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In 1973 Marvel Comics made the decision to kill Spider-Man’s girlfriend, Gwen Stacy. The story, which was published in Amazing Spider-Man #121, was one of Marvel’s most controversial stories to date, resulting in numerous angry letters. The backlash was so big that the late Stan Lee, who was Marvel’s publisher at the time, publicly disowned the story, claiming it had been done without his knowledge.

According to the late Gerry Conway, writer of Amazing Spider-Man at the time, this was completely false. Not only was Lee aware of the story, but he had personally approved it.

“Stan did not say no to this,” Gerry Conway says during a spotlight panel at San Diego Comic Con 2013. “I mean, Stan was fine with it. He was like, ‘Yeah, okay. Go kill her.’ But Stan did get a lot of heat at conventions and at college campuses, and as a result of that started claiming that it happened when he had been out of the office and didn’t know.”

Related: How Sony's Spider-Verse movies changed Marvel's Spider-Man comics forever

“Yes, Stan did blame me. That was, I think, a defensive move on his part, because he didn’t really know that things were going to explode. None of us did. I felt very traumatized because I was a kid. I was like 19 years old or 20 when this happened. For many years, I didn’t go to conventions, I didn’t read letters from fans because they were just filled with rancor and hate. You get kind of impressionable about that kind of stuff. Stan did sort of shift the blame off onto me and onto [then-editor-in-chief Roy Thomas] and the other people at the office, and that’s why he asked us to bring Gwen back.”

As Conway mentions, Lee asked him to bring Gwen back, hoping it would calm the backlash. Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway came up with the idea of bringing her back as a clone. This was the beginning of a sequence of events that resulted in the Clone Saga, another Spider-Man storyline that created a lot of controversy. It just goes to show you that you can’t get rid of controversy; you can only pass it on to the next writer.

Marvel's most reliable superhero has proven he can do a whole lot more than just 'whatever a spider can.' Swing into Spidey's history with Popverse's...

• Best Spider-Man comic books 
• The best Spider-Mans (or is it Spider-Men?)
• Spider-Man movie watch order
• Spider-Man's actors, ranked
• The best Spider-Man suits
• and the Spider-verse explained!

Just watch out for that radioactive blood.