Sincerely,
Thomas Mets
why can't us modern haters be so eloquent?
I don't blind date I make the direct market vibrate
I wonder if Seanan McGuire sent a letter in (although I think she started getting into comics way after Gwen's death).
"Why is it in when a superhero and his girl finally seem to be getting it together" - Weren't Peter and Gwen on the rocks by that point? Or at least Gwen still had a deep hatred of Spidey.
This isn't "about to head to the altar" level of "getting it together."
The letters page you guys really need to read is ASM#125. That has actual death threats printed on it directed to Gerry Conway. It also has Roy Thomas' famous bit about saying that the snap killed Gwen which started that ridiculous and farcical debate on what was essentially a prank.m
It also has famous letterhack Jane Hollingworth roast Gwen on the coals and actually thank Gerry Conway for whacking her.
So you have bricks and bouquets thrown at Mr. Conway at the same time.I never imagined you could actually kill Gwen. You have more intelligence then I gave you credit for. I fervently hope Gwen doesn't make a miraculous recovery in #122 (or in any subsequent issues). I also hope Peter doesn't mourn her too long...how long can he grieve over a person whose brain was constructed entirely out of old Pepsi bottles and whose personality had the exact color, consistency, and flavor of a loaf of Wonder Bread?
— Jane C. Hollingsworth, Letter to the Editor, "The Spider's Web" Column, published in Amazing Spider-Man, #125.
My favorite one of these is this guy who insisted Gwen could have survived by means of a parachute and that it wasn't even bad that they killed but that they couldn't even kill her "right."
I created a thread about Dick Grayson/Nightwing and Koriand'r/Starfire. It is to acknowledge and honor their iconic and popular relationship.
I created a fan page about Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson. This page is for all the Spider-Marriage fans.
Nobody got arrested or reported. Marvel printed death threats in the letters' pages...which they don't do nowadays. And people put their real names behind it and everything. As opposed to today's anonymous death threats on twitter and social media. Nobody took death threats by fans seriously back then.
This was before John Lennon got assassinated by a crazy fan, so I think Marvel and others simply ignored or played down these death threats as "all bark and no bite" and there was also that whole "no such thing as bad publicity" and so on which people subscribed to at the time. That became less of a case by the end of the 80s when you had the Satanic Verses and Last Temptation of Christ brouhaha, where people realized that there definitively is such a thing as bad publicity. People take death threats and stuff seriously when people actually do go out and kill and attack creators and so on.
If you read Marvel: The Untold Story by Sean Howe, Gerry Conway's real gripe during that was with Stan Lee himself. When the controversy started, when fans harassed Lee at college tours where he gave speeches and so on, Lee threw Conway under the bus...despite Conway being a young up-and-coming writer and Lee being the publisher and senior figure. Conway was getting death threats and so on and Lee was washing his hands off him. Lee claimed that he didn't know or approve that story and EIC Roy Thomas (Lee's closest friend in real life) put out a public letter claiming that Lee definitively knew that story and approved it, because Thomas had some editorial responsibility to defend writers and so on. Lee also asked Conway to bring Gwen back and that led to the First Clone Saga...and Conway as he is quoted in Howe's book was pretty angry about that. If Conway didn't sell the Peter/MJ romance as well as he did, then the First Clone Saga would have been different. You would have had a twist that said that the Gwen who died in ASM #121 was the clone, and this was the real Gwen...instead since fans were moving on and so forth, Conway was able to close his run with Peter and MJ getting a room so to speak.
The fan reaction to Gwen Stacy's death was more because it made Peter look bad (or as Peter says in his caveman manner in ASM#121, "You killed my woman, Goblin") then because Gwen was herself very popular. Most of the outrage as you see in those letters was about making Peter look bad. And Lee himself didn't have issues with Gwen's death but he had issues with fans harassing him and he wanted to be liked.
TRUTH, JUSTICE, HOPE
That is, the heritage of the Kryptonian Warrior: Kal-El, son of Jor-El
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I am sure the ones with all the f-words, c-words and other stuff and so on were never published. As it is stuff like "rattlesnake" and so on are probably substitutes and euphemisms for that. In any case if you read the letters column above, you'll find that most of it is positive and appreciative and so on.
Marvel Comics had a certain reputation at the time, and one of that was that they were accessible and not like any other company. So of course even reader letters that were a little coarse and irreverent were allowed to be printed. It was a way of saying "We're not like those other companies, man. You can tell us what's wrong, and we'll hear you out and print it 'cause we can take it." I mean this reputation was strong enough that Lee even printed a letter calling him out for downplaying Ditko after his departure (https://www.cbr.com/comic-book-quest...left-the-book/) and responded to it as diplomatically as he could, even if it did make him look bad.
And again this was before Lennon got assassinated. After that creatives began to have a certain fear of fans and fandoms.
Based on the comments and replies, there probably won't be much of a difference, because Conway even back then was quite insecure and humiliated about that entire thing (especially when Stan Lee threw him under which he couldn't protest owing to the power-differential between them) though he did tough it out and stuck to his guns and eventually won people over. People forget that Conway's run after that was quite successful and he had enough prestige to be tapped in to write Superman versus the Amazing Spider-Man, the first inter-company superhero crossover was given to some guy in his early 20s who wrote that story that killed a superhero love interest was allowed to write Superman, a very conservatively protected character and moral icon, at that.Anyone else remembers that time early in 2013 when Gerry Conway said he's glad they didn't have twitter back then?
@revolutionary jack: Can you, (or anybody else who read it) recommend the book: Marvel-The untold story?
You mean write a blurb or whatnot. Would only do that if someone paid me.
Anyway it's an interesting read and got a lot of stuff in it. There are flaws there and so on, like it's biased against Jim Shooter and full of a lot of mistakes and one-sided narratives concerning him but the rest of the book is interesting and informative.