I have previously looked at the genesis of J. Jonah Jameson and a timeline of his early appearances. Today it’s time to examine Ditko’s most celebrated foray into serialized storytelling. Chiefly the Green Goblin Mystery which begins with ASM#14 and ends with ASM#40, two issues after Ditko’s departure. This post will address the known details about the development of Green Goblin, and the design of the character. It will debunk some of the rumors about this character. The aim is to use close reading and visual analysis to explain Ditko’s writer-artist plotting and how it factored in his serialized storytelling. My reading is based on close-reading and guided by intuition, so it’s definitely subjective.
There are many reasons why the Stan Lee and Steve Ditko run of Amazing Spider-Man is so unique and seminal quite separate from it being the first run of the character and title. One principal reason is that in 41 issues (ASM#1-38, Annuals #01-02, AF#15) Steve Ditko created so many characters with unique and utterly individual character designs(the protagonist, supporting cast, villains).
Ditko created the following villains: Chameleon, The Vulture, Doctor Octopus, The Sandman, The Lizard, Electro, Mysterio, The Green Goblin, Kraven the Hunter, The Scorpion, and The Spider Slayers. He did that in a span of four years. For sake of context, Batman is the character with the most famous and iconic rogues gallery in comics but the truth is that his rogues gallery was built over decades by multiple writers and artists, whereas Ditko introduced a rogues gallery as iconic and sustaining as Batman’s in a mere three years.
Of the villains Ditko developed, the Green Goblin is especially useful to help trace out Ditko’s conceptual design ideas. The conception of this character is one of the few things Steve Ditko has been outspoken about and understanding his conception, his genesis and likely influences can provide insight into how Ditko designed such durable creations; especially Spider-Man’s greatest enemy.
GENESIS OF THE GOBLIN
In general, we don’t have much or any information about the genesis and development of most Marvel characters. What inspired the Mole Man? What was the theory and inspiration behind the Puppetmaster? Or what was the design inspiration for Magneto? Search all you wish, you will find no hint. A character like J. Jonah Jameson, a major supporting character, has no documentation from Lee and Ditko discussing his development, the intentions behind him, the psychological conception of the character, as I covered before. So most times, fans have to decide and make guesses for themselves about these characters.
The Green Goblin is an exception. He’s the one character who Steve Ditko, so reticent about discussing the making of Spider-Man, discussed in some detail. In fact, Blake Bell implies that Goblin came to be a talismanic character for Ditko. He had struggled with Stan Lee’s ideas over the first 10 issues of the title feeling that the latter’s ideas did not serve the interests of the story’s core themes. It was with the Green Goblin that Ditko grabbed the tiller:
“The ideological difference lay in Ditko’s desire to bring Spider-Man down to street-level on part with the reader and normal human beings…Ditko also fended off Lee’s attempts to corrupt the strip’s integrity with the introduction of too many far-reaching elements of the “fantastic” that would be incongruous in a strip about a plausible teenager…But before Ditko could convince Stan to stay away from [fantastic] elements, in issue two Lee introduced space aliens into Spider-Man’s world for the story of the Terrible Tinkerer. Twelve issues later, Ditko finally put his foot down with the introduction of the Green Goblin. Lee wanted a movie crew to find an Egyptian-like sarcophagus containing an ancient, mythological demon that would be released and come to life…Instead the Goblin’s origin is built as a mystery to be slowly unveiled; his face hidden by shadows, hinting only that he is a wealthy figure with a lust for power.”
Blake Bell, Strange and Stranger, Page 57-58 [1]
So the Green Goblin can be understood as the moment when Ditko takes over the plotting more directly than previously. I had covered how the early Spider-Man issues (the first 10) differed in various ways from the rest of the run. The Green Goblin makes his debut with ASM #14 and the Goblin is a recurring serial villain in the titles over the rest of the run. Ditko discussed the conception of Goblin and how it diverged from Stan Lee’s idea in his usual sarcastic-caustic style:
Stan’s synopsis for the Green Goblin had a movie crew, on location, finding an Egyptian-like sarcophagus. Inside was an ancient, mythological demon, the Green Goblin. He naturally came to life. On my own, I changed Stan’s mythological demon into a human villain…I rejected Stan’s idea…A mythological demon made the whole Peter Parker/Spider-Man world a place where nothing is metaphysically impossible.
Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man, (THE COMICS v12 #7 [2001] – “A Mini-History Part 1 -“The Green Goblin”), [2]
From this description it seems that Stan Lee did come up with the name “The Green Goblin” but his original idea was tangential to the character who ultimately developed.
Now Ditko’s sarcasm at Lee’s dubious taste might have a sense of pettiness or throwing shade at his collaborator’s bad taste and making out about how lucky we all were that Ditko was around to save Spider-Man from Stan Lee. At the same time, it’s easy to share Ditko’s sneering assessment of Lee’s concept: what does a goblin, a mythological figure associated with European fairy tales, have to do with Egyptian mummies exactly?
Aesthetically it’s incongruous and a hodgepodge without any proper sense. Whereas the Green Goblin as he ultimately developed in the course of the Lee-Ditko run and afterwards — a vindictive, cunning, villainous-trickster figure who can be frightening while also having dark humor, in addition to residing in several underground bunkers and lairs — is in fact a science-fiction update of a medieval goblin who were known for being devious, violent, tricksy, and living in caves and in dark places. The first Spider-Man and Green Goblin story is titled : “The Grotesque Adventure of the Green Goblin” and the cover of it is set in a cave with the goblin attacking Spider-Man as he’s hanging beneath a stalactite (those spikes that protrude from the ceiling). The word “grotesque” originates from “grotto” or places of the earth and the image of the Goblin confronting Spider-Man echoes a sense of a modernized and updated fairy tale.
THE ARCH-ENEMY
It’s a common misconception, argued by some that, Green Goblin was an obscure character or obscure villain in comics history until the iconic story of The Night Gwen Stacy Died.
“Because really, when you go back and read the original Green Goblin stories, he wasn’t much of a villain. He was a C-list Kingpin wannabe who failed at everything he tried, lost pretty much every fight he was in, and whose only talent was in running away…By contrast, Doctor Octopus was clearly intended to be Spider-Man’s arch-enemy. He was a powerful physical challenge to Spider-Man–Peter didn’t beat Doc Ock in a fair fight until long after Ditko had left the series.”
John Seavey, “A Long Sad Talk About Norman Osborn” [3]
This doesn’t at all represent the Green Goblin from the original Ditko stories who often got the better off Spider-Man. As for instance in Amazing Spider-Man #26 where he outright defeats Spider-Man in battle. Likewise, Doctor Octopus was a villain who Spider-Man defeated in battle and sent to jail multiple times in the original Lee-Ditko run. The fact is that Steve Ditko presented and framed Green Goblin as Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis and established that in a single panel in Amazing Spider-Man #18. After the second confrontation between Spider-Man and Goblin in ASM#17, where Spider-Man had to leave the fight on hearing that his Aunt May was hospitalized, the Daily Bugle runs a story of Spider-Man as a coward, leading to a series of panels showing group reactions. One of them shows Spider-Man’s villains responding to Green Goblin’s great victory.
The Green Goblin is the only Spider-Man enemy in the entirety of the Lee-Ditko run who Spider-Man never defeats in battle, and never gets the better of, and who Spider-Man never sends to jail. Other villains in Spider-Man’s rogues gallery go to jail but never the Goblin. In real-world terms, it would be some 40 years after his debut when Norman Osborn went to jail in 616 Continuity during the first six issues of Brian Michael Bendis’ The Pulse making him having a longer record of in-universe impunity than even the likes of Wilson Fisk, Magneto and Victor von Doom. So the Goblin from the start established himself as a major threat. Despite appearing relatively late in Ditko’s run at 14 issues (only Kraven and Scorpion among the classic villains are older than Goblin), by the time of Ditko’s final issues, Green Goblin had made 8 appearances as a villain (6 as the Goblin, 2 as Norman), the most by any rogue, a clear indication of the great interest Ditko had in him [4].
This panel above in ASM#18 clearly has Goblin assert himself as the top dog and treated huffily by other rogues, chiefly the incarcerated Doctor Octopus as a “Johnny come lately” newcomer who showed them all up.
