Why Tom Brevoort Killed Gwen Stacy’s Comeback

A writer on Popverse says that during the One More/Brand New Day atrocity in 2007, Marvel’s staff was originally planning to resurrect Gwen Stacy, much as they did Harry Osborn, but that Tom Brevoort allegedly persuaded them not to follow through. And some of the “justifications” Quesada used are as laughable as can be expected, considering all the damage he did back in the day:

The 2007 storyline ended with the demon Mephisto rewriting the timeline so that Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson were never married. This was done as part of a Faustian bargain to save Aunt May’s life. The final chapter of the storyline featured the return of Harry Osborn, a supporting character who had been dead for years. But Harry wasn’t the only character Marvel wanted to bring back.

“We wanted to bring in some cast members, and [Gwen Stacy] was one of those cast members that I remembered fondly as a kid,” former Marvel editor-in-chief and One More Day penciler Joe Quesada told me in a 2010 interview for Spider-Man Crawlspace. “Both [James Michael Straczynski] and myself were vehement; we wanted to bring her back. We passed this piece of paper around a room of 50 creatives, and we put Gwen, and no Gwen. And we asked people anonymously to check one box. By the time it got back to me, bringing Gwen back had won out by one vote. One single vote. So, we were going to bring Gwen back.”

This vote was held in 2006 as Marvel was planning the next phase of Spider-Man books, which included One More Day and their three-times-a-month publishing initiative Brand New Day. Speaking with Popverse for a Brand New Day oral history article, Spider-Man editor Tom Brevoort recalls his reaction to Marvel’s plans for Gwen Stacy

“We knew that when we were going to inherit the titles, a couple of things were in place,” Brevoort says. “Spider-Man wasn’t going to be married anymore. And then, as part of that story, Joe and Joe Straczynski had intended to bring back Harry Osborn. And there was some back and forth at the time of, ‘Are they going to bring back Gwen Stacy?’ I kind of put my thumb on the scale and said, ‘No, don’t do that. That’s bad.’”

As Quesada recounts, Brevoort approached him a few months after the vote and convinced him to nix their plans to raise Gwen from the grave.

“Tom walked into my office, closed the door, and he said, ‘It’s a mistake. Bringing Gwen back is a mistake,‘” Quesada says. “We talked about it. One of the things that he said that was poignant was she’s been dead longer than she was alive in the comic books. So, the only people that really remember her with that sort of affection are fans that have been reading the books for that long a period of time. So, he questioned me and said, is it something that you want to bring back because you emotionally like the character or is it really going to be good for the cast?”

Looking back, Quesada admits that Gwen’s revival wouldn’t have made sense.

“It felt a little too magical to bring her back. It felt a little too heavy-handed by Mephisto,” Quesada says.

This from one of the same staffers who pathetically and arrogantly defended their directions in the late 2000s by saying, “we don’t need to explain anything, it’s magic”. And of course, if it wouldn’t make sense to revive Gwen, why does it make infinite sense to revive Harry? The original 1973 death of Gwen at the hands of the Green Goblin was written well enough, but if it’s okay to resurrect a man, then by that same logic, it’s okay to resurrect a woman too. In fact, how come Gwen’s father George isn’t brought up when it comes to the subject of resurrections?

Something else that’s bewilderingly absent from this issue is that there was some criticism coming from some readers at the time, and though Gwen wasn’t revived in the Bronze Age, the writers did compromise by creating a clone, produced in-story by the Jackal during 1975 (and lest we forget, the Spider-clone, Ben Reilly, was originally created at the time too), and if they really needed to concoct anything involving Gwen, couldn’t they have resorted to the clone instead of the real deal? Then again, such awful staffers as Quesada’s happened to be have no ability to produce anything palatable, and the Spider-Gwen who’s been created since hasn’t improved their fortunes either. But if Gwen were revived, what good would it do, when her image is tainted by the Sins Past storyline, certainly if it remains canon? That’s just another of the reasons why it’s hypocritical for Quesada and Straczynski to propose reviving Gwen after all the damage they did, and it’s not hard to guess they’d be brining Gwen back at Mary Jane’s expense.

And of course, there’s the little matter of Mephisto, and Quesada has the gall to say it’s heavy-handed for a fictional character to reverse something involving a cast member from Spidey’s world, but not for Quesada to editorially mandate the Spider-marriage be broken up. He’s never apologized to fandom any more than his DC counterpart, Dan DiDio, for tearing apart continuity cohesion and denigrating other people’s creations, both major and minor, to suit his ambiguous agenda. It’s really a shame the audience didn’t bail en masse on Marvel a quarter century ago when Quesada ascended to EIC position, since it could’ve sent a message what he had in store was not approved of; the whole train wreck he had in store could’ve been seen coming back then. Now, years later, Marvel’s fortunes have plummeted, and they continue to put the character creations through all sorts of pointless crossovers more than once every year, along with other illogical and implausible mishmash that nobody sensible needs. And Spidey, lest we forget, is but one of the biggest victims of Quesada’s machinations.

Originally published here