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Today, Gwen Stacy might be one of the most interesting characters in the Marvel Universe. Her multiverse variant Ghost-Spider, or Spider-Gwen, has one of the most memorable superhero designs of the 21^st century, and it’s hard to walk a convention floor without seeing a few people cosplaying as the character. Gwen Stacy was also given one of the most interesting character arcs in the 2023 film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

However, the original version of the character was mostly known for dying. Gwen Stacy was introduced in Amazing Spider-Man #31 (1965), and she was killed by the Green Goblin eight years later in Amazing Spider-Man #121 (1973). Decades after she was killed, the late Gerry Conway, who wrote Gwen’s death, maintains that he made the right decision.

“I don’t have regrets,” Gerry Conway says during a spotlight panel at San Diego Comic Con 2013. “I do think it was the right thing to do. I think that Mary Jane is a much better foil for Peter than Gwen is, despite the fact that they’ve done a wonderful job in the feature films with making Gwen more like Mary Jane. The Gwen in the comics, and I’ll defend this to my dying day, was much more interesting after she was killed than she ever was as a character during the day.”

Marvel's most reliable superhero has proven he can do a whole lot more than just 'whatever a spider can.' Swing into Spidey's history with Popverse's...

• Best Spider-Man comic books 
• The best Spider-Mans (or is it Spider-Men?)
• Spider-Man movie watch order
• Spider-Man's actors, ranked
• The best Spider-Man suits
• and the Spider-verse explained!

Just watch out for that radioactive blood.

“Part of this is because Spider-Man for [Stan Lee] was kind of a wish fulfillment for him. I mean, he was kind of the nerdy kid who nobody liked, as was I, and all of us in this room. His goal in life was to achieve certain things. What I think made Stan’s art on the comics kind of unsatisfying for me as a reader was that by the time I took the book over, Peter was doing great. Peter’s life was just great. He had this fabulous blonde as a girlfriend, he had a career as a photographer, he had graduated into college, he was doing fine in college, he had a great buddy.”

“Everything was going great for Peter, because that was also true for Stan. Stan had married the woman of his dreams back in the ‘50s. Stan’s wife Joan looked a lot like Gwen Stacy, and they had a wonderful relationship, there was no real stress in it. It was just perfect, so he didn’t really have anything to sort of draw on once he had created that. For me, getting Mary Jane in there was, as a writer, I wanted to have her in there, because I felt like those two people would really connect and bounce off of each other in interesting ways. Mary Jane was always going to be a firebrand compared to Peter and push him in ways that Gwen couldn’t.”

To be fair to Gwen, the character was written as a supporting player by male writers during her lifetime. Gwen Stacy has become more interesting as a character now that she’s written with present day hindsight and used as a protagonist who can be more fleshed out than a typical love interest.

If you disagree with Gerry Conway about Gwen not being interesting before her death, here’s a fun thought exercise – can you name a memorable Gwen Stacy moment that was published before her death?

Marvel's most reliable superhero has proven he can do a whole lot more than just 'whatever a spider can.' Swing into Spidey's history with Popverse's...

• Best Spider-Man comic books 
• The best Spider-Mans (or is it Spider-Men?)
• Spider-Man movie watch order
• Spider-Man's actors, ranked
• The best Spider-Man suits
• and the Spider-verse explained!

Just watch out for that radioactive blood.