Having ‘come into’ comics as a child in the very early 80s, the Bronze Age of Marvel was probably the genre-defining era for me.

And given my dual penchant for Spider-Man and The X-Men, that meant that the two most defining voices of the Bronze Age were Gerry Conway and Chris Claremont.

I grew up reading a lot of Gerry’s writing some 8-10 years after he originally wrote it and I always found it more centered and engaging than most of what was on the newsstands in the mid-late 80s. He had an amazing sense of earnestness when it came to depicting the inner workings of his characters and his voice was seminal in the fragile humanization of many superheroes that went hand in hand with the decade of the Bronze Age.

It would be fair to say that Gerry Conway probably informed my interpretation of and love for comics more than almost any other writer.

I just recently finished re-reading his very early Daredevil run (far from his best work) as well as his runs on Amazing Spider-Man and Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (which were top shelf) and had been musing over whether I might be able to catch him at a convention sometime in the next year. Alas, it seems not to be. 73 feels so damned young.

Anyway, that’s that. We lost a real one on April 26, 2026. Pour one out for kid who had the huevos to kill Gwen Stacy stone-ass dead, no matter how many goddam times they brought her back. He was barely 21 when he rang that bell and he still gave another 50 years to the industry in the decades since.

Marvel’s official tribute, Remembering Gerry Conway, 1952-2026, is worth the read.

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Joshua Dinges’s last article for Black Gate was a review of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.