How did Gwen Stacy die? YOU The World have decided.

All seekers of truth and justice will no doubt be delighted to know the results are in from the latest poll to hit the internet.

Because you the jury have decided just how Gwen Stacy died.

It's an issue that's vexed the world for nearly four decades but at last the truth can be revealed.

And what an epic poll it was, with a mighty 41 votes, making it by far the most number of votes for any Steve Does Comics poll ever.

In joint fifth place, with 2 votes each, were, "The sheer speed of her fall killed her," and, "I don't know."

In fourth place, with 4 votes, was, "The impact of the Goblin glider knocking her off the bridge killed her."

In third place, with 5 votes, was, "Gwen Stacy is still alive! I refuse to accept she's not!"

In second place, with 6 votes, was, "The Goblin had already killed her before Spidey arrived at the scene."

But the runaway winner, with a walloping 22 votes, was, "Her neck broke when Spidey caught her."

Amazingly, no one voted for, "Mary Jane Watson poisoned her then framed the Goblin." How that girl gets away with it, I'll never know. I happen to know Mary Jane Watson also killed George Stacy, the Kangaroo and Uncle Ben, as I'll reveal in my Spider-Man retcon if Marvel ever have the sense to let me write the strip.

As always, thanks to all who voted - and apologies to J Jonah Jameson, who it seems was right all along; Spider-Man is indeed a menace to society.

Amazing Spider-Man #121 - the Death of Gwen Stacy.

With the sort of bad luck worthy of Peter Parker himself, I managed to miss the biggest event in Spider-History.

I must declare that the issue of Marvel UK's Super Spider-Man that reprinted The Amazing Spider-Man #121 failed to be stocked by my local newsagent.

Was he trying to spare his readership the soul-shattering horror of it all? Or was it just the delivery van having broken down?

Perhaps we shall never know but it does mean I only joined the two-parter for its second half, reprinted from The Amazing Spider-Man #122.

Fortunately, the world sometimes being a wonderful place, years later I finally got to read the first part of the tale.

So, with The Amazing Spider-Man hitting our cinema screens even as I speak and the internet abuzz with talk of Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy, it's time to do the decent thing and gawp at her death.

I do of course mean Gwen Stacy's death, not Emma Stone's. Emma Stone is alive and well and will no doubt be back to play both Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson in future instalments.

Gwen Stacy's death happens in Amazing Spider-Man #121 and it all kicks off with Norman Osborn fretting over the illness of his son Harry who's back on the drugs. Not only that but Norman's business is threatening to fail and he has a doctor who looks exactly like Bullit from Amazing Spider-Man #91.

Faced with such dilemmas, Osborn reacts as anyone normal would. He dresses up as a goblin and flies around on a metal bat, out to kill his son's best friend.

Arriving at Peter Parker's apartment, he finds not Spider-Man but Gwen Stacy and kidnaps her, setting up a confrontation with our hero on a George Washington bridge that looks remarkably like the Hudson Bridge.

In the ensuing fight, the Goblin knocks Gwen from the top of the bridge and, despite Spider-Man thinking he's saved her from guaranteed death, it turns out he hasn't.

Its certainly not a tale short of incident. Nor is it short of intensity, as we get the drama of Harry's drug relapse followed by Osborn's breakdown before topping it all with the shocking climax. Gil Kane's story-telling's as masterful as ever and Jazzy John Romita's inks help maintain the look the strip's had since Steve Ditko left way back in issue #38. We even have time for a little J Jonah Jameson amidst it all.

But, whatever else goes on in the tale, the talking point's inevitably its climax.

And it's here the tale's at its best and at its most frustrating. It's impossible to ignore the power and shock value of it all as Spider-Man thinks he's triumphantly saved Gwen, only to realise he's done nothing of the sort.

On the downside, it does get bizarrely ambiguous about how exactly she's died, suggesting no clear consensus between, writer, editor, letterer and artists as to how it's actually happened.

