Greg, I feel your pain regarding "Sins Past." That was a gnarled and twisted, ugly little story. It made Gwen complicit in never revealing what had supposedly taken place and it made her death an even more misogynistic exercise in cruelty. I'm not certain Marvel considers the story canon at this point. I have a vague sense that it was wished away into a cornfield pretty quickly after it was written.

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It’s my personal Worst Spider-Man Story Ever. The story which made me quit modern comics. And that’s saying something. Not only did it again trot out a classic story and characters which had already been endlessly strip-mined, but it warped all of the characters to fit the story it was telling, and added multiple layers of ick and creepiness to the lore. There’s Mary Jane not bothering to ever mention anything about the tryst to Peter (to say nothing of two innocent kids languishing in Europe and being fed lies to turn them against Spider-Man) to Gwen Stacy being a liar and cheater who expected and assumed that Peter would help her raise the twins she’d secretly conceived with the father of Peter’s best friend.

Not to mention that it gutted the core theme of “The Night Gwen Stacy Died”. The whole point was that she was an innocent caught in the crossfire of the Spider-Man/Goblin war, and died without even knowing the how or why of it. JMS retconned it into a Gwen/Goblin war, with Osborn killing her because she was keeping him from their secret kids, with Spider-Man retconned into a clueless cuckold.

And then there was a weird and pedophilic flirtation between Peter and Gwen’s age-accelerated daughter, who looked exactly like her. 

UGH. So ****ing bad.

Thanks for sharing, but not that one.

I remember some words. Hulk said something like, "Hulk knows he is a freak, knows he is not beauty..."

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I believe you’re thinking of INCREDIBLE HULK # 189, where the Hulk befriends a blind girl, then leaves her at the end, musing that she sees him as a man, but he’s really only a monster.

How does the Hulk know Russian? Maybe Bruce Banner knows Russian? Maybe he was speaking "caveman Russian" in that story, like he speaks "caveman English" most of the time?

I'd forgotten that so many heroes had relationships with villainesses ("villainessi?") Spider-Man & the Black Cat. Cap & Diamondback. Iron Man & Madame Masque (my personal favorite of the Marvel romance-foes.) Batman & Catwoman, of course, but also Talia. And of course, he would scratch the itch to lock lips with Poison Ivy every now and then... Superman was generally too smart for such things, except with the Starry-Eyed Siren From Space and later, Maxima. Green Lantern's ladylove was also the Star Sapphire. The Black Canary started out as an apparent thief that Johnny Thunder was smitten by. Nearly every female criminal mastermind he fought had a thing for the Spirit...

Kind of puts a new spin to the term "Playa On the Other Side..." :-)