Did Spider-Man Nearly See His First Girlfriend Die Years Before Gwen Stacy's Death?

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn how close Spider-Man came to losing his first girlfriend years before Gwen Stacy's death

Welcome to the 905th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, our first legend is about whether Spider-Man nearly lost his FIRST girlfriend to tragedy years before Gwen Stacy's death.

Earlier this year, we "celebrated" the 50th anniversary of Gwen Stacy's death (quotes because, well, it seems pretty morbid to call it celebrating, right? Honored, perhaps?), and I wrote the following about the impact that her death had on the Spider-Man mythos:

[Gwen Stacy's tragic death at the hands of the Green Goblin] goes to the idea that Conway has said a few times that this death was necessary because Spider-Man was about personal tragedy. That's the interesting thing to me, though, is that that really WASN'T the case at this point in Spider-Man's history. Yes, Spider-Man was born out of the tragedy of Uncle Ben's murder, but the book had gone past that idea for years at this point. In fact, in Amazing Spider-Man #100, it was Gwen's father, George Stacy, that is the moral center in Peter Parker's subconscious. Uncle Ben's murder just WASN'T that central of a theme to Spider-Man at this point. The drama in the character was more the general sense of "I have to be a superhero, even though being a superhero means I can't do other things." There's a certain sense of drama there, of course, but it's not a tragedy.

The death of Gwen, though, brought tragedy back to the forefront of Spider-Man's life and it has never left. Now, the idea of Peter Parker "needing" to suffer to be Spider-Man has become an almost central idea (stress almost, though, as different writers have different takes on the idea. It's a very popular theme, though, and Gwen's death solidified it all).

The interesting thing about that to me is the fact that that same concern I had was one that Steve Ditko had over fifty years ago!! You see, Spider-Man nearly lost his FIRST girlfriend to tragedy, as well, and it was actually Ditko's IDEA (which he later regretted)!

Who was Spider-Man's first girlfriend?

Spider-Man's first love interest in the comic was Betty Brant, J. Jonah Jameson's secretary at the Daily Bugle. When they first kind of sort of met in Amazing Spider-Man #2 (by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee), you can hardly tell that there was ever going to be something between them, due to how they, you know, didn't really interact, and she was just Jameson's secretary...

Did Betty Brant almost die early on?

While Steve DItko would eventually take over as the sole plotter of Amazing Spider-Man, and even before becoming the SOLE plotter with #25, he was mostly plotting it before that point, early on, Ditko and Lee came up with the plots for the stories together, and while Ditko probably drove the narrative a bit more than Lee (and Lee, in turn, was very willing to LET Ditko do that, giving him the freedom to control things mostly, with Lee just telling him ideas he had, with the sort of implicit understanding that Lee WAS the boss, so if there was a REAL fight, Lee was going to win), there was a real collaboration between the two (and Lee came up with some major plot points of the era)

In Blake Bell's brilliant Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, Ditko explained that initially he wanted to kill off Betty Brant early on, explaining, "I had this idea we establish a real romance between Betty Brant and Peter Parker and then have her die in some kind of accident - nothing criminal, just the kind of unfortunate tragedy that happens in real life. Stan said no, and he was right."

Ditko continued to explain that he acknowledged that had they done that, then they would have added too much "heavy negative emotional baggage" on top of the death of Uncle Ben, and, well, that's pretty much the same thing that kind of DID happen with the death of Gwen Stacy, so it's interesting to see the parallels with what Ditko feared and what ended up happening (of course, again, it took Lee to tell him no).