Gil Kane and John Romita's depiction of Gwen lying totally motionless throughout the fight suggests they may have intended her to be dead all along, killed by the Goblin before Spidey even reached the scene.

Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy - alive and well.
For now...

On the other hand, letterer Artie Simek's inclusion of a, “Snap!” as Spidey snags Gwen with his webbing, strongly suggests her neck breaking as the deed happens.

Then again, just one page later, writer Gerry Conway has the Goblin bafflingly declare, “Romantic idiot! She was dead before your webbing reached her! A fall from that height would kill anyone before they struck the ground!”

Leaving aside the fact that a fall from that height clearly wouldn't kill someone before they hit the ground, the declaration leaves the waters disappointingly muddy.

Personally I take the view that Gwen should've been revealed to have been dead all along; with the, “snap,” and the Goblin's bizarre claim being left out. I suspect though that others may disagree.

Whatever the truth of it, the death of Gwen Stacy sent a shock-wave through the world of comics and may have signalled the end of the Silver Age and the start of a grimmer Bronze Age.

In all honesty, despite this issue's many merits, I do prefer the second part of the tale - for its sheer intensity and Peter Parker's seething anger - but issue #121's certainly a more-than-capable set-up for that classic issue.

Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. New Spider-Man movie photos.

News has reached the Steve Does Comics throne room that on-set shots from the new Spider-Man movie can be found here. Personally I'm pleased they decided to reboot the franchise. Ted Raimi's first two Spider-Mans are my favourite super-hero films of all time but, for me, Peter Parker should always be a teenager and therefore they can't stick with the same cast members forever.

Big hair aside, Andrew Garfield looks much more like Peter Parker to me than Tobey Maguire ever did but I do have to admit that, as far as Emma Stone goes, that's not really how I see Gwen Stacy. Isn't Captain Stacy's favourite daughter supposed to have eyes?

Still, she's got the Gwen Stacy boots on and, as my more long-suffering regular readers will know, for me, when it comes to comic book characters, it's all about the boots. Sadly, it would appear there's no place in the movie for Mary Jane Watson.

Supposedly the villain's going to be The Lizard. This is good news. This site has and will always have a large place in its heart for The Kangaroo but, in that heart, Doctor Curt Connors' evil alter-ego will always rule supreme.

But will the herpetological heel be defeated by talcum powder as he once was in the original comics?

Only time - and the insanity of the scriptwriters - will tell.

Super Spider-Man #171. The Death of Gwen Stacy & the Green Goblin.

Something very strange happened in the Autumn of 1975. A number of the comics I'd been getting week-in and week-out for several years disappeared without trace from my local newsagents. The Mighty World of Marvel, The Avengers and Spider-Man Comics Weekly all vanished at around the same time. If not for Planet of the Apes, what would I have had to keep me going? Fortunately, within a few months they were all back. But when Spider-Man Comics Weekly returned, it was in a whole new form.

It had been Titanised.

Like that other Marvel UK comic, Spider-Man's weekly mag was now printed sideways. This was good. Thanks to it allowing them to print two pages of artwork side-by side on every physical page, this meant you got twice as many pages for your money.

So what did you get?

You got trauma.

No sooner had the comic reappeared than this happened; Gwen Stacy died.

Now, I managed to miss the issue where she went but I sure as shooting heck had the next one, in which I discovered that in my absence Gwen had bought it. This was terrible. Gwen was blonde. She wore nice boots. She wore an Alice band. How could they kill such a creature? On top of that, by the end of this issue, the Green Goblin was gone too.

To say this was powerful stuff for a twelve year old would be no matter of hyperbole. Seeing Spider-Man clutching the corpse of his long-time girlfriend was quite the most moving thing I'd ever read in my life. This story and the ones that followed, as Peter Parker tried - and sometimes failed - to come to terms with the death of Gwen Stacy had a potency I'd never seen before in a comic and left an impression on me that remains to this day. I still regard the events of the next couple of years on that strip as the greatest era Spider-Man ever had. One that only dissipated when Ross Andru left the mag and Peter Parker graduated.