It’s a mistake to assume that Green Goblin’s status as arch-nemesis owed itself to his later reputation as the man who killed Gwen Stacy and supposedly ended Silver Age comics. The truth is that Goblin was the arch-enemy from his inception. The impact of Green Goblin as a character on Spider-Man’s continuity is such that his defeat and death did not lead to any corresponding elevation of Doctor Octopus as the next big threat. Instead several writers tried to have other characters take over as the Green Goblin or a variant like Hobgoblin was developed to fill the void he once occupied and yet all failing to do so for some reason or another, until the character’s in-continuity resurrection in the finale of the 90s Clone Saga.
THE MYSTERY BEHIND THE GOBLIN MYSTERY
The Green Goblin and his arrival also introduced something novel in Spider-Man comics, which is to say a long-running serialized story-arc. ASM was of course highly serialized in its first 10 issues which is to say subplots and happenings in the previous issue carried over to the next one, villains appeared multiple times and made reference to previous encounters. All that happened but what was missing was a single storyline and thread which built its way though multiple appearances, sustaining itself slowly by means of breadcrumbs and careful buildup. This was generally lacking in the first 10 issues which were standalone adventure stories.
The Green Goblin became one of the first serialized story-arcs. The mystery of the Goblin, his motivations, and his secret identity formed one of the long-running subplots of the Lee-Ditko run. Now it’s important to mention that Steve Ditko left Spider-Man (and also Marvel) by ASM#38 and the first two issues of John Romita Sr. was a two-part storyline that ultimately saw Norman Osborn revealed as Green Goblin. The fact that Ditko’s departure was immediately followed by the reveal of the Goblin’s mystery has provoked rumor and debate over the years, chiefly that Ditko’s departure had to do with his objection to the Goblin’s secret identity. Namely that Stan Lee wanted it to be Norman Osborn but Ditko wanted it to be an unknown. This rumor is so strong that the 2007 BBC Documentary by Jonathan Ross called In Search of Steve Ditko has multiple talking heads assert it and leading Neil Gaiman to assert “obviously Stan was right” as a way I suppose to cushion the generally critical perspective of Stan Lee that the documentary otherwise provides. There’s just one problem, this documentary, despite being made by BBC cites no sources and doesn’t base itself on close-reading of the comics at all merely repeating office rumors.
In general the Green Goblin mystery has for a long time had a mystery of Ditko’s intentions and whether or not he intended Norman Osborn to be the Goblin. This “mystery” has continued to survive in various forms even if it’s one of the few things Steve Ditko publicly debunked:
Now digest this: I knew from Day One, from the first GG story, who the GG would be. I absolutely knew because I planted him in J. Jonah Jameson’s businessmans club, it was where JJJ and the GG could be seen together. I planted them together in other stories where the GG would not appear in costume, action…I planted the GG’s son (same distinctive hair style) in the college issues for more dramatic involvement and storyline consequences. So how could there be any doubt, dispute, about who the GG had to turn out to be when unmasked?
Steve Ditko, quoted by Brian Cronin [5]
As Ditko points out, long before the reveal of Norman Osborn, Ditko had drawn and featured Norman Osborn in the background panels of various scenes such as in the background of Amazing Spider-Man #23 (which also featured the Goblin as the main villain):
Ditko also gives Norman his first speaking role in Amazing Spider-Man #26. And in Amazing Spider-Man #27, we have him featured more distinctly, this time with more detail, resembling Norman’s final look, with his widow’s peak and old-fashioned “waves” hairstyle much more prominent and distinct.
Still Norman isn’t named in these appearances. The first Osborn we know by name is Norman’s son Harry who Peter meets when he goes to college on his first day in the iconic “Master Planner Saga” trilogy. Harry Osborn in his first appearances is a jerkish character and he and Peter were far from being “fast friends”. We first come to know Norman Osborn by name in Amazing Spider-Man #37 where he’s introduced as Harry’s father and the story has Norman worry about reprisals from Mendell Stromm a former colleague he had swindled and now seeks revenge.
