Not deep ones but I liked the stories I read in the Son of the Goblin trade, a really sad depiction of a horribly damaged human and the reverberations of his pain, and it had that good good Sal Buscema art.
Venom vs the Green Goblins in Mini-Marvels
Norman Osborn and Harry Osborn work as the father and son team in this lighthearted Mini Marvels AU comic. Also, in this AU, Spider-Man and Venom work as paperboys when they are tasked in delivering newspapers to anyone. The Osborns attack the paperboy whom they mistook him for Spider-Man from a distance. Just as Harry Osborn charge in, he stops at his tracks when he realizes that he made a big mistake as this paperboy is not Spider-Man. It turns out to be Venom who is working as a substitute paperboy whenever Spider-Man is not around. This is also Venom’s first day as a paperboy and he’s trying very hard to deliver the newspaper but with little success.
– Mini Marvels Ultimate Collection trade paperback
I was away for a couplea days and I come back to this! Hooray!
Harry is back, EXCELLENT! Now please, please, please don’t have him be a clone/a robot/a hallucination/the Chameleon and things will be good again!
(pssst, also, go check out harryosborn.net.)
Hey, remember how I was making an archive of all Harry Osborn’s appearances in comics complete with annotations and general ramblings? Turns out that’s the sort of project which kinda needs its own blog-
-and a few weeks ago I noted that the domain name harryosborn.net has NOT, in fact, been snapped up by Disney/Marvel/whoever. (the .com version was apparently claimed in 2006) So……. It’s now mine! WELL…
…I don’t know what happens next, because I never actually expected to get that far. Here’s harryosborn.net!
[You can read this post here or on harryosborn.net!]
Lots of things happen in this issue!
Harry and Peter chat 60s-style, except of course thanks to the sliding timeline none of this ever happened in the 60s! So we’ll have to imagine what era-appropriate sex symbol Harry “really” referenced at this point.
Ah this is all so sad to read fifty years on, knowing what will be changed and retconned.
Harry and Peter flirt with Gwen, Harry somewhat more successfully than Peter.
Oh here’s Kraven! (He was introduced in ASM #15 if I remember correctly so readers of the time would’ve already known him.) But more importantly: romantic entanglements! I still don’t know what the relationship between Harry and Gwen really was at this point because dating just seemed to be different in the 60s? I think these days we’d call it like, a non-exclusive casual relationship I guess.
Whether or not they ever hooked up hooked up is up to you really but honestly I imagine they probably did.
In these panels! Harry reminds us he’s rich, the boys are awestruck by the girls dressed up, Gwen looks jealous of MJ in the background there and wow there used to be a time where women could hang out wearing short skirts in the middle of the street and not get sexually harassed so much they went back inside?
Uh, one way in which the early Marvelverse differs from ours I guess.
Flash is on his way to the Vietnam war, a subject we’ve already tackled.
MJ and Gwen participate in a dance-off which the boys, ur, appreciate. Then in bursts a man wearing a dead animal and he wants Harry!
Flash attempts, with endearing bravado, to save Harry. Harry gets in a few punches but to no avail.
Ah, the days before Harry’s hatred for Spider-Man set in. Also awww, that panel of Gwen and Flash helping Harry is sweet. The Flash-Harry friendship is almost completely forgotten about these days but it was a nice one.
Huh Norman sure got there quickly.
Ahh if only Peter had tried that same technique with Gwen. (Too soon?)
Annnd there ya go, back in the days where Marvel could tell a story in one issue instead of six.
I have a feeling this story was given a retelling of sorts at some point in a much later comic, but we’ll deal with that when we get to it.
[You can read this post here or on harryosborn.net!]
Now at the end of the last one of these I said, since Vietnam is coming into the story now let’s find out what Stan Lee actually thought about the Vietnam War. And that’s the thing, that information is kinda hard to find. There’s an extent to which Lee has sort of I guess been a bit lionized over the years and plenty people think he was labelled more of a progressive than he really was. But I think he was progressive for his era, it’s just that that doesn’t always mean, “was good.” It means… well, it means they were progressive in the original sense of the word and that’s that. So that Washington Post article linked to there, here’s the cached version which isn’t behind a paywall, it says,
In the midst of the antiestablishment riots of 1968, he convened a panel for a failed talk-show pilot in which he repeatedly denounced radicalism; asserted that Black people needed to respect the law; and said the Vietnam War may have been immoral, but had to continue for the greater good.
