DOCTOR OCTOPUS

May Parker had been living under Otto Octavius's roof — he had rented a room from her, then kept her at his Westchester mansion — when word reached him of a letter concerning her family. A distant relative had died and left May an island off the Canadian coast, complete with its own nuclear facility. Octavius, mid gang-war with Hammerhead and always short of infrastructure, reached the conclusion supervillains reach: the fastest legal route to the reactor was down the aisle. He courted May in earnest, and she — who liked the courteous doctor and despised Spider-Man — accepted.

The ceremony in The Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1 #130–131 (1974), held on Christmas Eve, never reached the vows. Spider-Man burst in having finally read the intercepted letter, and Hammerhead's gunmen crashed through the windows seconds behind him, determined the inheritance would not fall to a rival. The wedding party scattered to the island itself, where Octavius got his first look at his prize and blanched: the plant was a breeder reactor, unstable enough that he warned Hammerhead the slightest vibration could set it off.

Hammerhead charged anyway, head-first, into the control panel. Spider-Man lifted the fainted May clear in a supply plane as the reactor went up behind them, taking Octavius's matrimonial business plan with it. May revived in mid-air, registered that she was sharing a cabin with the masked menace she blamed for everything, and fainted a second time — the official end of the Parker–Octavius engagement.