Then Spider-Man confronts Stromm’s robot, surprising Norman who doesn’t like Spider-Man’s presence in his affairs. In the course of this fight, there’s a moment where Norman punches Spider-Man from the back and knocks him unconscious. Now the question of why a normal seeming businessman could knock a superhero with super-strength unconscious ought to have occupied a few people, in retrospect? And also isn’t it odd that Norman is wearing a green colored business-suit in these scenes? The next issue ASM#38 has a scene where Norman puts on a disguise and siccs a mob on Spider-Man.
In other words, the mystery behind the Green Goblin mystery is how it should ever have been a mystery to start with? How is it that so many generations of comics fans and smart comics fans at that — writers, professionals and scholars — simply failed to perform the basics of close-reading and establish a foundation for their interpretation? Where Steve Ditko, the plotter-artist, on multiple occasions established and set-up Norman as not only the Green Goblin but as a character one or two degrees separated from Peter Parker’s personal life, via his boss Jameson at his gentleman’s club and as the father of his classmate Harry Osborn.
The Goblin was the first sustained serialized character that Ditko chronicled and in many ways he’s the lodestone of the 28 issues on which Ditko had control over the plotting. Furthermore, there’s one obvious visual hint of the Goblin’s identity. In ASM#27, Ditko draws the Goblin holding his mask with his face covered in shadow. However Ditko draws him with a clear silhouette, and if you compare the shape of the head with the shape of Osborn’s head in the same issue, then it’s possible to discern that the silhouette’s outer edges has the same striated wave pattern of Norman’s hair.
Ditko was an artist with an eye for detail who always sought to distinguish his characters and give them unique features, unique hairstyles and unique silhouettes, as such we can’t chalk details such as this as incidental, they are evidence of a very clear design. The visual and storytelling clues set up in the serialized development clearly establishes that Norman Osborn was always intended to be the Green Goblin.
INTERLUDE: SERIALIZED PLOTTING
- The Green Goblin became a character of great importance to Ditko, in terms of asserting his own independence as a plotter-artist over Stan Lee.
- The Green Goblin was always conceived to be Spider-Man’s arch-enemy and his greatest and most dangerous enemy.
- The Green Goblin was always intended to be Norman Osborn by Steve Ditko and he foreshadowed and seeded hints for this reveal multiple times.
Establishing these points is crucial to make the case for presenting Green Goblin and Norman Osborn as a single entity in the same way that Peter Parker/Spider-Man are the same character. If one examines the Goblin’s appearance against the textual data and the context of publication it becomes possible to appreciate the storytelling of Ditko as a plotter-artist how his visual designs and character models affected his plotting and characterization.
For instance, one can see that the decision to age up Peter Parker and have him graduate high school for college, was likely geared with the idea that Ditko could organically introduce Harry Osborn and his father into Peter’s orbit more naturally. So the Green Goblin mystery and Ditko’s desire to build this villain and raise the stakes and up the ante with each new appearance likely fed into other aspects of the comic, and inspired other developments.
MEDIEVAL-MODERN AESTHETIC
On another level, the Green Goblin is a very atypical villain for Steve Ditko.
In general, Ditko as an artist favored the weird and the distorted. He liked to draw weird shapes, odd silhouettes, squiggly patterns and lines. When we think of Spider-Man’s villains in visual aesthetic they are some form of human-monster chimera. Doctor Octopus is a norman human being with a monstrous silhouette especially apparent in the iconic cover of ASM#03. It creates an uncanny image of a normal human of average height and build suddenly make himself tall by means of these four appendages. Other Ditko villains such as Electro with his bizarre spark headpiece, the Vulture, which is an ordinary bald human attached to a giant vulture suit, also illustrate Ditko’s chimerical pattern. This three-panel sequence of The Sandman from ASM#04 where we see this size and shape-shifting villain transform into a kind of genie on the left, and then a sandworm with a human body is especially grotesque and uncanny, making the villain seem monstrous and unnatural. The fact that Sandman maintains that ugly T-shirt and grotesque face in all phases of his transformation adds to the chimerical aspect of a human mixed with something unnatural.
Most of Spider-Man’s villains aside from the Goblin are chimeras. The chimera of Ancient Greece was an unnatural being with the body of a goat the tail of a snake and the head of a lion. Chimeras symbolize something ugly and incongruous mashed together and these typify most Ditko villains which mix and mash unnatural shapes.
