Gerry Conway obituary

Comic book writer and co-creator of Marvel’s avenging antihero the Punisher

The comic book writer Gerry Conway, who has died aged 73, made his biggest impact on the industry when, at only 19 years old, he took over from Stan Lee as writer of The Amazing Spider-Man. A year later, in 1972, he wrote the classic two-issue story The Night Gwen Stacy Died, drawn by Gil Kane and John Romita, in which Peter (Spider-Man) Parker’s girlfriend is killed by his archrival, the Green Goblin.

It began a transition from the so-called “silver age” of comics, which had produced Marvel’s popularity boom in the 60s, into a darker era. Only eight months later, also in Spider-Man, Conway introduced the Punisher, drawn by Ross Andru and Romita, a henchman of another Spider-Man villain, the Jackal.

An ex-Marine avenging the mafia’s murder of his family before his eyes, the Punisher became an iconic antihero hit. Vengeance was a popular trope in the early 70s; Conway was inspired by the paperback book series The Executioner, by Don Pendleton, and the violent vigilante in Brian Garfield’s novel Death Wish and the subsequent movie. He also admitted to being influenced by the Depression-era pulp and radio avenger the Shadow.

The Punisher later spawned three movies, but Conway opposed the way its imagery changed, especially the character’s death’s head symbol. In his 2012 memoir American Sniper, Chris Kyle, a former US navy seal, claimed to leave it behind after operations, and the symbol also became a logo for America’s far-right militias, as well as the military and police.

After the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, Conway attempted to reclaim the image by starting his own line of merchandise, including t-shirts designed by people of colour. The Punisher “should be a symbol for Black Lives Matter,” he told the Guardian, “for people on the outside of the justice system”.

Conway worked prolifically for both the major comics companies, Marvel and DC. Among his best known creations were Ms Marvel (who later became Captain Marvel), Power Girl (with the artist Wally Wood, a Superman spinoff), Firestorm, the Batman villain Killer Croc and Batman’s second Robin, Jason Todd.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Margaret (nee McAllister) and Francis, who worked at a printing plant, were both children of Irish immigrants, his father a “blue-collar, lower-middle class kind of guy”. Gerry’s childhood was spent absorbing comics and movies; his first published writing was a fan letter in issue 50 of The Fantastic Four, when he was 13.

Soon he was going into Manhattan and haunting the offices of both comics companies; he would sneak away from the weekly tour offered by DC to chat to editors in their offices. One of them, assuming he worked there, gave him a short story to write for the anthology comic House of Secrets – within a year he was writing The Phantom Stranger.

But later, in 1970, he moved to Marvel, on the urging of Lee’s number two Roy Thomas. He scripted a Thomas plot for the jungle series Ka-Zar, and began in 1971 scripting Daredevil. In August 1972 he replaced Lee on Spider-Man.

Conway was part of a new generation who had grown up reading Lee’s Marvel. This also included Len Wein, a fellow New Yorker, and Steve Englehart, with whom Conway created a three-issue “cross-over” in which Marvel and DC heroes met their creators in everyday situations: the story ran through DC’s Justice League of America and Marvel’s Thor and Amazing Adventures.

He described this new generation as being different from the veterans who in some ways “perceived themselves as failures ... they wanted to be newspaper strip writers or artists” and saw comics as a ghetto for commercial artists, whereas the newcomers wrote for love of the genre.

While working at Marvel, Conway also did stories for the black-and-white horror magazines Creepy and Eerie, and published science-fiction stories and two novels, Midnight Dancers (1971) and Mindship (1974), which grew out of an anthologised story of the same name. In 1975, as Wallace Moore, he produced three novels featuring Balzan of the Cat People, a space-set version of his Ka-Zar version of Tarzan.

In 1976, Conway scripted the first major Marvel/DC crossover, Superman Versus the Amazing Spider-Man, drawn by Andru and Dick Giordano. He was named editor in chief of Marvel that year, but, disliking the politics, stepped down after only a few weeks, and went to DC as a writer, where his first impact was felt in modernising Wonder Woman and reshaping the Justice League. Again he was prolific, producing six or seven books a month.

He began writing the Star Trek daily strip for the LA Times syndicate in 1983, and moved into movies, co-writing with Roy Thomas. The following year, they received the story credit on Conan the Destroyer, but their screenplay for an X-Man movie went unproduced, 15 years ahead of its time.

Conway transferred into television in 1989 as story editor and producer of The Father Dowling Mysteries, featuring a cosy crime-solving priest, and then as co-executive producer of Dick Van Dyke’s Diagnosis Murder, writing many episodes of both shows. He also wrote the acclaimed, darker Batman: The Animated Series. For Topps Comics, in 1993 he, Thomas and the artist Don Heck created another female hero, Nightglider, for a unique comic and trading-card package.

After working on the long-running Law and Order franchise, particularly Law and Order Criminal Intent, he returned to comics, among them The Last Days of Animal Man for DC in 2009, and, from 2015, a number of Spider-Man stories and the series Carnage for Marvel. In 2026 he was voted into the Will Eisner Comics Hall of Fame.

In 2022 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; though the cancer was removed, his health went through a series of setbacks.

Conway was twice divorced. He is survived by his third wife, Laura (nee Van Scotter), a writer and film-maker, and by two daughters: Cara, from his first marriage, to Carla Joseph, a comics writer; and Rachel, from his second, to Karen Britten, a psychologist.

• Gerald Francis Conway, comic book writer, born 10 September 1952; died 27 April 2026