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Gwen Stacy's death always seemed suspect to me.  The fact that she was unconscious (or even dead?) when the Green Goblin threw her off the bridge and that, therefore, she didn't speak or show her personality in any way was very suspicious.  And then the SAME WRITER introduced her clone (or "clone"?) during the same writing stint made me wonder as a 9 year-old kid (and maybe still) if it was a trick of some sort (by the writer and/or the villain).  I guess I always expected Gerry Conway or someone to reveal that that Gwen clone who walked off into the sunset was the real Gwen Stacy after all and it was a clone thrown from the bridge.

So, there's a death that has still stuck almost fifty years later that I never expected to stick.

Question to the group (I've missed some things): Has any writer ever attempted (like they did with "Peter" and the whole Ben Reilly thing) to bring back the real Gwen (as the "clone" or otherwise)?

Interestingly, Avengers 4 erased the post-WWII Captain America and Bucky (that Stan wrote I believe), including Bucky's post-WWII death.

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Steve Englehart covered that in his first arc in his Captain America run with the evil Captain America and Bucky.

Englehart only covered 50s Cap.  Roy Thomas was the one to cover the late 40s in the original What If? #4.

Bucky was definitely not killed off either in the 40s original comics or even in the brief return of the 50s. It was in AVENGERS #4 that we learned he died. But since that was the first time we learned that he died, how could it be a retcon? Doesn't a retcon actively change what we knew so that now what we knew becomes what we thought we knew? Is Bucky's death, rather, a kind of "passive" retcon -- or as JB said, not a retcon at all, since it's not a change of what we knew but an addition...? Isn't any addition, even if a character is dormant for a long time not a retcon but a standard continuation of the character's story?

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Another tangent - how did a WHAT IF? story end up being considered canon? Doesn't that go against the purpose of that series?

Issue 4, with the All-Winner's Squad became cannon when Roy Thomas realized it could be. But I've never read it, only heard about it.