The Green Goblin is different. The Goblin isn’t chimerical. He’s a civilian with a normal body who puts on a Halloween outfit. The Goblin is the stuff of fairytales but he rides out on a mechanical broomstick and later a glider, he drops grenades shaped like pumpkins. In other words, he’s a mashup of a medieval concept with something modern. In this Green Goblin’s aesthetic resembles none other than Jack Kirby.
Kirby as an artist-plotter was constantly fixated with mashing together ancient or medieval ideas with modern science-fiction. So Doctor Doom has a medieval surcoat with golden clasps, a monk’s hood and a cape, covering absolutely modern robotic armor. The Sentinels are giant robots with heads based on Olmec sculptures. Galactus is modeled on Aztec and Mesoamerican art. Kirby’s Asgard similarly mixes ancient myth with science-fiction.
The Goblin with his mix of medieval and modern and him inhabiting fairy tale boogeyman nightmares as well as being a credible science-fiction villain is quite similar to Kirby’s design principle more than Ditko’s usual wheelhouse.
DITKO’S NORMAN VERSUS ROMITA’S NORMAN
Ditko intended Norman Osborn to be the Green Goblin. As such there can be no talk that John Romita Sr. somehow betrayed his vision. The 2-Part story of the reveal of the Green Goblin (ASM#39-40) is a classic Spider-Man with iconic images and a classic cover. At the same time by simply being a different artist and storyteller, Romita Sr. nonetheless introduced divergences between his take on the characters and Steve Ditko’s. Visually, Romita’s Norman is a more thickset man than Steve Ditko’s, which helps distinguish Norman and Harry more clearly.
The more important distinction is that Lee-Romita’s run introduces the notion, or at least suggests strongly, that Norman and Green Goblin are like Jekyll and Hyde. This has no foundation at all in the Lee-Ditko era, where Norman is presented as a sane rational criminal with a calculating and manipulative edge. Apparent in ASM#37-38 where he compartmentalizes his life, putting on a front of a caring father to Harry and Flash, manipulating a crowd to attack Spider-Man by disguising himself and then hiding from Spider-Man and sucker-punching him to cover his tracks and involvement with Mendell Stromm.
We also see Norman and Harry sharing a bond, not a healthy one, since it’s apparent that Norman finds Harry a little annoying (and Ditko’s Harry indeed is annoying), but a normal father-son bond. Whereas in ASM#39 after Ditko leaves, Harry says he and his father used to be “real pals”. The cultivation of this distance between Norman and Harry was important for Lee-Romita to resolve the Goblin mystery and likewise provide a sentimental solution to a villain as dangerous as him but it’s also contradicted by Ditko’s take.
The adaptation of Norman/Goblin as a rational villain who compartmentalizes his civilian and supervillain lives is most directly seen in The Spectacular Spider-Man by Greg Weisman. Admittedly the show ended in 2 seasons but the version of Norman/Goblin in that show is a super-cool rational operator who doesn’t seem to have any hint of mental illness or sentimental excuses. That aside, the family saga aspect of Norman and Harry has clearly proven most influential and it’s that version that finds its voice in Willem Dafoe’s performance in Raimi’s Spider-Man 1.
I happen to like both adaptations a great deal.
CONCLUSION
The general assumption people have about artists like Ditko and Kirby was to assume that their work can be understood as expressions of innate creativity rather than careful storytelling choices. In other words, there’s an element of condescension when we discuss artists as storytellers and not see how design choices fuse with storytelling choices and operate on clear aesthetic principles. My hope with this essay was to provide an intuitive exploration of that through one major example of Ditko’s work.
REFERENCES
- Blake Bell. Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko. Fantagraphic Books. 2008.
- https://hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger.tumblr.com/post/183046114923/stans-synopsis-for-the-green-goblin-had-a-movie
- John Seavey. “A Long Sad Talk About Norman Osborn.”
https://mightygodking.com/2013/08/02/a-long-sad-talk-about-norman-osborn/ - Comics Cube. Villain Appearance Count.
http://www.comicscube.com/2019/08/spider-rama-amazing-spider-man-39.html - Brian Cronin. CBR. Jan 04, 2013. Comic Book Legends Revealed.
https://www.cbr.com/comic-book-legends-revealed-400-part-1/
Elving's Musings 
Thank you for this, particularly the conclusion and the observations about the Green Goblin matching up more with Kirby’s character designs than Ditko’s.
