new revenant post haha just kidding its the fucking green goblin
The idea is the green is a bio exoskeleton that secretes from Norman’s skin and dissipates once his Goblin Shit wears off. Like if Raimi Goblin was physical mutation and wore tattered cloth all the time
If this character ever gets brought back- and I would only accept this if Kindred was retconned as NOT Harry (which honestly would be super easy to do) – I wouldn’t want him to be part of Peter Parker’s supporting cast.
Like, nope, no, I’m sorry. That bridge has been so thoroughly burnt. It’s not even embers anymore. I just don’t think realistically there is any way Peter would ever trust Harry again. And having them have a fake relationship would be a thousand times worse.
I don’t know how much of the comics you’ve been reading (I don’t blame you if you abandoned them altogether) Kindred WAS established to be Not Harry! He was some combination of an artifical intelligence established before Harry’s death, the Stacy twins, Mephisto, and I guess maybe some of Harry’s soul that Norman sold to Mephisto?!?!
It made absolutely NO SENSE WHATSOEVER but geez it was at least better than “Harry turned evil again for no reason.”
Ah. I haven’t really been reading the current ones. Could you tell which issue says this?
And I don’t blame you!
Okay so in Amazing Spider-Man #74 it’s revealed that Kindred was [drumroll] Gabriel and Sarah Stacy All Along! But wait! They were created by an evil A.I. of Harry Osborn (the one from a 90s story called Legacy of Evil) so it was A.I. Harry All Along!
BUT WAIT! The A.I. Harry is controlled by Mephisto, because Norman sold Harry’s soul to Mephisto in exchange for wealth and power. Mephisto worked through Harry to create the twins for some godforsaken reason.
Oh and the Harry we’ve known since 2009 was a clone All Along and then he dies saving Norman, the evil war criminal who as previously mentioned sold his soul to the devil.
Peter is very upset even though he knows that particular Harry was a clone, and reiterates his love for him a couple of times later on.
Peter also knows full well that Norman sold Harry’s soul to the devil., since he was there when he confessed to it. This never comes up ever again. Him and Norman are friends now. The end.
no way home was a great movie but i hated how they turned harry osborn’s death into a joke and made n*rman osborn seem like a loving father
I agree wholeheartedly but unfortunately the comics did almost the exact same thing, leaving me with no option but to burn the entire enterprise to the ground
So the infamous Spider-Man story Sins Past is about to be retconned, according to some leaks that have just come out about the end of Nick Spencer’s Spider-Man run. I’m… not looking forward to it. (You’re bound to hear all about it on harryosborn.net.) For a start I suspect it’s not going to deal with the actual sin.
In the years after Sins Past came out there was so much complaining about how the story “ruined” or “tainted” Gwen. But let’s look at what she actually does in the story, shall we? Not much, because the story doesn’t seem nearly as interested in her as it is in her uterus, but-
Gwen finds herself attracted to Norman after he (during one of his spates of non-villainy) helps rescue her and her dad. Okay, fair enough. Gwen actually wasn’t technically Peter’s girlfriend at the time, and even when she was it didn’t seem completely exclusive, since Harry and MJ were in the mix there too. So she was really free to pursue whoever she wanted. Norman is, uh, an odd choice but his design was based on Tommy Lee Jones around this time and I’m sure Tommy Lee Jones had his share of female admirers, so whatever.
Now let’s look at what Norman does in the story!
He has a girl young enough to be his daughter turn up at his house and fawn over him. Norman must have known Gwen as a teenager at least a little, surely, since she and Harry were close friends since high school. He must have some idea of her personality, that her mother was dead and she was devoted to her father. And then…
What exactly passed between them to make them instantly fall into bed together? We don’t know, but we do know that it’s heavily implied this is the first time Gwen had sex with anyone–
-that Norman wielded quite a lot of power and influence at the time, even without bringing his superhero alter-ego into things-
-and that, this is rather crucial I always thought, they didn’t use protection! That’s where the twins came from!
Does any of this sound like a regular “affair”? No! You know what a decent man does if a girl so much younger makes a pass at him? He SAYS NO!
But that’s not what happened. Gwen soon found out what sort of man Norman was and found herself pregnant. (You’ve got to wonder if she considered getting an abortion, but the story isn’t interested in that.) She gave birth to the twins and then Norman murdered her. The Death of Gwen Stacy was written long before Sins Past came out but one thing SP didn’t retcon was that Gwen meant less than nothing to Norman.
Oh, and eventually he then proceeded to creepily hit on her alternate self too.
….Where there was an even bigger age gap, I’m assuming.
Long story short, Norman is a misogynist who took advantage of a younger woman, and Sins Past justnever really acknowledges it. The Gwen/Norman encounter is treated like a regular affair, albeit one where superpowered sperm is involved (ugh) but it wasn’t. Yes it wasbetween two consenting adults, but oh god the power dynamics. It’s a story that plays out time and time again in real life and yep, always ends badly for the woman.
Gwen was Norman’s victim in all of this but was treated like his collaborator. That’s the real sin of Sins Past.
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
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.
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.
