"Wrong, Goblin! You MURDERED the only girl I'll ever LOVE -- AND TODAY'S THE DAY YOU'RE GOING TO DIE!!"

Holding the love of his lifes lifeless body in his arms, Peter Parker spoke those words. You can just imagine the tears of rage under that mask. One of the most tragic events in Spider-Man's life, second only to the death of his Uncle Ben.

The Green Goblin abducts Peter's girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, and lures Spider-Man to a tower of the George Washington Bridge. The Goblin and Spider-Man clash, and the Goblin hurls Stacy off the bridge. Spider-Man shoots a web strand at her legs and catches her. As he pulls her up, he thinks he has saved her. However, he quickly realizes she is dead. Unsure whether the whiplash from her sudden stop broke her neck or if the Goblin had broken it previously, he blames himself for her death.

A note on the letters page of The Amazing Spider-Man #125 states: "It saddens us to say that the whiplash effect she underwent when Spidey's webbing stopped her so suddenly was, in fact, what killed her."

John V. Romita (January 24, 1930) is an comic book artist best known for his work on Marvel Comics' The Amazing Spider-Man and for co-creating characters including the Punisher and Wolverine. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2002. Romita is the father of John Romita Jr., also a comic book artist and husband of Virginia Romita, for many years Marvel's traffic manager.

While Romita's depiction of Spider-Man would eventually become the company mascot and the definitive look to the general public, the artist had trepidations: "I was hoping against it, believe it or not. People laugh when I say this, but I did not want to do Spider-Man. I wanted to stay on Daredevil. The only reason I did Spider-Man was because Stan asked me and I felt that I should help out, like a good soldier. I never really felt comfortable on Spider-Man for years. ... I felt obliged to [mimic] Ditko because ... I was convinced, in my own mind, that he was going to come back in two or three issues. ... I couldn't believe that a guy would walk away from a successful book that was the second-highest seller at Marvel. ... After six months, when I realized it wasn't temporary, I finally stopped trying to [mimic] Ditko. ... I was doing these nine-panel pages and the thin line, and I was doing Peter Parker without any bone structure — just like Ditko was doing, I thought."

Romita designed the look of Mary Jane Watson, a supporting character in the Spider-Man series who would later become the lead character's romantic interest. Romita has stated that in designing Mary Jane, he "used Ann-Margret from the movie Bye Bye Birdie as a guide, using her coloring, the shape of her face, her red hair and her form-fitting short skirts."