When Stan Lee left the day to day management of Marvel Comics in the early ’70’s to focus on integrating Marvel into TV and movies (to questionable success), it was indicative of several changes that I feel heralded the end of the Marvel Age of comics. Jack Kirby leaving in ’70 to go to DC, Stan going to LA and maybe the final good bye was the death of Gwen Stacy.
To be clear, I’m not talking about the end in a gloomy end of all there is, but simply the end of an era. Arguably the best era Marvel ever had, starting in 1961 with issue #1 of the Fantastic Four and possibly ending with Spider-man #121 & 122, 1973.
It started out as a seemingly regular issue of Spider-man, chock full of the regular melodrama involving Peter Parker and the every day hassles of his life. Just returning from an international trip and a battle with the Hulk (as you do). Peter’s catching a cold and checking in on his buddy Harry Osborne, who’s done himself further damage by overdoing it with the LSD. Being a rich kid who’d never worked a day in his life, the pampered young Osborne was a mess.
But not as much of a mess as his father. Norman Osborne was a wealthy industrialist, inventor, businessman and psychotic, also known as The Green Goblin. As the Goblin, Osborne was incredibly dangerous, with enhanced strength, keen intelligence and a load of weapons, ranging from pumpkin bombs to a jet glider, all to attain power and as a bonus, make life miserable for Parker.
Because to make everything worse, Osborne knew Peter’s secret identity. But due to his own personal psychosis, he would sometimes lapse into an amnesiac state, remembering absolutely nothing about his ID as the Goblin or Pete’s alias.
You can imagine how stressful this would be to a young Parker, with the weight of the world on his shoulders. His 950 year old aunt May constantly on the verge of dying, trying to pay the bills by taking photos of himself in action as Spidey and selling them to skinflint publisher J. Jonah Jameson, and maintaining his crime fighting career all at the same time. All while trying to make a life for himself and his soulmate, the one, true, single love of his life, the wonderful Gwen Stacy.
It’s enough stress to give a guy an spider-ulcer.
But as the events in the early part of #121 play out, Peter’s worried about Harry, while Norman — currently in his amnesiac state, is getting more and more paranoid and angry, as he finds out his company is losing more and more money, his son is a drug addict and he’s starting to hallucinate visions of Spider-man coming to attack him. He’s cracking under the strain and that’s not good for anyone.
He’s already kicked the visiting Peter, Gwen and Mary Jane Watson out of the Osborne house, saying they’re the cause of Harry’s “illness” and they’re no longer welcome.
So they go about their business and while Pete stops by the Daily Bugle to get some cash for freelance photos he took abroad of Hulk and Spidey, across town, Norman has a psychotic break and all his memories come flooding back.
Peter decides to websling home as it’s faster and because his cold or flu is getting worse. He just wants to go to bed and sleep it off but decides to check in on Gwen.
When all he finds are signs of a struggle and a lone pumpkin bomb, he realizes that Osborne is once again the Goblin and he’s got Gwen.
In searching for the emerald egotist, his spider-sense somehow leads him right to the top of the George Washington bridge* where the Goblin is threatening to kill the unconscious Gwen unless Spidey kills *himself*, or just stands still while Gobby does it for him.
Spidey does not go willingly. The battle begins. Spider-man is not at 100% but still manages to give Osborne a couple good shots. Instead of prolonging the fight, Peter attempts to just grab Gwen and get her to safety.
Here’s where a rather good issue becomes one that gets referred back to in blogs almost 50 years later. Here’s where everything really DOES change in the life of the lead character in a comic.
The Goblin swoops in before Spidey can get to unconscious Gwen and knocks her off the top of the bridge, sending her plummeting to the water some 100 feet below. Spider-man, reacting quickly, shoots a webline down, catching her boot, which stops her fall abruptly. Too abruptly. We see a “snap” sound effect by her head.
Peter, relieved to have saved her, pulls her up, only to find she died during the fall. He, and the readers, are stunned.
The Green Goblin flies by, gleefully informing us all that of *course* she’s dead, the shock of such a fall would kill anyone! Yet we know, and Peter knows deep down, that she was never conscious, so there was no shock.
But the readers know that when he stopped her, he mistakenly killed her.
Issue #121 ends with the Goblin happily flying off into the distance, while Spider-man swears to make Osborne pay.
This was a shock to the reading audience, especially to ten year olds like myself at the time. Back then, deaths like this really didn’t happen that often at all. Usually because back then, deaths were permanent, especially among civilians and heroes. Villains would always have some nebulous apparent death that they would survive and come back to fight another day.
But this was Gwen. This was the woman Peter was going to spend his life with. But writer Gerry Conway and editor Roy Thomas had decided that there was no where else to go with Gwen, other than marrying her off to Peter, and they felt they couldn’t go that route. That Peter “wasn’t ready” (?). Depending on who you believe, Stan was either in on the decision or was unhappy they did it and demanded they bring her back immediately. Thomas said that would be a huge mistake and make them all look silly. Meanwhile, the fans were SO upset about Gwen dying, Marvel actually received death threats. Imagine if there was an internet back then. Some people might’ve gotten critical!
