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Spider-man Review

Spidey's Turning Point...

The death of Spider-man's girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, in Amazing Spider-Man #121 was something of a watershed in the history of super-hero comics and was a sign of grim times to come for Marvel Comics. Let's set the stage: Stan Lee's revolution had run its course. Lee had largely retired scripting the titles he created and had been bumped upstairs to the post of figurehead. The acutal job of editing the comics had been handed off to a handful of Lee's successors, most notably Roy Thomas and Archie Goodwin. The talent pool had begun to dry up. Jack Kirby, the architect of the Marvel style had left the company in the first stage of a messy divorce. Steve Ditko had also left the company. John Romita, Spidey's other signature artist from the sixties, had been bumped upstairs to art director. The Marvel style was now epitomized by journeyman artist John Buscema (who would later illustrate Stan Lee's stultifying How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way). Even younger talents like Barry Smith and Jim Steranko were being winnowed by the meat-grinder nature of the industry and had left the soul crushing schedule of the monthly comics industry for personal projects. The only real boon to Marvel was the end of the Vietnam War, which signaled a serious blow to the underground comics--Marvel's only real competition during the sixties. Marvel in the mid-seventies was a haven for hackwork. Sales began to slide.

Lacking a new vision to see their characters through, Marvel began staging publicity stunts.

The storyline one finds in Amazing Spider-Man #121 isn't totally without precedent. The very first Spider-man story in Amazing Fantasy #15 features the death of Peter Parker's Uncle Ben. Stan Lee began playing around with a grittier style of storyline towards the end of his run, including the death of Captain Stacy, Gwen's policeman father, and a revolutionary drug-addiction story that represented the first real crack in the Comic's Code Authority. But there always seemed to be a point to these stories, whether it was the social conscience behind the drug story or the character development spurred by Captain Stacy's death.

The death of Gwen Stacy was different.

The story in this issue was written by Gerry Conway, who would later go on to script the second Conan movie with fellow Marvel writer/editor Roy Thomas. The story culminates in a sequence where the Green Goblin carries Gwen Stacy to the top of the George Washington bridge and, during the ensuing fight with Spider-man, pitches her from the top. Spidey snags her leg with a strand of web, but the the force of the fall snaps her kneck (the sound-effect used in this panel is hilariously small and understated). In the following issue, Spider-man, bent on revenge, pursues the Green Goblin to his lair, discovers that he can't kill him, only to have him killed accidentally by a runaway bat-glider.

This story doesn't meaningfully expand on Spider-man's character, but plays out as a convenient way to get rid of a character (Gwen) for whom the creators of the book no longer have any feeling. What were they to do with Gwen Stacy? They were running out of ideas, and short of taking the next step and revealing Spider-man as Peter Parker to her, taking their relationship to the next level, and demonstrating that she already knew who he was anyway (as would be painfully obvious). Gerry Conway was simply too hidebound by the rules of comics to do any of this. She was Lois Lane, perpetually in the dark about Clark Kent/Superman because that's the way things worked. It took twenty years for this farce to finally play out. Interestingly enough, both Lois Lane AND Mary Jane Watson found out about their superhero boyfriends at roughly the same time. Marvel had the better time of it, since Mary Jane simply told Peter that she knew it all along. Ironically, this same situation was played out twelve years earlier in Iron Man under the aegis of writer David Micheline in a story where Iron Man's girlfriend and Tony Stark are trapped with no place for Stark to put on his armor. His girlfriend tells him to stop fooling around and get suited up, much to his surprise. But I digress.

The death of Gwen Stacy was a wholly gratuitous act of desperation on the part of an unimaginative scripter, but the issue itself was a best-seller. The Marvel editorial staff was quick to notice the spike in sales, and major characters began to get themselves killed fairly often as a means of keeping the readership interested. This spawned an interesting sideline in character resurrections. Gwen Stacy herself became the first recipient of this particular miracle when she was cloned by The Jackal over the course of a long storyline about a year after her death. Death, for comic book characters, became like a Holiday Inn. You could check in, but you could check right back out again.

The callous treatment of Gwen Stacy in this storyline pointed the way to the grim future of superhero comics. The trend toward violent, grisly stories with heroes and villains bleeding into one another finds its genesis in this particular comic. It's no surprise that a mere seven months later, Conway's Spider-man would introduce the character of The Punisher, who would come to typify the ultraviolent, "grim and gritty" superhero of the eighties and nineties.

The cover of Amazing Spider-Man #121 advertises a "Turning Point." Unfortunately, it was a turning point, in more ways than the creators of the book intended...