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I can hear my pulse in my ears against my pillow… it sounds like a clock embodying the word “sheet”… also I have “I eff with Christmas” stuck in my head in a very non-linear fashion.
It is 1:20 am
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X-23: The First Clone
The origin story of Laura Kinney was first published in 2005. Although a version of the same story was summarized at in X-23′s first appearance in X-Men: Evolution in 2003, when we first meet her in the books in NYX, the story spends almost no time on her background. All we’re introduced to is a virtually mute young girl sharing Wolverine’s powers who was forced into prostitution, and we’re given no context for how she got there. It would be two years before the story of her creation was told in full in the comics.
In it, Dr. Sarah Kinney proudly proclaims that the process of cloning a mutant is something akin to godhood. Right from the very start, there seems to be a problem with this statement, as by the time Laura made her first appearance, and her origins were told, comics were positively brimming with clones.
Among the most famous is Madelyne Pryor, the Goblin Queen, created by Mister Sinister to further his obsession with the Summers/Grey bloodline after the (apparent) death of Jean Grey.
And of course, no conversation about clones in the Marvel universe is complete without Ben Reilly and the Clone Saga.
Which begs the question: How can Sarah Kinney be breaking such new ground, if it was already so well-trodden by the time she came on the scene?
The answer is: It wasn’t.
Marvel’s continuity is built around the Sliding Time Scale, which basically freezes the entire universe in a sort of stasis where no matter when characters first appear, they more or less don’t age (or if they do so, it’s very slowly, very generally working out to approximately 1 year in Marvel = 4 years in real life). And that time scale begins in the 1960s, with Fantastic Four #1, with X-Men #1 occurring roughly around the same time. And, according to Marvel, only between 10-15 years have passed since the Fantastic Four made their famous space flight.
So how is that relevant to Sarah Kinney’s hubris?
In All-New Wolverine #27, Daken reveals that Laura was cloned “20 years ago,” and it’s since been established that Laura is approximately 21 years old in the present day (her interactions on Krakoa and in X-Terminators suggest she is of legal drinking age).
Which means that if only 10-15 years have passed since the Fantastic Four’s flight, Laura was born anywhere between 5-10 years before the events of Fantastic Four and X-Men #1.
Almost every other clone we’ve seen in the main Marvel universe, whether Maddie, Ben, the Stepford Cuckoos, or even Sinister’s own many clones of himself, are known to be created after these two comics.
As a consequence, the Sliding Time Scale makes X-23 one of, if not the, first clones in the Marvel universe.
Sarah Kinney’s hubris was well-justified. She truly was breaking scientific ground that not even Mr. Sinister himself had not yet touched — in fact, even Madelyne herself was a failure until a fragment of the Phoenix brought her to life.
For all we know, her work to create Laura is now retroactively the foundation of all human cloning in the Marvel universe. Welcome to godhood indeed.