Comic Book Questions Answered - where I answer whatever questions you folks might have about comic books (feel free to e-mail questions to me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com). Here is a link to an archive of all the past questions that have been answered so far.

Reader Tony F. wrote in the other day to ask me if they ever came up with a definitive cause of death for Gwen Stacy. Let's find out!

First off, let's see the actual death from Amazing Spider-Man #121 (by Gerry Conway, Gil Kane, John Romita and Tony Mortellaro)...









So there are four possibilities for Gwen's death here.

1. She died from the shock of the fall

2. She died when the Green Goblin hit her with his Goblin Glider

3. She died from a broken neck from the whiplash effect of Spider-Man's webbing stopping her fall abruptly

4. She was already dead before Spider-Man even got there.

I think the original intent of Gerry Conway was either #1 or #2, almost certainly #1, since he put it into the dialogue. The Goblin has no reason for wanting to make Spider-Man feel better about Gwen's death, so it is unlikely that he would lie to Spider-Man about how she died.

However, Conway was also the one who specifically added the "snap" to the story. He's told a few different versions of how the "snap" got in there, but he's been consistent in taking the credit/blame for it (as I detailed in a Comic Book Legends Revealed years ago). The version that makes the most sense to me is that he saw the way that Gil Kane had drawn Stacy, and it just looked like her neck was snapping, so he threw in a snap.

Anyhow, while I think the original intent was that she died of shock (and thus, if her neck snapped, it happened after she was already dead), but the tricky part there is that Kane clearly drew her as unconscious, so how could she die of the shock of the fall?

Go to the next page as we get into the whole issue of whether the "snap" was the cause of death...

The whole "she was out cold, how could she have died of shock?" thing led Roy Thomas to have to come to the conclusion that it must have been the whiplash effect. He explained as much in the letter column in Amazing Spider-Man #125...



Our longtime blog buddy, Dr. Jim Kakalios, had an excellent take on this approach in his book about the physics of superheroes. Here he is discussing the point in a lecture...

Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross sort of follow that approach in Marvels #4, saying, in effect, "they TELL us it was shock, but it didn't look like shock"



Note that the whole "she died of the neck snapping" thing is only a relatively recent debate. Even with Thomas' declaration in the letter column. For years, it was not even remotely an issue. The Green Goblin killed her. End of story. Remember, Peter Parker is a dude who is ALL about feeling guilty about stuff, so if he seriously thought he broke her neck, it would have come up a lot. It didn't, because Marvel didn't want to talk about it. Here's Peter thinking about it in Amazing Spider-Man #145 (by Gerry Conway, Ross Andru, Frank Giacoia and Dave Hunt)....



It was only in the last twenty years or so that it has become a real issue, as later writers keep going back to the whole "snap" thing and now Peter is suddenly depressed about the neck snapping.

In the 2006 Civil War one-shot, Casualties of War (by Christos Gage, Jeremy Haun and Mark Morales), Iron Man and Captain America use Gwen Stacy'd death to argue their respective points of view. Iron Man argues that if Spider-Man had been better trained, he would have avoided breaking her neck. Captain America notes she was only IN danger in the first place because Spider-Man's secret identity had been compromised...



I believe (but am not positive) that Peter Parker: Spider-Man #50 (by Paul Jenkins, Mark Buckingham and Wayne Faucher) is the first time that Peter says it explicitly himself...



Obviously Peter is way off base about her surviving had she hit the water. I mean, come on, dude.

Mark Millar, Terry Dodson and Rachel Dodson implicitly reference the neck snapping theory in Marvel Knights: Spider-Man #12, where Spider-Man saves Mary Jane from a similar fall through an intentionally different approach designed NOT to hurt her neck...



J. Michael Straczynski muddied the waters a bit (to the point where it's best just ignoring this story) with Amazing Spider-Man #500 (by Straczynski, John Romita Jr. and Scott Hanna), where he has Spider-Man travel through time into his own body at different points in time, and note that Gwen is very much awake here...



I suppose that the proximate cause of her death is, in fact, the neck snapping. I've seen some compelling arguments that his webbing should have been elastic enough not to stop her fall abruptly. That's a good argument, but, I mean, we see it - she IS stopped pretty abruptly there, right? Commenter Jaime brings up a point thst I meant to mention, that Spider-Man routinely saves people the same way that led to Gwen's death. So yeah, that's also a bit on the inconsistent side.

Anyhow, if anything, I think the way to go in the future is that there is a ton of room to have it be revealed that the Goblin killed her before Spider-Man showed up. I'm honestly surprised that that hasn't been tried by some writer. I tend to think Stan Lee is probably correct when he noted, "To me, that’s a little too – I don’t think we have to know her neck snapped, you know what I mean?"

But for now, that's where we are, so the answer, Tony, is currently "neck snapped." Although, obviously, the Green Goblin is still ULTIMATELY responsible. Dude threw her off a bridge.

Thanks for the question, Tony! If anyone else has a question, feel free to send it in to bcronin@comicbookresources.com!