An idea that won’t leave my head: in some far-off uncharted corner of the Marvel world, Emily Lyman cheats on her abusive husband with a strange man who claims to be an alien. Maybe he can help her leave Norman, she thinks, but he doesn’t. Through what seems like no fault of his own, he leaves her alone and pregnant. Luckily, Norman never suspects that the baby isn’t his.
Emily gives birth, names the child Harry and promises she’ll do the best she can for him. But, when Harry is still an infant, she’s stricken down with cancer. She dies in despair, but clinging to a shred of hope that Harry’s real father will reappear one day and take Harry away from Norman. But Ego – for it was Ego – is of course far from the man Emily thought he was. He never loved Emily and won’t love her son.
By the time Yondu comes to pick the eight-year-old Harry up, he already knows in his gut that something’s terribly wrong with Ego’s planet. He looks at Harry, looks at Norman, looks back on his memories of the last couple of kids he delivered, and thinks “fuck this”.
Suddenly, Harry Osborn is a space pirate under Yondu. A couple of years later he gains a brother called Peter. (He likes that name. He had a childhood friend with that name.) What’s going to happen next? What has the universe got in store for him? Harry doesn’t know, but he’s kind of glad about the way things turned out.
I’m not a super fan of how Spider-man stories set in the future always make Normie a supervillian bent on avenging his dad/his granddad. It negates Liz entirely as a parent and pisses on how Harry tried to ensure his kid wouldn’t have the same live experiences as him.
Norman Osborn’ first proper appearance in the Spider-Man comics. He’s already apparead a few times, but this issue is the first one really focusing on him.
On these two panels, Lee and Ditko are already establishing two mains of Osborn’s character’s traits :
Will someone write a ten page dissertation on the portrayal of of Peter Parker’s friendship with Harry Osborn in various spiderman media because I have SO MANY FEELS.
