This is "You Act Like We Never Have Met," which is a feature about one-time cast members of popular comic book series that have fallen by the wayside in the years since. Some of these are characters who would appear in comics routinely read by hundreds of thousands of people but are now effectively mysteries.

Today, we look at the odd time Jill Stacy had in the Spider-Man titles.

Almost as soon as Peter Parker married Mary Jane Watson, the various Spider-Man writers were trying to think of ways to break them up. The general belief among the writers was that Peter being married "aged" him, as he was only in his early 20s, story-wise. One of the more notable ways to deal with the marriage was to reveal that Peter Parker was actually a clone and so Peter and Mary Jane left the series and the REAL Peter Parker took over the book, using the name Ben Reilly. Ben got to have the old school single Spider-Man stories but, well, it was a pretty hard sell to say "Oh yeah, this guy is Spider-Man now" and so, less than a year after Ben took over, Peter was back in the comic and in Peter Parker: Spider-Man #75 (it was pointedly re-named that with that issue), Ben was killed off and Peter officially regained the title of Spider-Man (while learning that, whoops, Peter is the real Peter and it was Ben who was the clone all along).

Okay, with Peter now back as the star of the book and still married to Mary Jane, the new approach was to go out of their way to stress just how young Peter and Mary Jane were. It was like every issue had big flashing lights "THESE ARE STILL VERY YOUNG PEOPLE." Part of that involved Peter and Mary Jane going back to college. Oh, and living with Mary Jane's Aunt Anna (who sort of took over the role of Aunt May, as this was during the period where Aunt May was still thought to be dead).

With them being back in college, then, they, of course, needed new college friends to hang out with, so in Peter Parker: Spider-Man #76 (by Howard Mackie, John Romita Jr. and Scott Hanna), Mary Jane runs into Gwen Stacy's cousin, Jill Stacy!

In the next issue, we also meet her father, Arthur Stacy (technically we met him back when Gwen stayed with him in London back when she ran away from the country because she blamed Spider-Man for her father's death)...

Soon, we also met Jill's jerk brother, Paul, who actually briefly joined the anti-mutant Friends of Humanity...

Generally speaking, Jill was just a sort of generic supporting cast member. Just someone there for Mary Jane to be friends with at college. She showed up in all of the Spider-Man books, but still mostly in the one that Howard Mackie wrote. This would be significant, as in 1999, the Spider-Man books all ended and restarted as just two titles, Amazing Spider-Man and Peter Parker: Spider-Man, both written by Howard Mackie!

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Jill%20and%20Peter%20Get%20Closer']

In Amazing Spider-Man (by Mackie and artist John Byrne, who presumably had some say in the plot of the series), Mary Jane and Peter were going through some marital strife and Jill seemed to be around a lot and seemed to have a bit of a thing for Peter. It's really kind of weird, because he's still married to Jill's ostensible best friend.

In Amazing Spider-Man #2, Jill talks about wanting a guy with a brain...

Then, in Amazing Spider-Man #4, Mary Jane sends Peter to keep an eye on Jill during a blackout on Valentine's Day...

Weird, right?

Then, in Amazing Spider-Man #9, while technically there to tell Peter to fix things with MJ, she starts calling him Tiger!!

Here's the weirdest one. Aunt May is back alive and she's staying with Peter and Mary Jane, but Mary Jane is away on modeling gigs a lot. So Peter hangs a banner to welcome her home and he falls on Jill and there's this moment and Aunt May is all, "Nuh uh, not on my watch!"

Mary Jane that seemingly dies and Peter is in denial about it for a while, but eventually starts to tentatively move on and, of course, Jill Stacy is there for him.

Peter moves in with Randy Robertson and then he, Randy, Jill and Glory Grant all start hanging out a lot together (Randy is trying to date Glory)...

There was this odd little moment where both Jill AND Glory had their eyes on Peter, but Glory seems to back off.

Arthur Stacy was involved in this weird plot involving aliens and Spider-Man had to save him and, in the process, we see Jill totally blames Spider-Man for her cousin's death...

In Amazing Spider-Man #27, Randy flat out sets up Peter on a date with Jill. It doesn't go very well...

The next issue revealed Mary Jane was alive, but only to the readers. So for Peter, Randy continued to try to set him up with women and there is this big moment with Peter and Jill where they seem about to kiss, which is super weird timing considering this is the issue we learn Mary Jane is alive...

Then, finally, the next issue, when Peter finds out MJ is alive, he and Jill have one last moment...

The thing is, when Mary Jane turned up alive, she and Peter then sort of took a break from each other, so Peter was written in the comics as still kind of sort of single, and so Jill got one last big moment when, in Peter Parker: Spider-Man #34, Peter is on a kind of date with his new neigbor, Caryn, when Jill runs into her when things go wrong during Peter's date and he has to turn into Spider-Man...

Besides a single background cameo in another Paul Jenkins Spider-Man story, that was it for Jill Stacy. J. Michael Straczynski dropped all of Howard Mackie's characters and we haven't really seen Jill since.

What an odd character, huh?

Okay, that's it for this installment of You Act Like We Never Have Met! Feel free to write in to brianc@cbr.com if you have suggestions for future installments!