But we don’t have any direct quotes from this so it’s still hard to pin down his exact opinion. Now on this Marvel site I found this quote from Lee:
Now it’s important that you bear in mind that this yarn [Iron Man] was written in 1963, at a time when most of us genuinely felt that the conflict in that tortured land really was a simple matter of good versus evil and that the American military action against the Viet Cong was tantamount to St. George’s battle against the dragons. Since that time, of course, we’ve all grown up a bit, we’ve realized that life isn’t quite so simple, and we’ve been trying to extricate ourselves from the tragic entanglement in Indochina.
And these comics we’re talking about here were written in 1967. Enough time for Lee to have grown up, I guess. And in the Stan’s Soapbox columns he apparently expressed hopes the troops would come home. Do any of the characters in these issues serve as his mouthpiece re Vietnam then? Does Harry? Well, let’s find out.
Here’s issue #44, where Harry and MJ meet for the first time. This one little scene and everything within it is going to have massive ripples throughout the Spidermanverse, many of which continue to this day, for better or worse. (Usually worse, let’s be honest.)
Harry is friendly here and Flash is…Flash, as has been the case for the past 4 or so issues. But the spectre of Vietnam is hanging over all this.
On to #45. Awww, all the boys have colour-coordinated their outfits, that’s nice.
Here we begin a long, nice tradition of Harry being super generous dude frequently prone to giving out jobs and, as we’ll see in a minute, apartments. Yes this lasted into the ’00s comics which I was always glad about, it’s a very intrinsic part of his character.
Now Harry appears to be dating MJ, or at least getting close to her. The first days of the Harry/MJ romance are actually something I don’t think ever got delved into that much in later comics, despite all the potential for great character moments there. The 1963 audience didn’t know it at this point and possibly neither did Stan Lee, but both are abused and damaged children frantically putting on masks.
This one little panel here sows the seeds for so much stuff that happens later. But more on that (and more on how even to this day MJ and her percieved shallowness is blamed for Harry’s downward spiral) in the future.
Now we’re in #46 and Harry has now secured Peter a job offer and a free apartment. Nice. Their friendship is cemented by this point, as you can tell, and it took under 15 issues! God I miss the much, much faster pace of Old Comics.
The gang exchange some wonderful 60s slang and plan a going-away party for Flash. “He’s the first one of the crowd to be drafted,” Harry says. But that makes me wonder, and bearing in mind that this is an era I know very little about except what I got via cultural osmosis… Did Harry and Peter expect to get draft notices too?
So, time to cram my brain with information about the draft system. The draft lottery didn’t start til 1969, so going back from that… If you were in full-time education, as Harry and Flash and Peter all are here, you didn’t neccessarily have to serve… if you were a good enough student.
These thousands weren’t selected at random. Instead, the Selective Service System (SSS) instituted a system of academic evaluation under which local draft boards would defer students based on intellectual ability. This ability was determined by two factors: class rank, and score on a national aptitude test known as the Selective Service Qualification Test. Undergraduates with a high class rank, or a test score above a certain cutoff, were draft-exempt. Everyone else could be sent to the front.
From here
So I suppose the implication in these Spider-Man comics is that Flash wasn’t a good enough student to avoid military service. Peter as a science genius I guess probably would have been. (Remember this panel from a couple issues back?)
But Harry… was Harry a fortunate son?
“It ain’t me, I ain’t me, I ain’t no millionaires’ son…”
But Harry probably was. Norman’s exact wealth wasn’t actually stated in the early days I think, but it’s safe to assume he’s pretty dang rich. And, says the New York Times (surprisingly one of the sources of Vietnam War draft info not outright blocked or paywalled in the UK, christ I hate the modern-day Internet)-
It was no coincidence that those men who already fit the middle-class mold of domestic masculinity — those men who were college students or teachers or scientists — received deferments.
It was a very classist, racist system. I feel like writing anything more along the lines of “So how did Spider-Man and his best friend avoid the draft?” trivalizes that in a way, so we’ll be back to business in a minute.
