Amazing Spider-Man #121 original art

[Lee B.]

Good morning! I was wondering whether anyone could share with me a scan of a page of original art from Amazing Spider-Man #121. I would like to see a scan of the page where Gwen Stacy falls from the bridge, with the small "snap" sound effect as Spider-Man tries to save her. If anyone knows how I could see that, please let me know, either on this board or via PM. Thanks a lot! Best, Lee

[delekkerste]

Just sent it to you via e-mail - let me know if you don't receive it.

[Lee B.]

Got it! Thanks so much! That was super-helpful. Best, Lee

[delekkerste]

Got it! Thanks so much! That was super-helpful. Best, Lee

 

(thumbs u

[glendgold]

Doing forensics?

[delekkerste]

Just hosted the pic - here it is. I downloaded the image years ago from Burkey's website; the art hasn't moved from the longtime owner (i.e., I don't own it).

 

[glendgold]

Isn't there an interview somwehere with Romita, Conway, et al, about who added that "Snap?" Because as I recall, even though the dialogue says she died on the way down, the SNAP means Spidey accidentally killed her. Is that right or am I making that up?

[Koa]

Thanks for sharing this. In my opinion Gil Kane's adventurous camera angles and dynamic figures inked to the point of being redrawn by John romita sr. produced some of the best Spider-man art and story ever.

[delekkerste]

Isn't there an interview somwehere with Romita, Conway, et al, about who added that "Snap?" Because as I recall, even though the dialogue says she died on the way down, the SNAP means Spidey accidentally killed her. Is that right or am I making that up?

 

In the preface to Marvel Masterworks ASM Vol. 13, Conway says that the SNAP does indeed mean that Spidey accidentally killed her. He also says that it would not have been as tragic if she was already dead via the Goblin's hand, nor would it have been realistic if the fall had killed her prior to the webbing catching her. But, he also says that she would have died had Spidey not acted as well, so it was "a lose-lose situation".

 

"So when it came time for Spider-Man to save the girl he loved from certain death, it seemed to me only natural that he fail.

 

But even that wasn't enough.

 

As I looked at Gil's pencils, his beautiful and almost balletic rendering of Gwen's fall and Spidey's desperate but vain effort to rescue her, I was struck by two things:

 

One...It just didn't seem dramatic enough.

 

Two...It sure looked like she ought to survive.

 

Characters had fallen from greater heights in comics and been caught without injury. So why couldn't Gwen survive a fall like this?

 

Well, I thought, maybe she was already dead when the Goblin tosssed her. But if she were already dead, that would make Peter's rescue attempt pointless, even pathetic: the opposite of tragic. And in any case, why would the Goblin bother to toss her off a bridge if she was already dead in the first place?

 

So, I decided, that meant she wasn't dead when she fell.

 

Which meant she died while falling.

 

But how? How could a simple fall kill her, especially when the art clearly showed that Spidey managed to catch her -

 

- by the ankle.

 

I never asked Gil what he intended to imply by having Spider-Man's web catch Gwen by the leg in just that spot, creating just that arc, torso and neck and hair arching backward like an upside-down apostrophe. In all probability, Gil was simply trying to execute an elegant layout. But what he drew had implications from a physics point of view, and even more importantly, from a dramatic and emotional viewpoint.

 

Spider-Man was haunted by guilt for failing to act, and by the knowledge that his failure to act cost someone he loved his life. Now, looking at Gil's art, I decided to show that sometimes, even a hero who takes action can fail the one he loves.

 

Sometimes trying to do good is as futile as doing nothing at all.

 

Sometimes, bad things just happen.

 

Snap.

 

I didn't know it then, and hindsight isn't really twenty-twenty so I can't say with certainty, even now, but in that moment, with that one small sound effect, comics changed forever.

 

(Yes, I know there's been controversy about whether the fall itself, or Spidey's catch, was responsible for Gwen's death. Let me clear it up for you now, once and for all. As far as I'm concerned, as the writer of the story, that sound effect is there for a reason. Let's not be coy. yes, in trying to save Gwen, Peter killed the woman he loved. I'd also like to point out, if he hadn't tried to save her, she would have been dead anyway. It was a lose-lose situation. Sometimes life is like that. Bad things happen.)"