Two into one will go. The landscape format that showed us a whole new way of looking at comics.

Fortunately there was more. After that Spider-Man classic, the issue gave us a Gene Colan Dr Strange story. I don't remember if I could make sense of the tale at the time but, looking at it now, I don't have a clue what's going on. Dr Strange and Clea are in Dormammu's Dread Dimension but Strange has lost his powers and is having to rely on Clea to do "pagan" magic to achieve something or other. It's a bit of a surprise to discover Dr Strange's normal magic wasn't pagan. Now I'm left not at all sure what kind of magic it was. There's some sort of junkie in it, a man who seems to be Clea's father, Dormammu, Umar and various others and, frankly, I'm left bewildered by it all. It does though end with a giant Dormammu climbing up out of a huge crack in the Earth, ready to perform some evil deeds or other. So, if it leaves you bamboozled, at least it makes you want to read the following issue.

Next we get a centre-spread poster featuring Luke Cage and Mace. Like virtually all artwork produced specially for Marvel's UK comics, it has to be said it's not great.

Nor is the specially produced splash page for the George Tuska Iron Man tale that follows it. Shell-Head's up against The Controller who I think turned up in the pages of Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel. The presence of this tale baffles me. Up until now I was under the impression Marvel UK's Iron Man reprints ended when the comic switched to landscape format. Now I've discovered they didn't. This means I must've read years of Iron Man stories from that point on, with no recall of them at all. Essential Iron Man Vol 3 clearly beckons, as I try to find out what happened in all those tales I've forgotten.

Next it's a Thor adventure as he sets out to tackle Dr Doom after rescuing a protesting girl from a mini-riot. He soon finds out Doom's kidnapped her father in order to get him to build him some missile silos. In the flashback, the girl's clearly aged at least ten years since he was abducted, which implies he's taking an awful long time to build those silos and that Doom blatantly kidnapped the wrong silo scientist. In order to lure Doom out into the open, Don Blake plants a story in the papers that he's developed a cosmetic surgery technique that can cure any disfigurement. This seems rather thoughtless of him, as the hopes of disfigured people the world over will be built up and then cruelly dashed for no good reason. Aww but who cares? It's drawn by John Buscema, so every panel's a thing of simple beauty.

We finish off with a Thing/Black Widow team-up that I assume comes from the pages of Marvel Two-In-One. Much as I love the Thing - and the Black Widow - I'm not convinced Two-In-One was always the greatest comic Marvel produced, and this tale does little to change that. The story's pretty silly, with the Widow at one point whipping off her top to reveal she has the parts for a disruptor cannon attached to her back, hidden in a strip of fake skin. Let's own up, we've all done it. Meanwhile, the Thing spends half the story hauling in a three mile long stretch of cable to stop a bomb going off. As well as the somewhat lame story, the art looks terrible. Either Klaus Janson's inking doesn't suit Bob Brown's pencils or Janson's habitually lavish use of ink suffers unduly from being shrunk to half normal size.

So, was the landscape format a good thing?

Of course it was.

As said before, the great thing about it was you got twice as much story for your money. Where else would you get an entire 20 page Spider-Man story, plus seven to nine pages each of Dr Strange, Iron Man, Thor and the Thing, and a double-page pin-up, all for 9 pence? The downside isn't really the small size of the artwork. Apart from the Thing story, it really doesn't suffer. The main downside is the small size of the letters page which only has room for two letters. As it's clear from one of those letters that the comic's only recently switched to the new format, it would've been nice to see more room for fan reaction to the switch.

Mary Jane Watson's poll dance - the results.

MJ and Gwen are so outraged by the results of
our poll, it's all Harry and Captain Stacy can do
to keep them apart.