Now comics-wise Spider-Man: Life Story tackled Vietnam quite a bit, but due to the Marvel sliding timeline Vietnam just doesn’t factor into the Spider-Man story anymore. Flash didn’t fight, Iron Man wasn’t there. And I sort of think that’s a shame, and one of the reasons I have very conflicting feelings about ongoing comics as a medium. If you’re going to tackle very real, very bad things that happened in real life you should commit to them, you know?
So back to Harry. For whatever reason you want to have in your head – his status as a student, his father’s wealth, something else (it actually feels pretty in character, at least eventually, for him to be an objector?) – he’s not going to Vietnam and neither is Peter.
But of course, even that one specific part of the story is far from done.
[You can read this post here or on harryosborn.net!]
Well the awfulness of the current comics shows no sign of going away anytime soon, so let’s jump back into this! Where we left off, Harry’s father had just overcome his first bout of supervillainy, but it would be faaaaaar from the last.
Here’s Harry’s very brief appearance in #41. Looks like his school bully days are behind him thanks to the previous story’s events! Meanwhile, Peter’s getting interested in Gwen.
#42 shows Harry defending Peter to Flash! Hooray for character development! Also Peter loves his motorbike a little too much.
Harry and Gwen’s relationship is a bit hard to pin down during this point, are they actually dating in the non-exclusive way or just friends?
And here’s Harry’s last appearance in these three comics. You’ll note that once more he sticks up for Peter. But now we’ve turned a corner into the real world and a still very relevant era of American history, the Vietnam war. Now I admit I don’t know much about it, being neither American or Vietnamese, but I know the basics. Flash has already been drafted, and these three panels rather make it sound like Harry is distressed at the possibility of Peter too being made to go to war.
Stan Lee’s thoughts about Vietnam I don’t actually know, but I’m gonna see if I can find out before the next one of these posts. I’d be interested in that. Harry is absolutely correct here in that a young man forced to join the military and kill people in a war is nothing remotely humorous.
Nick Spencer’s New Spider-Man Twist Literally Demonizes The Mentally Ill
I’m very pleased to announce I just got an article about Spider-Man, Harry Osborn and mental illness published at The Mary Sue! It’s, uh, not positive about Nick Spencer’s writing.
I hope you enjoy it. There are some nice comments on there, including one that actually vocalised something I’ve been thinking for a while – for all the terribleness of this storyline, the backlash to it did highlight how unexpectedly beloved Harry is among Spider-Man fans. (Maybe the real Harry was the friends we made along the way.)
[You can read this post here or on harryosborn.net!]
Here we are, the fallout from last week! The Green Goblin took his mask off and revealed himself to be… Peter’s high-school bully’s friend’s dad. Not exactly a “No, I am your father” level revelation… well, not yet anyway…
Peter begins by slagging off Harry, even though they’re teetering more to being almost-friends at this point. Oh sure he’s stalling for time! But I suspect in-universe Peter regretted those words once he came to love Harry.
Reading some of these lines in the present day, knowing the rest of the story, you just gotta go
or is that just me?
Here’s baby Harry, wearing the Spider-Man colours to boot. Norman tells this story as if he was a perfectly good father temporarily sidetracked, and maybe that’s what Stan Lee planned back then, but in the modern day comics this is… very much not the case.
See that red bike there? That bike will many years later play a starring role in a story detailing Norman’s abuse of Harry during this period.
“I couldn’t be bothered with him” could be the tagline for a heavy book titled “Norman Osborn’s Guide To Parenting.”
Many years later it would be retconned so Harry was responsible for the explosion in question. Which makes his thought bubble here kinda make no sense, except for the “It’s all my fault” bit.
“How did someone like me ever have a sniveling weaking of a son like you?” is the other, probably even more accurate tagline for Norman Osborn’s Guide To Parenting.
Poor Harry. It feels like that nurse in the background is looking on like, “hmm maybe someone should intervene to help that kid.” (ur, yeah.)
Norman just casually designing his supervillain suit to match that one pink satchel he already has.
One fight later:
He has… AMNESIA! This would be a get-out-of-jail card deployed by Spidey writers for quite a while.
“It would break his heart!” Told you Peter was SUCH A LOVELY KID, he barely knows Harry at this point and his initial impressions were nothing but negative.
It was not.
