Who’s this Gwen Stacy I’ve been hearing about?

She’s a science major at the Marvel equivalent to NYU, where she met Peter Parker. She’s whole package, beauty and brains, although she always plays second fiddle to Mary Jane Watson in the cultural zeitgeist. Oh yeah, and she’s (spoilers) super dead.

If you watched Amazing Spider-Man 2 (you have my pity), you saw an awful version of one of the most powerful arcs in comic book history. To summarize for those who aren’t aware:

Green Goblin tosses Gwen off a bridge.

Spider-Man uses his webbing to grab Gwen as she plummets to certain doom.

Spidey forgets to account for whiplash, and snap goes Gwen Stacy’s neck. Whomp whomp.

But now there's Spider-Gwen... so what, she came back to life? And got spider powers?

Nope! Gwen Stacy stayed dead. Shocking, I know. As possibly the only person in comic book history to do that, we have to travel to Earth-65, a parallel dimension to find Spider-Gwen.

Parallel dimension?

Right. Umm… I’ll try to make it as simple as possible… the Earth that the Spider-Man we know and love is on is 616. Morlun, basically a life essence vampire, was hopping from dimension to dimension with his family, hunting the “spider totem” of each one.

"We love Hot Topic"

The spiderfolks realize what’s happening, and band together to fight Morlun and co. One of these spiderpeople is Gwen Stacy, who was working in a lab and got bit by a radioactive spider and performs various heroics. After that, it’s your classic story; girl meets boy (Earth-65’s Peter Parker), boy is inspired by superhero and tries to become a hero himself, boy turns himself into crazy lizard monster and dies. Whilst fighting Morlun’s family of Lost Boys wannabes, Gwen-65 and Peter-616 meet and protect each other.

OK, I get the backstory. So what’s so great about her?

Great question, true believer! Let’s break it down.

First up: the costume.

What a thing of beauty. Super clean, and have you ever seen such a great use of negative space before? Plus, it actually feels like something a high school kid would wear. When it comes down to it, it’s basically a fancy hoodie. Probably costs a fortune to get that thing cleaned though. Fighting in the streets of New York in white? Sheesh.

Second: She’s cool AF.

Gwen plays drums for the Mary Janes, a dope punk band. She’s meta without being over the top, like a certain Mr. Pool I could name. She’s got the quips. She’s got the smarts. She’s got the looks. She has a cool cop dad, and she DOESN’T have to mope about Uncle Ben. Literally, what more could you ask for in a hero?

Thirdly: She’s a strong lady hero.

We need more lady heroes. Comics are all about wish fulfillment, and people that aren’t white dudes should get to see themselves in comics as well. And as much as the original Gwen followed the classic trope of dying to provide motivation for a guy, Earth-65 Gwen literally reverses that. Gwen is haunted by the death of Peter Parker, and most of the public actually thinks she killed him. she’s considered a criminal, and a task force headed up by one Frank Castle is hunting her down.

yeah, this Frank Castle.

Finally: She doesn’t replace Peter Parker of 616.

Something I don’t love about a lot of these recent gender-bent heroes is they tend to replace the former version completely. Thor was unworthy, so stuck around for a bit but ended up vanishing when Jane Foster took up the mantle. Ironheart has an AI version of Tony Stark, but what do you know, he’s missing too. With Gwen, we get the best of both worlds (pun very much intended). Not only do we get both heroes, they even fight together! I love Peter, and I love Gwen. Not having to lose one for the other is one of my favorite things about this series.

She sounds awesome! I want to check out some of her comics!

I can’t encourage you enough to do just that. Spiderverse is great, Spider-Gwen has some excellent series of her own, but the underrated gem of the bunch is Web-Warriors. As a continuation of Spiderverse, it’s Gwen and some other webheads hopping around dimensions and fighting bad guys. It… it was cancelled because not enough people read it, but that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the books that we did get!

Do you love Spider-Gwen too? Do you prefer one of the other various Spider-People? How about the Japanese one with a giant robot? Are you also super bummed about Web Warriors getting binned? Sound off in the comments and let me know!