Keep in mind that both Thomas and Conway were young guys– Conway might even have been only 19, I’m not sure. In my book, this was a case of both the editor and the writer lacking the proper skill and imagination to do something with Gwen beyond what they’d done with her to this point. This was on them and was only the beginning of the long reaching effects of these dominoes toppling.
Now, in issue #122, Peter is a man possessed.
The love of his life is dead and he’s out for blood.
He’s angry. Angry at Osborne and he knows deep down exactly how she died and he’s inconsolably angry at himself.
Right at that moment, he’s very dangerous to anyone who might get in his way.
He brushes aside police, and barges into the Bugle for information for a lead on Norman. Robbie Robertson makes some calls and gets him answers.
What follows is a final battle at a warehouse, where the Goblin dies, impaled on his own glider.
All in all, a grand two parter. Arguably, maybe that should have been it for the book. Sure, it’s a down ending, but considering the bonkers storylines that flowed in and out of the book over the next 30, 40 years…. well, maybe it would have been kinder to end things shortly after this two parter.
Re-Reading the two parter and the issues that followed in one of the Essential Spider-man collections, it was here that MJ quickly became the default girlfriend very soon after Gwen died. It might not have seemed like it if you were reading the book month to month but in a collected form, it played very much like Peter grabbed MJ on the rebound to fill the void left by Gwen. Decades later, whenever there’s an alternate reality, and Gwen didn’t die, Peter was married to her and it was always established again and again that Gwen was The One.
MJ, right from the very first time she appeared in the book, was the party girl, the carefree, flaky chick who was only on the look out for a good time, all the time. She was the exact opposite of Gwen. So when Peter just automatically clung on to her, it seemed a bit weird but stretched out slowly over the months, probably a bit more subtle.
But in the following years, we got Peter being cloned, him killing the clone, Gwen being cloned, lotta clones that kept dying and coming back. Then, eventually Peter and MJ got married and now, since it’s years later, so much time had passed since Gwen, many new readers were unaware of her and what she meant to Peter. Most came into the book thinking MJ was The One. Stan, who at some point just figured it was okay to move things along (Stan rarely thought long term), okayed Peter getting married, although that’s just one of those moves that automatically ages a character and puts them in a very different place in their life.
Then, another few years and more clones, the Clone Saga, which was one of the worst put together storylines ever created, a true clusterf**k.
Then years later, (highly overrated, yeah, I’m saying it**) writer J Michael Stryzinski comes up with a hidden flashback that purportedly stated that Norman Osborne had a torrid affair with Gwen back in the day and she had two kids*** — possibly a story that was even more disliked than her dying. An even bigger clusterf**k.
Then the powers that be at Marvel, such as Joe Quesada (another brain child) decided to make like Peter and MJ’s marriage never happened by “Magic-ing” it away by MJ making a deal with the devil himself (Mephisto).
The astonishing amount of bad decisions, compounded by other bad decisions, decade after decade are amazing. Yet Spider-man is still very popular.
Mind you, there have been some good and interesting storylines as well. In the ’80’s, Kraven’s Last Hunt was brilliant–where the Hunter buries Peter alive and takes over in the black suit— but that was Kravenof’s story. The Superior Spider-man was an excellent run a few years ago, where a dying Doc Ock takes over Peter’s body and actually becomes a better, more efficient Spidey. Highly recommended, but that was really Otto’s story.
But regular ol Spidey has had *more* than his share of crap stories, yet still, he perseveres.
Just goes to show, if you have a good character, it can whether even horrible stories–and terrible eras.
*Evidently, it was the Brooklyn bridge where this happened but the mistake was probably only recognized by New Yorkers.
**Although I’ve liked some bits of his Spider-man run, I find JMS to be highly overrated as a writer and honestly, I’ve tried to get into Babylon 5 but it really is a lame, dated, piece of cheap fan fic that could barely hold my attention or keep me awake. As a show, I feel it’s not worthy of even docking at the upper pylon of DS9.
***I don’t know if the horrific idea of Norman sleeping with Gwen was Quesada’s or JMS, but they really should be ashamed of themselves. In the history of bad story ideas for a major comic book over the last 80 years, this one tops them all. Not only was it completely out of character for Gwen, it really wasn’t in character for Norman either, he of the red cornrows.
Seriously, what was Ditko thinking when he originally came up with that hairstyle? And he used it on a couple characters!
And I’m not sure when Gwen would have even had time to be pregnant since we saw her every month back in the day, and she not only never showed interest in Norman but she also never showed a baby bump. Much less gave any indication she gave birth to twins. Unbelievable, sheer lunacy and it showed the creative team had no clue about the characters. Impractical, illogical, impossible.
Seriously, back then, if there was any character that was a free enough spirit to party with an older industrialist like Norman after he had a few cocktails, let’s be honest, it would be MJ.
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