated Series pulls off really well with many of the villains; in stark contrast to the movie adaptations, where the villains are all people directly tied into Peter Parker’s life, the cartoon used the ‘boss’ villains to connect all the dots. Most of the villains come into play when the Kingpin or Norman Osborn or some other crime boss hires them and they only start hating Spider-Man after he butts in to stop ‘em. I really dug this approach because it dodges the issue that gets brought up in Batman stories in particular, where it’s questionable whether or not Gotham would be full of supervillains if Batman wasn’t there first. In Spider-Man’s case, most of the costumed lunacy would be going on regardless of his involvement.

Hey, that’s New York for ya.

In the comics, Hydro Man was Morrie Bench, some guy that got knocked into the ocean by Spider-Man accidentally while an experimental generator was operating, giving him hydro powers and a reason to feel entitled to punching Spider-Man’s face. In the cartoon though, Morrie is an off-kilter brute obsessed with Mary Jane. He gets his powers in a freak accident (sans-Spider-Man) and then figures he can woo Mary Jane with stolen goods, brute force and moisture. It’s an interesting take, in that Morrie comes off as the adult version of Peter’s high school bully antagonist, Flash Thompson. Flash winds up an okay guy in the cartoon and the comic, but if he was a bit more unbalanced, couldn’t find a decent job and still felt entitled to the hottest girl from school, he could’ve wound up like Morrie.

While Spider-Man has to do most of the fighting, Hydro Man is really Mary Jane’s supervillain. She’s the one he’s after. And so, fittingly enough, she’s the one to defeat him by tricking him into exhausting himself on a hot roof far from water. He evaporates and we assume that this won’t be the last we see of him.

Except it is the last we see of him. It’s revealed in “The Return of Hydro Man, Part Two,” that Miles Warren took a sample from that roof and used it to make his clone Hydro Man. Which suggests that the original is kaput.

Yeah, Mary Jane killed Hydro Man. Killed him dead. Apparently the no-killing rule just doesn’t count at all for folks with hydro powers.

So you can imagine how hard it must be for Spider-Man when the Hydro-stalker steals his wife from his honeymoon, diving into the ocean with her while hysterically insisting that she was “made for him.” Now try imagining how hard it must be to find out that he’s telling the truth.

That brings us to Professor Warren and my third picture. Here’s Miles, Morrie and Mary Jane.

(Click to view larger)

And yeah, I know Warren didn’t have the glasses in the cartoon, but he has ‘em in all the comics I’ve got, so, tough.

Warren’s better known to comic readers as the Jackal. Unfortunately, as the Jackal, he’s really hard to take too seriously because he looks like this. For a time he dressed up in this green furry man-jackal suit until he decided he was done with the laundry bills and just had himself mutated into that form permanently. Kinda silly, until you go back in his history and read the bit about him actually creating a man-jackal creature at one point who escaped and eventually murdered his wife and children. So, sure, when you remind yourself that it’s essentially Dr. Frankenstein dressing up as his own monster after it killed his family, it gets a little unsettling.

But the Jackal stuff doesn’t interest me as much as the Professor Miles Warren stuff. He was much creepier before he started dressing like a big-eared Grinch.

In the comics, Warren was a professor of biology at Empire State University when he met Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. He fell in love with Gwen, his student and Peter’s girlfriend at the time, and at one point collected her DNA (along with Peter’s) for future use. When Gwen Stacy was killed in the fight between Green Goblin and Spider-Man, Warren went nuts and blamed it all on Spider-Man. He then tricked his lab assistant, who had just successfully cloned a frog, into helping him make clones of Gwen and Peter. When he discovered what was going on and confronted Miles about it, he suffocated him in an attempt to shut him up. Unable to bear the guilt, he blamed the crime on the Jackal, a new, evil personality he could hide behind, and after making his Grinch costume he began a long career of harassing Spider-Man. He’s actually the villain who manipulated the Punisher into trying to kill Spider-Man in his first appearance.

Oh yeah, and those Gwen Stacy and Peter Parker clones managed to stick around. You can go through the whole sordid history over at the Jackal’s Wikipedia entry. It gets pretty nuts. And when you read it, don’t imagine this all playing out in a comic book or cartoon. Imagine your watching a David Cronenberg adaptation of these stories. Imagine living with the psychological repercussions of dealing with this insanity.

The main point I want to make is that this guy is about as creepy as Spider-Man villains get if you put yourself in Parker’s shoes. Imagine, you’re in college, you’re dating an amazing girl, and you notice one of your teachers leering at her. Unbeknownst to you, he’s obsessed with her and has collected DNA from the both of you for his experiments. When your girlfriend tragically dies, your creepy old professor blames it all on you, then repeatedly, incessantly clones the both of you with varying degrees of success. Imagine having to watch your girlfriend die all over again, only this time her flesh dissolves and she melts into a nasty puddle of goo. Oh yeah, and you get to watch clones of yourself dissolve into viscous gunk also.

That’s gotta **** you up.

You may have already put two and two together here and figured out that “The Return of Hydro Man” is actually a loose adaptation of the original Miles Warren / Gwen Stacy clone story. As bad as cartoon Spider-Man gets it, comic book Spider-Man’s gone through a hell of a lot more weirdness over the decades. But at least Peter Parker didn’t marry the Gwen Stacy clone. They didn’t have a long relationship that gets capped off in one afternoon when it’s revealed she’s a clone and she promptly disintegrates.

The cartoon Miles Warren doesn’t have the personal history with Peter Parker (or the glasses or all the Jackal BS), but his anonymity in the cartoon is sinister in another fashion. This guy doesn’t even know Peter Parker, doesn’t have any plots against Spider-Man, he just happened to be interested in cloning and decided that the best way to go about that was to start with Spider-Man’s girlfriend and her stalker.

Just a wacky coincidence! Nothing personal!

Except it gets personal, deeply personal, since in the end, Miles escapes with a scrap of Spider-Man’s suit, foreshadowing an obsession with Parker DNA, the Clone Saga and the eventual origin of Spider-Carnage.

The Miles Warren of the comics is psychotic, brilliant, and obsessed with Peter Parker and his dead girlfriend on a genetic level. Peter Parker’s seen himself die by the truckload thanks to the Clone Saga. If he weren’t in a comic book, he’d be in an asylum at this point.

The Miles Warren of the cartoon, however, may have pushed him far enough to make killing reality seem like a good idea.

Next time we’ll wrap things up with the last couple pictures I made, a tragic alternate ending to Spider-Man: The Animated Series and our final farewell to Spider-Man’s hydro-clone wife.

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Four