The junk that gets passed between comics fans about the difference in intent between Ditko and Lee, which are frequently pedantic and based on hearsay, misses so many obvious points that I have to chalk it up to people not actually reading the comics they’re talking about or that they have read them and they’re just (really) poor readers.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for your kind words. Glad you found this piece useful.
In general comics scholarship often fails at basic reading of stuff in the comic, but Spider-Man comics even moreso because of its overwhelming popularity.
LikeLike
Thank you so much! I got into some of this on my own blog [https://crustymud.paradoxcomics.com/spidey-miscellanea-pt-2-what-is-that-thing-on-norman-osborns-head/] but I did not have a copy of Ditko’s original essay and had to go by this magazine that cited just a small portion of it. I just knew something about that article didn’t smell right and now I can update it with corrections.
Great article! I plan on getting neck deep into your other Spider-Man posts ASAP!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Glad to help a fellow researcher. Welcome the readership
LikeLike
Personal, idiosyncratic taste is something that cannot be debated, so I can’t (and won’t) criticize someone for saying, for example, Doc Ock is their favorite Spidey villain. But when trying to treat the question objectively, the only candidate for Spidey’s archenemy is the Green Goblin—the Norman version specifically. This is something Lee and Ditko agreed upon, clearly, as the first issue after Ditko leaves, Lee has the Goblin UNMASK Spider-Man. This is something that has hardly ever happened in comics, even up to today, let alone back in 1966. And the personal connection between Peter and Norman through Harry multiplies the drama a thousandfold. No other villain has such a connection with Spidey; few other superheroes have such a connection to any villain. Spidey’s got an awesome rouges gallery, but Gobby is the best of this very strong lot.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Is important to point out a few things: Peter and Harry weren’t friends when he first appeared, the notion of the Goblin as “The father of Peter’s best friend” became a point of drama after Osborn’s identity was revealed, and after Ditko left the title. So this “connection” wasn’t there from the start, and there is nothing that indicates that was always meant to be there. This breaks the idea that he was the only “objective” choice to be Spider-Man’s archenemy
If we are going with iconic moments, Doctor Octopus was the first villain to unmasked Spider-Man (but not the first to learn his secret identity, that is definetly a win for the Green Goblin), was the man behind The Master Planner, leading into the iconic Amazing Spider-Man 33 and was the villain of the very first Annual, leading The Sinister Six.
I’m not even defending tha Doc Ock “should” have this role, I’m arguing that we could make him work as “the archenemy” just as well as Osborn’s trough a different set of “objective” standarts
There is nothing that indicates that Stan Lee and Ditko “agreed” that the Green Goblin would be Spider-Man’s archenemy, as far as I’m aware (I might be wrong) the two of them never stated that (and in the case of Lee, I put into question many of his statements, as he had a tendency to exagerated, that’s why I put emphasis on being something they both said) and even if this was the case there were villains who managed to fullfill the role of archenemy just as well as Norman would. Hell, Harry worked even better as Peter’s greatest enemy during J. M. DeMatteis run
What gets me is the argument that the reading of the Globlin as the greatest Spider-Man villain is an objecive fact instead of something that was build through years by several different writers and artists.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Excellent work! The “Goblin Mystery” is one of my all-time favorite Spider-Man stories, and I was always was intrigued about stories aimed to retell his saga in some ways (like the original Hobgoblin Saga, by Roger Stern). I was happy to see someone else noticing the hair silhouette in ASM#27. Was something that stuck with me since I was a kid as a hint of the Green Goblin being Norman Osborn since the original Ditko run. I personally think that The Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon gave a definitive version of this Saga, making a plot twist that everyone already knew feel like an engaging mystery again.
The only thing that I put into question is that the Green Goblin was created from the start to be the archenemy of Spider-Man. Doctor Octopus being revealed as The Master Planner, being the founder of The Sinister Six in the first Spider-Man Annual and being a foe that almost made Spider-Man quit in his first appearence (while also being the first villain to flat out beat Spider-Man) makes a strong argument that he was meant to be the top foe of the character. The Green Goblin can just as well be interpreted as an experimentation with seriealized storytelling that would end with Osborn being caught.
