Very few comic book Silver Age professionals survive, and even the ranks of the Bronze Age creators are thinning. One of them was Gerry Conway, a writer whose work, frankly, didn’t do much for me.
Conway wrote the Spider-Man story where he killed off Gwen Stacy. The earlier death of Gwen’s father, Captain Stacy, worked well, as scripted by Stan.
But for me, writing Gwen out of the series made as much sense as Betty disappearing from Archie comics. The move came across like a gratuitous fanboy idea, intended for shock value. There were other, better, ways the love triangle with Mary Jane could have been resolved.
But I was cool to Conway’s writing pretty much from the outset, before that one notorious Spidey story. I wasn’t big on Len Wein or Marv Wolfman either. For me, their comics were a step down from those written by Stan, Roy, Steranko, Gary Friedrich, and Denny O’Neil, among others. Perhaps it was because I was older and better able to consider things more critically.
Soon after Gwen was killed off Gerry introduced the Punisher, a truly sadistic character. It took a long time for me to appreciate the character, and that was only on TV, not in the comics.