[Lee B.]

Gene, thanks for reproducing that material from the introduction to the Marvel Masterworks volume. It is quite enlightening.

 

Glen, I am indeed doing some forensics work, in that I am hoping to prove that someone other than Gerry Conway was at least indirectly responsible for the "snap!" and Gwen's death.

 

Someone who worked in the Bullpen at the time has told me that he remembers telling Gerry that it made no sense for a fall in and of itself to kill Gwen, and that the art was changed late in production, perhaps in response to this conversation, to add the "snap!" sound effect.

 

Gerry's essay seems to indicate everything was his idea, but the wording doesn't necessarily rule out the other possibility. If the neck snapped from the start, then one would imagine the sound effect would have been drawn along with everything else on the page, rather than later.

 

Anyway, I am trying to figure out whether such a late alteration is obvious from looking at a scan of the art. It seems hard to tell for sure, but I am pursuing other leads. It's a fun question, and I appreciate the help and discussion on the board today. Best, Lee

[delekkerste]

The Great Gwen Stacy Death Debate

 

"When he pulls her up, Peter finds that she’s dead, and whispers “I saved you … ” to her corpse. Goblin flies over and shouts, “ Romantic insufficiently_thoughtful_person! She was dead before your webbing reached her! A fall from that height would kill anyone — before they struck the ground!” After the fight, Spider-Man makes the following ambiguous statement to a cop: “She’s dead — and Spider-Man killed her.”

 

Readers were left scratching their heads. What happened? Was the Green Goblin right about the fall killing her, thus absolving Peter of responsibility? Or did that “SNAP!” mean her neck broke when the web stopped her in midair — a gruesomely ironic end that puts some blame on Peter? Was there an alternative explanation (perhaps it was the impact from the Goblin’s glider)? Fans had no idea, and were immediately thrown into a tizzy, inundating Marvel with letters of outrage and confusion.

 

A few months later, Marvel published an editorial in the letters page for Amazing Spider-Man in an effort to settle the debate: “t saddens us to have to say that the whiplash effect she underwent when Spidey’s webbing stopped her so suddenly was, in fact, what killed her.” Case closed, right?

 

Not so fast. Fans smelled a rat. If that was the original intent, then why wasn’t it made clear in the comic? Why include Goblin’s statement about the fall killing her?

 

Readers were right to be suspicious. Behind the scenes, there was even more confusion about the intended cause of death — confusion that has never been totally resolved. Lee claims he never approved the decision to kill off his beloved Gwen in any form and gave an interview years later where he expressed unease with the neck-snapping explanation: “To me, that’s a little too — I don’t think we have to know her neck snapped, you know what I mean?”

 

Marvel’s been equivocal in the subsequent years. Allegedly (though I’ve never found an example), some reprints of the comic took out the “SNAP!” sound effect. A 1987 edition of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe said, “the shock of the fall itself had already killed her.” In Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s beautiful 1994 graphic novel Marvels, the protagonist — a photographer — sees Gwen’s fall from a distance while holding his camera, and at the crucial moment, a “SNAP” sound effect appears … leaving it elegantly ambiguous whether that refers to her neck, or the camera’s shutter. A 1999 introduction to a collected edition of “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” refused to come down on one side or another, and added a whole new bit of real-life confusion: “No one seemed to know who added the telltale ‘snap’ sound effect in that critical panel.”

 

It’s not exactly true that no one knew who added the “SNAP!” But the story behind it is really weird.

 

As of 1973, Marvel was still using the so-called “Marvel Method” of comics creation: The writer would tell the artist what the general plot was, then the artist would draw the whole comic without any text, then the writer would add in dialogue and sound effects. Somewhere in that process, the neck-snap sort of magically appeared, it seems.

