Uncanny Avengers vol 5 – “Axis Prelude”
Uncanny Avengers officially ends with issue #25, though what this actually means is that it gets replaced first by Axis, and then by whatever relaunched version comes after Axis.
Since volume 4 of Uncanny Avengers ran through to issue #22, this presents the collections department with something of a problem. Hence the unlikely-looking volume 5, “Axis Prelude”, which collects the final three issues of Uncanny Avengers, the two tie-in issues of Magneto (which will also be included in Magneto vol 2), and the entirely unrelated comedy issue Uncanny Avengers Annual #1.
Did we do the Annual when it came out? I forget. As I recall, it’s not very good. It’s a Mojo story which thinks it’s being very clever and met by having a completely arbitrary non-plot, but continually lamp shading that fact. It’s a joke that quickly wears thin.
That aside, what we have here is a transition between larger stories. Issue #23 is largely aftermath from the previous arc, with the characters adjusting to their new status quo. This basically means Alex being horribly scarred, he and Janet remembering the daughter they had in the deleted future timeline (who is presumably still out there somewhere in Kang’s custody), and Rogue having Wonder Man stuck in her head. All of which is basically fine. I’m not particularly thrilled about going back to a variant of Rogue’s old status quo – once you’ve already done the story about her maturing and gaining control, you can’t really re-tread that ground with this version of the character. If you want to do that story again, what you really need is a reboot. But once the decision has been taken to go this route, the book does it as well as can be expected.
After that, it’s a four-issue crossover with Magneto, billed as a direct lead-in to Axis. And for once that billing is perfectly fair; the end of issue #25 is indeed a major plot point leading into the big crossover.
The Avengers issues have the Red Skull kidnapping Rogue, Wanda and Alex to Genosha, where he’s set up a mutant concentration camp. This doesn’t go as well as he might have expected, because he hasn’t allowed for Rogue having Wonder Man’s powers. Meanwhile, over in his own title, Magneto makes his own attempt to kill the Skull, and gets captured. That leads to the Avengers rescuing him so that he can join the big confrontation with the baddie in issue #25.
If a crossover between Uncanny Avengers and Magneto sounds like a horrendous style clash… well, yup, it pretty much is. Uncanny Avengers is, at heart, a superhero team book of the 1970s and 80s, given a 21st century polish by the contemporary art. Magneto pitches itself as a more brittle character piece, a little bit removed from the superhero house style. Purely in plot terms, a crossover seems like it ought to make sense; Magneto is Wanda’s father, and the Red Skull fits with Magneto’s background, what with him being a Nazi war criminal. But the tone of both books winds up muddled.
Uncanny Avengers is not a book that’s particularly interested in the psychology of its villains. For the most part, it’s perfectly content to go with the idea that the Red Skull does evil things because he’s evil. He’s not evil for any particular reason, or at least, the reasons why he is evil are not of interest to the series. He’s a force and a threat for other characters to respond to, and that’s basically all.
Magneto isn’t that bothered about the inner life of Nazis either, but it certainly is concerned with the inner life of Magneto and the way he’s been damaged by his past. It acknowledges that it’s dealing with a character who has come to take on many of the features of the people he hates (and where that hate drives him as a character). It doesn’t treat his single-minded obsessiveness as necessarily making him a villain, but it does see it as something that makes him unnervingly like a villain, even today. And it sees Magneto’s own lack of interest in the psychology of his opponents as part of the problem with him.
So bringing these two titles together to do a Red Skull story poses a problem, and for the most part it’s Magneto that comes off worst. It’s not a series that really wants to be doing stories with major Marvel Universe figures to start with, and it would rather prefer its Nazis to take the form of realistic figures, not demented cartoons in skull masks.
In fact, Uncanny Avengers is right in its approach to the Red Skull. He’s an outrageously malevolent icon of evil. He doesn’t function well as a rounded character, and his creators never really intended him to. After all, he’s a Nazi villain from the heyday of propaganda. If he had a moustache he’d be twirling it constantly. This doesn’t make him a bad character; but it does make him a character who isn’t at home in Magneto. When you stick him in a setting of huts and tortured prisoners, you’re evoking the grotesquerie of concentration camps. But the Red Skull is a different sort of camp entirely. They don’t go well together.
