brevoortformspring:

It’s hard to say for certain, honestly. I started reading in a world in which the original Green Goblin was already dead, and that lent the character a certain stature–I didn’t miss him especially because he had always been dead as far as I was concerned as a reader, and I had the replacement Goblins such as Harry or Bart Hamilton to fill that slot. So, to me at least, it was a perfectly acceptable move. But to a reader who had been reading since the 60s, I don’t know if they would feel quite the same. Certainly there were a lot of readers who were wildly upset that Gwen had been killed off, and the Goblin’s death was a part of that.