Weapons of Self Destruction

After his father destroyed his coffee shop, Harry Osborn has arrived at Oscorp with his girlfriend Lily Hollister, who refuses to leave his side. Harry demands to speak to his father and is allowed inside, but Lily is told to wait outside. In Norman’s office, Harry tries to tell off his father, but Norman says that Osborns always bounce back.[1] Harry is upset to see that his father is wearing his Green Goblin costume again. Norman ignores his son’s rantings telling him that he shouldn’t be wasting his life with the Coffee Bean and should come back and work with his father at Oscorp, saying the pair would be unstoppable. However, Harry has a pretty good idea who could stop his father.

At that very moment, Spider-Man and Anti-Venom are heading to Oscorp to confront Norman and his Thunderbolts. Along the way, Spider-Man reminds Brock to keep his distance as his proximity also cancels out Spider-Man’s powers. When they arrive on the roof of Oscorp, the pair agree to split up. It’s at this point that Norman is about to explain his plans to Harry when he is interrupted by Bullseye. He tells Osborn that they had Spider-Man but they were ambushed by Anti-Venom and that both of them are heading their way.

Elsewhere in the facility, the other Thunderbolts — Songbird, Radioactive Man, and Venom — think they have gotten the drop on Spider-Man, but it turns out to be Anti-Venom in disguise. After webbing Songbird and Radioactive Man to the wall, Anti-Venom confronts Venom, who has since had his symbiote augmented with a new suit of Scorpion armor. While this is all being reported back to the Green Goblin, the villain is ambushed by Spider-Man. As the two fight it out, Harry chastizes both Spider-Man and his father for always meddling in his life. While they struggle, Green Goblin activates a device on his costume that summons his goblin glider from a secret room hidden behind a bookshelf. Seeing that the Glider is heading right for Harry, who is too busy yelling at them to notice, Spider-Man shoves the younger Osborn out of the way. Spider-Man gets his back slashed open by one of the razor-sharp wings. As the Goblin climbs onto the glider, he rants about how close Harry is to reach his true potential, mentioning rooftop encounter and secret experiments, but Harry has no idea what his father is talking about.[2] Having had enough of Norman Osborn’s manipulations, Spider-Man leaps onto the back of the Goblin Glider and forces the Goblin to fly headfirst through a number of walls until they break through to a lab.

There, Spider-Man is horrified to see a number of people being experimented upon and demands to know what Norman is doing this time. That’s when the Goblin says that this isn’t his work, but Harry’s secret Promethean experiments. Harry is horrified to see the results of his work and while everyone is distracted, Norman activates the self-destruct system. He tells Spider-Man that he has a choice, drags out Norman Osborn, and exposes him as being the Green Goblin — again — or take the six minutes of the count down to save the people in the lab.[3] Realizing that there is no choice whatsoever, Spider-Man lets Osborn go to save the people in the lab. As they are busy evacuating the building, Spider-Man comes across the rest of the Thunderbolts. While Venom and Anti-Venom are still duking it out, Spider-Man frees Songbird and Radioactive Man after they promise to stop trying to arrest him and help evacuate the building.[4]

While the others are busy with the evacuation, Venom uses his scorpion tail to inject Anti-Venom with a poison created by Norman Osborn to kill Eddie Brock’s new symbiote.[5] This causes the Anti-Venom symbiote to melt away, but when Mac Gargan tries to kill Eddie, his own symbiote refuses to let him kill Brock because of its long time bond with Eddie. As the pair fight with each other, the Scorpion armor is shattered in the struggle.[6] Venom retreats, but not before vowing to kill Brock, a threat that Eddie mirrors. While outside, Ben Urich and Sally Floyd arrive to get the story for the Front Line and Lily is reunited with Harry who is glad to see that he is still alive. With the danger passed, Songbird suggests Spider-Man to leave, telling the wall-crawler that they’ll convince Norman and the public that he was buried alive in the debris of Oscorp. The following day at a press conference, that’s exactly what Norman Osborn tells the gathered news media. He also spins the medical tests saying that they would have cured many diseases until Spider-Man destroyed the lab. It’s during this press conference that one of Norman’s doctors comes and privately tells him that the Freak could not be recovered and believed dead. Norman reminds him that the creature doesn’t stay dead for long and tells him to get looking for the Freak.[7] When Ben Urich asks Norman about the human experiments, Osborn tells Urich to direct his questions to his son, Harry, who was running Oscorp at the time.