Still, Uncanny Avengers does find some use for Magneto as a guest star. There are some good ideas in here about his awkward pseudo-relationship with his daughter Wanda – as she points out, Magneto has occasionally tried to be a better person for Xavier, or the X-Men, but never for her. She’s just not that important to him. More broadly, Remender uses Magneto to play into the book’s usual theme of the need for unity. Magneto is locked firmly in the cycle of hate, or at least that’s how the Avengers see it. From his standpoint, killing the baddies is a necessary exercise in clearing away the obstacles to a future peace. But given the amount of hate the character has, there’s obviously a lot of rationalisation in there. Magneto is all too willing to come up with reasons not to rise above things.
This builds to a rather wonky finale, in which Magneto actually does kill the Red Skull, only to find that this releases the Skull as the new Onslaught. It’s a nice enough twist in its way, not least because it actually delivers on the “Axis prelude” billing in a way I never really expected the story to do. Okay, it’s Onslaught, and much like the sixties, if you fondly remember Onslaught, you weren’t there. The original story is a catastrophe from start to finish – an extended tease for a character whose details hadn’t actually been worked out, belatedly swerving into an incoherently plotted story that was simply an excuse to set up the Heroes Reborn line (which had nothing to do with the X-Men). But the flip side is that it’s almost inevitable that the second attempt will do it better. The bar has been set so low that they had to excavate.
Does it work beyond the surprise factor? The way it’s structured, the idea certainly seems to be that Magneto has transgressed by deliberately killing a bad guy, and is getting his comeuppance for that. This is slightly tricky territory, since the “heroes don’t kill” trope has the downside of not actually making any sense. An absolute prohibition on lethal force doesn’t match up with any ethical code people apply in the real world, and it doesn’t even make sense within the logic of the Marvel Universe. (Captain America was desperate to enlist in the US military – how can he possibly be a non-lethal absolutist?) You could make a case that Magneto kills the Skull unnecessarily, but given the scale of the threat he poses and the absence of any clear means of containing him, it wouldn’t be a very good one.
Ultimately, the “heroes don’t kill” thing isn’t an ethical principle so much as a genre convention tied to the idea that superheroes are simply better – just as they can do impossible things, they can (and therefore should) hold themselves to impossible ethical standards. And this is fine, I guess, if you use it as a vehicle to do stories about people crossing ethical lines, rather than seriously trying to push it as a moral in its own right. It works, in other words, if you get everyone to buy it as a sort of metaphor for real-world compromise that allows superheroes to cross a moral line without straying too far beyond PG territory.
But this sort of artificial ethics sits a little uneasily next to the concentration camp stuff, for my money. This may well be the idea – issue #23 goes out of its way to remind us that Wolverine is a killer and that he’d be willing to kill the Skull too, so Remender doesn’t seem to think that Magneto’s behaviour is somehow entirely beyond the pale. At any rate, the message ends up feeling more than a little confused. There’s a symbolic logic to what’s going on here, but it’s not one that feels quite consistent even within the series.
Frankly, there’s another point hanging over these issues as far as I’m concerned, which is that I can’t honestly claim to be remotely excited about Axis. Yes, as I’ve acknowledged, Onslaught II can hardly be worse than Onslaught I. But neither the Skull nor Onslaught are inherently interesting threats – Onslaught is actively the opposite of interesting – and I’m kind of dreading months of stories with variations on the same “here’s a character with a central trait reversed” theme. I’m not convinced that’s anywhere near a strong enough idea to carry the volume of material that’s apparently being asked of it. We’ll see, though.
There are plenty of good moments in these issues – they certainly aren’t bad, and in plot terms they do what they were designed to do. But there’s a mismatch of elements in here that stops things from quite working smoothly.
I’m not sure where the problem in Magneto killing is supposed to be seen.
Magneto killed a number of times in the Cullen Bunn series. It’s basically been Punisher with a minority-rights twist.
During Claremont’s original run, Magneto killed the crew of the Soviet nuclear submarine.
Magneto is always going to be an anti-hero. Killing Nazis shouldn’t be something surprising for the character.
It might be something that Scarlet Witch doesn’t approve of, but it’s certainly not out of line for Magneto.
Yeah, that scene didn’t work for me.
I’m wondering if the point it was going for was that Red Skull wanted Magneto to kill him, and then Magneto did, hence, Red Skull considers it a victory.
“Heroes don’t kill” worked perfectly well in the Silver Age. Super heroes were there to supplement the forces of law and order, not replace them. They were super heroes because they had the power to deal with threats that the police couldn’t, but as soon as the bad guy was neutralised, their involvement ended. The bad guy would be sent to regular peoples’ prison.
The nature of the stories changed since then, of course. Supeheroes are now a paramilitary in a war against blah blah blah. Bad guys commit genocide and keep coming back over and over to kill more.
