Marvel Comics. Peter Parker had always struggled to balance his private life and his superhero secret identity, but for a while things had seemed to be picking up. In large part that was because artist John Romita, Sr. had ed Amazing Spider-Man, and his experience with romance comics means he rendered the characters very differently. As Sean Howe notes in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, his Peter Parker was stronger and more confident-looking, while his girlfriend Gwen Stacy became even prettier; as he notes, "She and Mary Jane began competing for Peter's attentions like they were go-go versions of Betty and Veronica."
And then, in June 1973, Gwen Stacy died. Spider-Man's nemesis the Green Goblin had learned his secret identity, and targeted the people he loved in a way to get at Peter Parker. This culminated in a catastrophic confrontation on the Brooklyn Bridge, and Gwen was knocked off. Spider-Man made a desperate attempt to save the woman he loved, but he was unsuccessful. "The Night Gwen Stacy Died," a story told in Amazing Spider-Man #121-122, has gone down as one of the most influential comic book stories in history. It's generally seen as the end of the classic Silver Age of comics, and the beginning of the darker, grittier Bronze Age. But why was it so influential?
It's because Spider-Man is, at heart, an everyman hero. When Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created Peter Parker, they based him on the kind of people they believed were reading comic books in the first place; a bit of a bookworm, someone who struggled to fit in, hard on cash, trying to do the right thing and often finding he got screwed over for it. Peter's superhero identity became wish-fulfillment for these readers, who could imagine themselves behind Spider-Man's mask. But it's important to understand that Spider-Man's love life was a part of the wish-fulfillment too; in fact, Gwen Stacy was basically Stan Lee's dream girl, heavily influenced by Lee's wife Joan (which is why there are marked similarities between the design for Gwen and that of the Fantastic Four's Invisible Woman, incidentally). Thus the death of Gwen Stacy was a shocking moment, with the wish-fulfillment twisted round into something dark and painful.
Modern readers can't even imagine how the death of Gwen Stacy shook fans at the time. Comic book deaths are no longer shocking, because readers generally expect them to be reversed at speed; death is such a revolving door in comics that the current X-Men range have lampshaded this by creating literal Resurrection Protocols. The fan backlash in 1973 was intense - and it's worth noting that Stan Lee didn't help, because he didn't really think much about the plot until he was confronted by it while speaking at a college campus. "This was the first time a beloved character had been killed off in comics," Howe records writer Gerry Conway recalling. "I couldn't go to conventions."
The story has only become more poignant with the ing of time, because the death of Gwen Stacy is now tinged with the nostalgia of the road not taken. As seen in Marvel's "House of M" event, Peter Parker's fantasies of Gwen Stacy now symbolize the longing for a simpler life, one without tragedy and heartbreak, where every dream has come true. Her death, then - one of the defining tragedies of Spider-Man's life - stands for each teenager ing their first love, the heartbreak of dreams crushed by reality. While it's true no reader has experienced losing their loved one to a supervillain, everyone knows what it's like to be heartbroken, and to look back wistfully wondering what might have been. And so in a remarkably poignant way, the death of Gwen Stacy made Spider-Man more relatable than ever before.
Source: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story