ITEM. walloping web-snappers! The result of our sensational Mary Jane Watson v Gwen Stacy poll are in -- and, with two votes for the lovely Gwendolyn, two for the ever-swingin' MJ, and one for, "It's a draw," that means our tumultuous poll of power is a tie! Never before have the people of the Blogiverse spoken so loudly!*

(*I'm definitely going to have to give up taking the Stan Lee lessons.)

Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson. Two Women separated by one dance.

Lennon or McCartney? Sheep or cows? Red or blue? It's a choice that at some point in our lives all men must make.

But there's one choice we're not forced to make.

Why?

Because it doesn't matter.

That doesn't mean I'm not going to make it anyway.

That choice is simple. Gwen Stacy or Mary Jane Watson?

Now, it should be said the natural girlfriend for Peter Parker was always Betty Brant. Being duller and less glamorous than the other two, it always made more sense for the loser-figure Parker to date her. It never made sense for him to be dating beautiful glamorous sex-bombs. Still it was comic books, it was Stan Lee, it was John Romita and so we got a defiance of all logic to match the characters' defiance of gravity.

Reading through the Spider-Man Essentials, several years back, it was a genuine shock to see how the characters were when they first appeared. Both of them seemed like they might be mentally ill. Gwen Stacy, as well as looking vaguely evil, seemed totally obsessed with Peter Parker. Everything she said was about him. Everything she thought was about him. Everything she did was about him.

Mary Jane, on the other hand, seemed to be thinking about everything but Peter Parker, seeing him as a football she could either pick up or leave lying around as she saw fit. She was a strange character, the living embodiment of the Swinging 60s but a woman to whom nothing at all seemed to matter.

While Gwen Stacy's head was filled with endlessly plotting thought-balloons and concerns. Mary Jane had no thought-balloons at all. It was as though she was an empty shell or simply had thoughts she had no intention of sharing with anyone, including herself - a woman in denial of even her own inner being. The differences meant a spiritual conflict was inevitable and, in the very early days, Gwen and MJ were involved in a kind of Cold War to prove who could be the hottest chick in New York. For a spell, amazingly, Gwen Stacy came out on top.

But then it all started to go wrong, as MJ continued being the life and soul of the party while Gwen slowly deteriorated into the dull, earnest limpet that prompted a young Gerry Conway to kill her off.

On the other hand, as Mary Jane went along she simply got nastier, metamorphosing into a total bitch who took the fact her boyfriend was in hospital, from a drugs overdose, as her cue to come on to his flatmate at every opportunity. All the more amazing then that she ended up becoming a proper love interest for Peter Parker, and at no point did the transition seem forced.

I have to admit I've always preferred Mary Jane. I've got a feeling the reason why's to be found in the events of Amazing Spider-Man issue #59, in which Mary Jane becomes a dancer at the Kingpin's club, while Gwen's dad is hypnotised into committing a crime by that self-same villain. Both women are dragged into a super-villain's machinations, one by her sense of freedom, the other by her sense of duty. This is the point. Despite Gwen's early status as Hot Dancing Chick TM, Mary Jane's role in this issue is one Gwen could never have played because she was never free. She always existed only in relation to other people, whether it be Peter Parker or her father.

Mary Jane, on the other hand, had from day one demonstrated she had a life independent of anyone, including possibly herself. Gwen Stacy never had a life beyond Peter Parker and her father, never said anything that didn't involve them, never had a thought that didn't involve them. It meant that, for all her emoting and agonising, she could never be as three dimensional as the determinedly two dimensional Mary Jane. Without Peter Parker, without her father, there was nothing left of her. She'd simply have vanished into the ether, a never-even noticed breeze - while, without other people, Mary Jane would probably have spent all eternity dancing away on that front cover, oblivious to everything but herself. It made her more self-obsessed but, to be self-obsessed, you must first have a sense of self, and to have a sense of self is to exist. Mary Jane had it. Gwen Stacy didn't.