Note of course that in the Red Skull’s first appearance, Captain America totally does murder him*. When Bucky asks what happened, he says “I’m not talking”. Captain America killed all the time in the 40s. He murdered a retarded guy once. That’s not a sick joke, it actually happened in the comic.
*later retconned obv.
Well, in World War II Cap was actually IN the military. To have him take a “no lethal force” stance in those days would have been utterly bizarre.
There’s a lot of stuff in Golden Age Captain America that hasn’t aged well. Pretty much anything featuring non-white characters, for a start.
In the early issues, Captain America was a private, at home, during peacetime. Most of his adventures, including when he beat up Hitler and put him in a bin, were done while he was AWOL and on his own initiative. They weren’t military acts at all. That said, I’ve only read the very early stories, but they’re alright, allowing for the prejudices of the time.
In addition to what Si said, it’s worth pointing out that the original Captain America series launched before the US entered the war. As I understand it, Simon and Kirby were hoping the series would convince Americans that they needed to join the war.
The problem with Magneto killing is that by this point it is so unremarkable. The ethical principle is sound, but the Marvel Universe has largely forgotten of it.
The first Onslaught led to the semi-reboot of Heroes Reborn and there have been all sorts of rumours floating around about the Marvel Universe getting a DC style reboot. They’re not going to use Onslaught II to start it off are they?
I took the “you’re no better than he is” as a quite personal indictment from Rogue. She’s not making some sanctimonious claim that heroes don’t kill (I mean, yes, on the face of it, she is) but I can’t help but think that she’s horrified that the man she once loved could be the equivalent of the Red Skull, as typified by that cold-blooded moment.
Except that that analogy is patently ridiculous – the Red Skull is setting up concentration camps. How does Magneto killing him make the former in any way equivalent to the latter?
Yeah, that does make Rogue seem like a twit.
As for the regressing, I suppose it was inevitable. The no-control thing was her shtick for years and had a lot to do with her rise to popularity back in the day. But you can’t really do it all over again with the same character.
On the other hand, what’s Rogue all about with her formula removed?
@kelvingreen
Even if a reboot somehow spins out of Axis, they started building to it during Bendis’ Heroic Age Avengers. Though, I think Hickman’s Avengers books are going to be dealing with that whole time gone wonky thread. “Time runs out” after all….
I’d say Bendis had a big hand in where it’s going, and that’s why he can get away with saying All New X-men won’t end with a mind wipe and being sent back to the past.
I don’t think it’ll end in a reboot. We still got eight more months until we catch up with Hickman, after all, and they have promised* that in the end Hickman and Remenders’ epics are going to fit together when all is said and done.
I see the point about the x-over being contrary to MAGNETO’s established tone so far, but . . . I like the Red Skull more than I like Magneto, and I think the Red Skull and Magneto make for great antagonists. The best part about Magneto killing this Skull is that it opens up the door for the REAL Skull to come back from his exile in the Cosmic Cube – I’m well sick of fruit-loops clone Skull and his psychic brain.
*Obviously you can shit in one hand and fill the other with promises from Marvel editorial with the other, and see which fills up faster.
cool typing, bro
well, Rogue is new to having Wonder Man in her head, right? And he’s been on a bit of a pacifist thing lately. Maybe it’s his fault she’s acting like a twit
oh god! AXIS hasn’t even started yet?! LOL I thought it was probably almost over by now. LONGEST EVENT EVER!!
I always thought Marvel heroes weren’t allowed to kill anyone, unless it was Nazis.
And yes, equating Magento with the Red Skull does seem a bit odd.
One thing I really miss about the Jemas era was the lack on non-stop crossovers…
I think the intended parallel must be that Magneto is also driven by hate. Reminder can’t possibly mean that they’re morally equivalent; that would be ridiculous. Magneto’s selection of victims is basically reasonable; the moral issue with him is really just the proportionality of what he does to them.
If that’s the intention, it certainly doesn’t come across on the page – Rogue’s exact wording is “After all your words, you’re no better than him”, which… no. You have to do a lot worse than bludgeon a man to death before you’re the equivalent of an actual honest-to-god Nazi.
I agree, but it’s one of those cases where the literal meaning is so plainly ridiculous that it can’t have been intended. Marvel simply wouldn’t intentionally publish a comic asserting that a Holocaust victim who murders actual Nazis in revenge is morally equivalent to the Nazis. If that reading had actually occurred to anyone involved, it wouldn’t have seen print. What we have here is a case where a wonky genre convention about superhero ethics had been shoved into a story where it doesn’t fit, without the implications being properly thought through, I’d guess. Another possibility is that this is Rogue speaking in the heat of the moment and the story will slap her down for it in due course but that’s not what I sense they were going for.
