Over the years I’ve found myself revisiting Andrew Goletz and Glenn Greenberg’s Life of Reilly website to review potential resolutions that were proposed and all the ideas not managing to see the light of day.
Of all the unresolved plots emerging out of that period, I’ll admit I have not found any of the proposed Clone Saga resolutions intellectually satisfying (or the whole saga for that matter).
My own ideas on ways this saga could have been better resolved have, at their foundation, the conceit that Harry Osborn had forever been the younger clone of Norman Osborn, and when we saw Harry in the throes of drug addiction it was a consequence of his becoming dependent upon medications he required to slow down the clone degeneration process.
With Harry as the clone of Norman Osborn, one can adduce as the next logical step that an historical alliance existing between Norman and Miles Warren.
Since Peter’s major enemies did not start reviving from death until after the Jackal’s return, this would become the nucleus for how I would resolve the Clone Saga.
I would reveal Miles Warren as the overarching villain behind all of Peter’s woes at the time, like a jackal feeding off the remains of the dead. In line with his mythological counterpart, I would reveal that it was Warren who returned Norman Osborn from the dead (what with cloning being his modus operandi), which was part of his wider plan to emotionally erode Peter by returning all of Peter’s deceased friends and enemies.
The returned Jackal during the Clone saga then is not Miles Warren per se, but in fact the New Man from his failed experiment at Wundagore while working under the guidance of the Herbert Wyndham. Warren captures the Jackal-man after it kills his family, exposing it to the Carrion Virus, later successfully transferring his consciousness into its body after his regular body dies (similar to the process Arnim Zola used for his clones).
During the years of his self-imposed exile, Miles also perfects a technique which gives him a legitimate reason for naming his alter-ego the Jackal. That is, he feeds off the dead by becoming a body thief, and might even go so far as using Spider-Man’s dead enemies to reincarnate into (since, for some unknown reason, his own body won’t clone effectively).
But his primary goal as a result of perfecting this technique is being able to incarnate into the body of a living human being, in particular transferring his consciousness into Peter Parker’s body, so he could take Peter’s place as Gwen Stacy’s lover.
Posted by Nathan Adler 