Furthermore, the assertion that after Osborn’s death we got mostly new Goblins to substitute Osborn and we never got Doctor Octopus being estabilished as the definitive archenemy has a few flaws as an argument:
a) The death of Gwen Stacy happend years after Ditko left the series, so it doesn’t work as an argument in the sense that Ditko’s plan was to make the Green Goblin Spidey’s top enemy
b) After that story happend, the Goblin did became to big of a villain, and had left a legacy that was almost impossible to top. So, it makes sense that Doctor Octopus didn´t managed quite measure up such a standart (but then again, this is something that happend after Ditko left the series)
c) But even then, we did had villains like the original Jackal and, finally Venom who managed to be quite sucessful at taking the role of “Spider-Man’s archenemy”. In fact, Venom did this job a bit too well becoming more popular than he should in the process.
The 90’s cartoon is another good example, with The Kingpin being firmly estabilished as Spider-Man’s arch-villlain and working just as well.
I really don’t agree with the implication that the Spider-Man series “needed” the original Green Goblin to return in order for him to have an archenemy. I mean, if the Clone Saga had gone a little bit different, the main antagonist would had being the ressurected Jackal, or even Mephisto and we might never had the return of Norman Osborn
But, overall, this was an excellent, thought-provoking post! Looking foward to see more of your work!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for your excellent response, Antonio. It’s balm to my soul.
If you are interested in the Hobgoblin, I wrote about him here (https://elvingsmusings.wordpress.com/2022/12/20/re-examining-spider-man-09-of-hobgoblins-foolish-consistencies/). It’s a bit critical, at the same time I do bring facts to the table that people haven’t acknowledged. So you might find stuff of interest similar to what I say here. Also have some stuff there about Jackal.
My contention that Ditko intended Green Goblin to be Spider-Man’s arch-enemy is based on the following:
— Appearances. By Ditko’s final issue, Green Goblin made 6 appearances, and 2 appearances as Norman Osborn alone. Doctor Octopus by comparison made 6 appearances, one of which is the cameo in ASM#18 showing him sulking in jail while Goblin exults. Doctor Octopus made his first two appearances before Green Goblin’s debut…so that means that Ditko simply found Goblin more interesting if he wrote about the character more often after introducing him.
— Doctor Octopus was a dangerous threat who won the first round against Spider-Man but at the end of that issue and the later issues, Doctor Octopus went to Jail. He always gets caught whereas Green Goblin escapes justice.
— Green Goblin having his own secret identity made him a mirror to Spider-Man. Everyone wonders who’s behind Spider-Man’s mask while Peter is worried about his own masked menace. That’s not true of Doctor Octopus, Lizard or the other villains. So Goblin is more of a mirror of Spider-Man than Doctor Octopus.
— As for Doctor Octopus being the leader of the Sinister Six. The funny thing is that had no impact at all. The Sinister Six was introduced in the Annual and forgotten about for decades. The second story featuring the Sinister Six was in David Michelinie and Erik Larsen’s Return of the Sinister Six story which was done in ASM and the SPIDER-MAN solo titles. The Jackal likewise was forgotten about between the end of the First Clone Saga and his lame revival in the second twenty years later.
— Venom though did indeed become Spider-Man’s biggest villain and a true breakout star.
Based on that, Green Goblin was a much more dangerous threat as conceived by Ditko. Now what might have happened had Ditko stayed on, whether Peter and Harry have become friends…that all is unanswerable. The issue for me is that Ditko left behind all the signs that made Goblin Spider-Man’s most dangerous enemy, and that’s enough. As for whether Goblin “needed” to return…well preferably he shouldn’t have returned during the Clone Saga as a CYA for a major mess of a story. But mechanically I did think his resurrection might have served another story. I agree though that there was no true “need”. I do agree that Spectacular Spider-Man did Ditko’s version of Norman/Goblin best, the sane and rational criminal mastermind who compartmentalizes and manipulates and gaslights people around him.
LikeLike