Gerry Conway, who killed Gwen Stacy in 1973 and gave Marvel Comics the Punisher one issue later, died on April 27, 2026 at 73, after a fight with cancer. His family confirmed the death through Marvel, which posted a tribute on its site the same day. [1] Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said Conway's writing had "inspired so much of what we've done on screen, from Werewolf by Night to Daredevil to Spider-Man and Punisher." [1]

He was 19 when he took over The Amazing Spider-Man from Stan Lee. He wrote issues 111 through 149. Issue 121, in June 1973, was the one. Gwen Stacy fell from the George Washington Bridge after the Green Goblin threw her off; Spider-Man's web caught her ankle on the way down; the snap, in panel, killed her. The issue's last caption — that "the spider's web only saves those who deserve to be saved" — closed an era in which superheroes did not lose. [2] Conway wrote the issue. He was 21 years old.

Eight issues later, in February 1974's Amazing Spider-Man #129, he and artist Ross Andru introduced Frank Castle, the Punisher, as a tertiary antagonist, a Vietnam veteran with a vendetta and a skull on his chest. Conway built the Punisher as a conflicted, morally compromised figure meant to be wrong. The character outran the brief. [3] He has since carried three movies, a Netflix-then-Disney+ live-action series, and, in 2024, a presidential campaign meme cycle in which the skull travelled across political signage in ways the Punisher's own creators have publicly refused to authorize.

Conway's career did not stop at Spider-Man. At DC, he wrote 102 issues of Justice League of America across the Satellite Era, second only to original writer Gardner F. Fox. He co-created Firestorm, Power Girl, Killer Croc, and Jason Todd; he revived Atari Force; he wrote the Spider-Clone Saga that gave Marvel readers Ben Reilly. Jim Lee, the DC Comics co-publisher, posted that Conway's Justice League run was the reason Lee took over the title during the New 52. [4] James Gunn, now running DC Studios, wrote on the day Conway died that the Spider-Clone run had been "an extremely influential run for me personally as a kid." [4]

The politics of the Punisher is the part of the obituary that is the present tense. Conway wrote in 2019 — the year police across the United States started wearing modified Punisher skull patches — that he objected to the character being used as a marker of authority. The Punisher, he argued, was not a cop and was not a soldier; he was a man who had failed at being either, and the skull was a mark of failure rather than identification. The current Disney+ live-action Punisher series, anchored to Jon Bernthal's reading, has, in dialogue, repeated Conway's framing. The 2024 campaign cycle did not.

The Marvel obit is dense with credits and quiet on the politics. Marvel president Dan Buckley called him "thoughtful, deeply attuned to the emotional and moral core of storytelling." Editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski said his work "has made an undeniable and indelible impact." [1] Both statements are true. Both are insufficient. The Punisher's authorship problem — that the man whose comics insisted on the character's failure has died, and the country's most visible deployment of his iconography is on people he wrote against — is the Wednesday-paper inheritance.

Gwen Stacy's death is the cleaner part of the legacy. Comic-book scholars name Amazing Spider-Man #121 as the closing of the Silver Age and the opening of the Bronze Age. Death, after Conway, became survivable in superhero stories — meaning permanent, meaning a frame that subsequent writers had to write inside, not around. The 2014 film The Amazing Spider-Man 2 staged the scene Conway had written four decades earlier; the snap, in CG, was the same snap. [5]

He was born September 10, 1952. He sold his first short story at 16, became a professional comics writer at 17, took over Spider-Man at 19, and was Marvel's editor-in-chief by 24. The career had a slope. The deaths in his comics had a slope. The politics his most enduring character has acquired, after his pen left the page, were not in his draft.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York