 

At a 2013 San Diego Comic-Con panel, Conway said he hadn’t consciously intended the neck-snap — but when artist Gil Kane gave him the artwork, he thought Kane “had drawn it in such a way that it seemed pretty obvious to me that Gwen’s neck was being broken by the catch, so I just added the sound effect.” In another interview, Conway said he added the "SNAP!" out of "pure artistic impulse." “I'm not sure why I added that sound effect, or what I meant to accomplish," he recalled. "[M]y subconscious mind made a choice that meant so much more than my conscious mind ever intended.” When the interviewer asked point blank whether Conway thinks Gwen died from the fall or from whiplash, he replied, "Could be! Honestly, I don't know." (I can’t find any record of Kane giving a statement on the matter, and he died in 2000.)

 

So perhaps there was no original intent. Conway wanted Gwen to die, but apparently never made a firm initial decision about whether her death should be entirely the Goblin’s fault or Spidey’s fault."

[Shepherd]

It reminds me of Kubrick talking about 2001:A Space Odyssey:

 

How much would we appreciate La Gioconda today if Leonardo had written at bottom of the canvas: "This lady is smiling slightly because she has rotten teeth" -or "because she's hiding a secret from her lover"? It would shut off the viewer's appreciation and shackle him to a "reality" other than his own. I don't want that to happen to 2001.

 

or this:

 

You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point.

 

At the end, we were given the opportunity to have our own explanation of what happened to Gwen.

 

[tv horror]

With the writers -script lay-out would the artist not have known that the fall caused her death and that it was by accident with the webbing. As I have never seen a -script I cannot say for sure, maybe someone on the forum actually has seen the original or at least a copy. I for one would be extremely interested in knowing.

[MasterChief]

Below is Kane's prelim. Sold via Heritage last year.

 

Also a side-by-side comparisons of layouts and published material.

 

 

 

 

 

[Koa]

Here's a recent interview with John Romita sr who takes credit for the death of gwen stacy.

 

The reason I take the credit for it was we were told to kill Aunt May. Gerry Conway and I got together for our plot session -- we used to get together at his apartment -- and he said, how are we going to kill Aunt May? I said, if you kill Aunt May, you're not going to do a damn bit of good to the strip. It'll lose one of Peter Parker's hangups. He won't have to worry about Aunt May anymore. He won't be treated like a child anymore. If we want to make any kind of stir in the monthly line, we have to kill somebody important. That means we need to kill Mary Jane or Gwen Stacy.

 

He also mentioned that Stan lee was livid when he and felt they killed her behind his back. he wanted to revive her. I'm guessing that "snap" sound effect made it impossible.

 

http://www.comicbookresources.com/article/john-romita-sr-reflects-on-his-spider-man-legacy-gwen-stacys-death-and-stan-lee

[tv horror]

Masterchief many thanks for posting the prelim, when you consider all the pages ever drawn that must be one of the most iconic.

[DeadpoolJr.]

Masterchief many thanks for posting the prelim, when you consider all the pages ever drawn that must be one of the most iconic.

The color guides for that scene were also being sold around the same time.

[Unca Ben]

Here's a recent interview with John Romita sr who takes credit for the death of gwen stacy.

 

The reason I take the credit for it was we were told to kill Aunt May. Gerry Conway and I got together for our plot session -- we used to get together at his apartment -- and he said, how are we going to kill Aunt May? I said, if you kill Aunt May, you're not going to do a damn bit of good to the strip. It'll lose one of Peter Parker's hangups. He won't have to worry about Aunt May anymore. He won't be treated like a child anymore. If we want to make any kind of stir in the monthly line, we have to kill somebody important. That means we need to kill Mary Jane or Gwen Stacy we need to have Gwen Stacy get knocked up by Norman Osborn and give birth to twins who magically hyper-age, then have Gwen gain powers and become Spider-Woman.

 

 

Fixed that for you

[tv horror]

I refuse to read Spider-Gwen until she starts wearing go-go boots again, come on boots start walkin!

[AnkurJ]

I owned the entire prelims a years ago and that panel was very close to the final published version. I regret having to sell it but that's life.