To this day, I am surprised that Rick has not made a single appearance in any of the movies or TV shows (not counting animation).

But was Rick Jones just a stand-in for Rick Nelson?  (Even making him a singer.)  And redundant to Peter Parker and Johnny Storm?

That's another thing they do to supporting characters--make them a super-hero!  (Or villain!)

I started this thread specifically to talk about supporting characters--those regular people that inhabit the day to day lives of especially Marvel and DC heroes' secret identities.

Stan Lee made such great use of Aunt May and Peter Parker's very large cast of characters for 100 issues, and other writers after him.  When I started reading, the private lives were just as important to me as the super-hero action.  I personally really enjoyed the back and forth between Clark Kent and Steve Lombard in my first years reading the Curt Swan era Superman stories.

On the other hand, Stan only gave Iron Man and Daredevil TWO supporting characters each, and it wasn't that great.  It took a decade and a half for Frank Miller to fill out Daredevil's life and David Michelinie & co. to do the same for Iron Man.

Steve Gerber was a master of bringing in "regular people" into his stories and making you care for them as much as the heroes.  Jack Norris and Richard Rory were two of my favorites, and David Kraft continued their lives--and I appreciated it.

It just seems like bad, lazy writing to kill off Moira McTaggart, Aunt May, Jim Wilson, Betty Ross, Harry Osborn, Jean DeWolff, Sue Dibny, Alexandra DeWitt (Kyle Rayner's girlfriend in the refrigerator), Steve Trevor, Alfred, and many more!  Was the death of Gwen Stacy great or awful?  There are people on both sides of that argument.  (Though Capt. Stacy's death seemed dramatically appropriate.)

Though many were reversed later--I think that just proves that the death decisions were most likely wrong in the first place!  

I'm not disagreeing about the quality of the work, but I wonder how much of a "storyline" it is when the actual death was a last minute unplanned switcheroo. I can say that at the time it certainly seemed like Jean Grey was as truly dead as any comicbook character could be. In retrospect, I think that feeling this played a major part in my soon after giving up being a reader. Now I'd seen it all.

Stan said he always meant for Gwen to be the one for Peter. His happy ending.

As to the deaths of supporting characters (who were not created to die) I tend not to like it. You have someone like Gwen Stacy, who has promise as a long-term character, and she dies to create drama for the main character. The killing of the girlfriend (almost always women love interests specifically) has become an overused trope. It seems like every main character has a dead girlfriend.

In general, having the character die is saying "we can't think of anything else to do with this character" and I think that's just a lazy way to write out a character.

Gwen Stacy was considered a fairly annoying (even boring) character by many back in the day, especially compared to the firecracker that was MJ.

I actually quite liked Gwen and found her sweet - but there's part of me that thinks she had to go (although not necessarily by dying).