Meanwhile, Harry Osborn is scouring his father’s lab for clues with the help of Peter Parker and Lily Hollister. Peter is certain that they wouldn’t have been allowed in by security if Norman thought they’d find something. When Harry goes to look in another room, Peter notices a lone book standing in the bookshelf. He’s surprised to see the book is called “The Rise of the Norman Empire” and is about to reach for it when Lily pulls him aside and thanks to Peter for all his help and then surprises him by kissing him.[8] As Lily is Harry’s girlfriend, Peter pulls away and tries to tell her that this isn’t cool when Harry returns, killing the conversation immediately. He tells Peter and Lily that he has found he was looking for and tells Peter that he has to keep it a secret, for now, telling Peter that he is the one guy he trusts the most in the whole world before running off. As he leaves, Peter notices that Harry has a cylinder of something called Prometheus X-90 in his satchel.

While at the FEAST Center, Ben Urich and Sally Floyd are trying to get some of the Chinese sweatshop workers to talk, but nobody is willing to speak against Oscorp. Meanwhile, Betty Brant is leaving, since the story she has been sent to cover —the alleged miracle cures happening at FEAST — are going into relapse, convincing her that the stories were bunk.[9] Not far away, Aunt May notices that Marin Li, the owner of the FEAST Center, isn’t looking very well. When she asks him if he is okay, Martin — his Mister Negative side coming out — tells May to stay out of his affairs. While in a nearby alleyway, Eddie Brock watches the activity at the FEAST Center across the street. However, he knows he can’t go back after fighting Spider-Man and the Thunderbolts. However, he has found a new purpose to cure societies ills as Anti-Venom.

Recurring Characters

Spider-Man, Anti-Venom, Thunderbolts (Green Goblin, Venom, Bullseye, Songbird, Radioactive Man), Harry Osborn, Lily Hollister, Aunt May, Martin Li, Ben Urich, Sally Floyd, Betty Brant, Randall Crowne

Continuity Notes

1. Norman specifically states that girlfriends are expendable and that Harry has cheated death once before. The facts

   • The girlfriend comment is a reference to Gwen Stacy, whom Norman murdered back in Amazing Spider-Man #121. Gwen was dating Peter Parker at the time.

   • Norman’s reference to Harry cheating death is to the time that Harry allegedly died in Spectacular Spider-Man #200. As explained in Amazing Spider-Man #581-582, Norman secreted Harry away to Europe to cure him of the Goblin formula and rehabilitate him. Harry only recently returned in Amazing Spider-Man #545.

   • Lastly, Osborn’s “bouncing back” is a reference to Norman’s own brush with death. Norman was seemingly killed when he was impaled by his goblin glider in Amazing Spider-Man #122. In reality, Norman survived and retreated to Europe to recover as explained in Spider-Man: The Osborn Journal #1. Norman didn’t return stateside until Amazing Spider-Man #412.

2. Norman thinks that Harry is secretly the Menace after their encounter in Amazing Spider-Man #570-571. In reality, Menace is actually Lily Hollister as we’ll learn in Amazing Spider-Man #585. The secret experiments that Norman is mentioning are his attempts to find a cure for his ex-brother-in-law, Mark Raxton — aka the Molten Man — as we’ll see in Amazing Spider-Man #581-582.

3. Norman refers to the number of times that Spider-Man has led to his public unmaskings over the years that have since been walked back one way or another. Spider-Man has known that Norman Osborn is the Green Goblin since Amazing Spider-Man #39. Since then, Osborn has been publicly outed as the Goblin on a few occasions:

   • The first time Osborn’s identity was exposed was in Spider-Man: Legacy of Evil #1, when — with Spider-Man’s help — Ben Urich published a book revealing the Green Goblin’s true identity. This was during a period when everyone thought Norman was dead, post-Amazing Spider-Man #122

   • Norman later publicly revealed that he was still alive in Spectacular Spider-Man #249-250, and used his wealth to purchase half of the Daily Bugle and help distance himself from the Goblin identity. This was done through a retraction as well as the creation of a Goblin construct in Spider-Man #88.

   • Norman’s identity was publicly exposed a second time, once again by Ben Urich (with the help of Jessica Jones) in The Pulse #1-5.

   • Most recently, the Daily Bugle was bought by Dexter Bennett in Amazing Spider-Man #547 who later used his position to retract all claims that Osborn was the Goblin in Amazing Spider-Man #568

4. Spider-Man says that the Thunderbolts are trying to arrest him for a crime he didn’t commit. He is referring to the so-called spider-tracer killings where dead bodies have been turning up with spider-tracers planted on them. This began in Amazing Spider-Man #547.

5. This poison was created by filtering enzymes of Eddie Brock’s symbiote through the Freak as we saw in Amazing Spider-Man #572.

6. How the symbiote went from Eddie Brock to Mac Gargan is a complicated affair. Here are the facts:

   • Eddie Brock was the host of the Venom symbiote shortly it was abandoned by Peter Parker in Web of Spider-Man #1. Brock was first seen using the symbiote back in Web of Spider-Man #18, although he didn’t fully reveal himself until Amazing Spider-Man #299-300.

   • Later, Brock discovered he had cancer in Spectacular Spider-Man (vol. 2), this, however, was a ruse created by the symbiote to make Eddie more dependant on the symbiote, as we’ll learn in Venom (vol .4) #11.

   • Despite this, Eddie later sold the symbiote to the highest bidder, selling the symbiote to Angelo Fortunado in Marvel Knights: Spider-Man #7. However, the symbiote later abandoned Fortunado in the following issue and later settled on Mac Gargan as a host in Marvel Knights: Spider-Man #9.

7. The Freak was a drug addict who injected himself with an experimental stem-cell treatment that turned him into a constantly evolving creature back in Amazing Spider-Man #552. Every time the Freak is killed he evolves into a new form that cannot be killed the same way again. The Freak will resurface again in Amazing Spider-Man #644.

8. The real reason Lily kissed Peter was that he was about to discover a secret cache of Goblin weapons that Lily has been using to supply herself as the Menace as we’ll learn in Amazing Spider-Man #586.

9. Miracle cures have been happening thanks to Martin Li’s abilities as Mister Negative, since Amazing Spider-Man #563.

Lo There Shall Come, This Man… This Candidate!

A local New York comedian is making a public bid for the presidency and has accepted a $100 endorsement from J. Jonah Jameson, former owner of the Daily Bugle.[1] The comedian is not impressed with the lack of a turn-out, despite all the things he has been trying to do to win the public over.[2] The only advice Jameson can give him is that a politician is only as good as their headline and suggests that he give the people the candidate they deserve.

The comedian wonders if Jameson is right and thinks about giving up on his bid for federal politics. He decides to take his list of subjects he has put “on notice”[3] and dumps them in the garbage with his sports coat and tie.[4] As he walks down the street, the comedian narrowly avoids getting struck by Spider-Man as the wall-crawler is thrown through a shop window. That’s when the comedian realizes that he has stumbled into the middle of a fight between Spider-Man and his foe the Grizzly. As the comedian has a hatred of grizzly bears, he tries to convince Spider-Man to stay back while he deals with the villain. The wall-crawler calls this absurd and leaps back into battle.

While Spider-Man is busy with the Grizzly, the comedian is convinced that the villain has come to assassinate him as he is viewed as a viable presidential candidate by his opponents. When the wall-crawler is caught in a bear hug, he is saved when the comedian pushes a stone eagle cornice off the side of a building onto the villain, knocking him out. With the Grizzly defeated, the comedian basks in the adoration from the crowd, ignoring Spider-Man’s assertions that the Gizzley was just robbing a bank and not after the comedian.

Recurring Characters

Spider-Man, Grizzly, J. Jonah Jameson, Grizzley

Continuity Notes

1. The comedian in question is Stephen Colbert and this was all part of a joke bid to run for the 2008 Presidential Election that was part of Colbert’s show The Colbert Report. This should all be considered a topical reference per the Sliding Timescale of Earth-616 since Colbert obviously didn’t seriously run, let alone win the election and Stephen Colbert’s show ended its run in 2014. Also, the Colbert presented here is not himself, but a political satirization of himself. Modern readers should interpret this story as being about a comedian running for President but not specifically Stephen Colbert running for the 2008 presidential election.

2. Colbert states that he has been killing Skrulls. This is a tongue in cheek reference to the Secret Invasion event that was published around the time of this story. However, chronologically speaking, this story takes place before Secret Invasion #1. As such this shouldn’t be taken literally and more of an off-the-cuff remark made for comedic effect as Colbert was want to do.

3. Of the items that Colbert has listed as on notice are Barbara Streisand, then Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, and the Toronto Raptors baseball team. The references to Streisand and the Raptors should be considered topical. However, Quesada would still be on the list as Marvel creators exist in the modern age of the Marvel Universe in the relative prime of their lives. Colbert's “On Notice” list was a recurring segment of his show, The Colbert Report where he jokingly put various subjects “on notice” for being a threat to the American way of life. One of the long-running items on this list was grizzly bears.

4. Stephen Colbert dumping his sports coat and tie into the garbage and proclaiming that he is Stephen Colbert no more is a reference to Amazing Spider-Man #50 when Peter Parker did the exact same thing.