I feel like I’d be more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt if it were anyone but Remender – he doesn’t have a great track record with this sort of thing (“the M-word”, the verrrry icky implications of Sam Wilson sleeping with Jet Zola, etc.)
His editors should be catching this stuff though.
“(“the M-word”, the verrrry icky implications of Sam Wilson sleeping with Jet Zola, etc.)”
Really? We’re not over that?
Sigh. You guys are attempting to be serious, aren’t you?
As recently as in Kingdom Come, the whole point of the heroes’ side was the very same that Rogue stated in this issue.
Moral standards have fallen quite a lot since 9/11.
There have been rumors about a Marvel Reboot for decades now. It’s never happened. I see no real reason to believe that’s going to change any time soon.
It seems more plausible now than it has been in the past though given that DC’S New 52 was at least a financial success.
The genre conventions that led to “superheroes don’t kill” are met with other genre conventions that render that idea either naive or pointless. On the one hand, I do like that someone thought at some point, “Hold on, it’s not okay for unsanctioned vigilantes to decide who gets to live and die.” But in practice, it winds up with the naive or pointless.
Naive, because when you’re dealing with someone like the Joker (or almost any of Batman’s lunatic villains) who use normal incarceration as a revolving door and go on killing sprees whenever they feel so inclined (or the story needs it). When the Joker’s on a spree with a double digit kill total, Batman’s stance against the death penalty starts to look a little stupid.
But at the same time, because it’s superhero comics, dead never means dead, and thus heroes killing villains in a way doesn’t matter because generally those important enough to at least make the argument that they should be killed are those who are just going to come back anyway. (Like, say, the Red Skull in this very issue.)
I think it’s like superhero aging–unless you’ve got a very, very good reason to bring it up, it’s best to quietly keep the issue out of the spotlight.
Well – it’s not Batman’s fault the Joker isn’t dead: If someone with that bodycount operated in the USA today he would have been excuted, or some police officer would have shot him during an arrest attempt with no follow up invastigation.
Whenever a reader says “The Batman should have killed the Joker by now”, it’s the same thing as saying “Warner Brothers should have discarded this valuable intellectual property by now.”
Was there ever an official announcement made about Uncanny Avengers’ cancellation? I just inferred it from the title’s absence in all future solicitations during and post-AXIS.
Also, if having Wonder Man in her head is making Rogue act all OOC, then that explains that issue.
The “superheroes don’t kill because we’re better than them” story a hoary old cliche, but it makes sense practically, if not always morally. Because Magneto killed the Red Skull, he was able to be free of his body and become the Red Onslaught (or something). Just like how when Wolverine cut off Sabretooth’s head with the Muramasa, he came back later from Romulus’ dimension (or something), with new training and skills. Or how when Norman Osborn originally died at the hands of his own Goblin Glider, he took the time the world thought him dead to heal up in Europe and build a much greater power base, going from a relatively minor threat to the arch-nemesis of Spider-Man (and for a time, all other heroes). Or how Daken died at Wolverine’s hands, then came back as a juiced-up Horseman of Apocalypse.
Come to think of it, keeping the bad guys in Arkham or the Raft or the Vault or wherever makes more sense, because they can at least watch them escape and keep them away from all these post-mortem power-ups the Marvel Universe loves providing.
But yeah, Rogue pulling the “You’re no better than them” card was impossible to swallow here, given how in this very series she tried to kill the Scarlet Witch (and, in a bad future that didn’t get a chance to happen, succeeded), and was working closely with Wolverine, who also tried to kill the Scarlet Witch and actually killed a buttload of people across this and the last century.
The solicits for Avengers & X-Men: Axis in November have suggested what Uncanny Avengers’ replacement title will be: Astonishing Avengers. Not kidding, either. Check ’em out and judge for yourselves.
“…going from a relatively minor threat to the arch-nemesis of Spider-Man”
Osborne was already the arch-nemesis of Spider-Man before he impaled himself on his glider. He was not a “minor threat.”
Just reading the term “Astonishing Avengers” makes the language centre of my brain vomit.
Though hopefully Iron Man will be in the team, and he can come out saying “I’ve just been to my AA meeting.”
After 33 years of collecting, I think Uncanny #23 was my final Avengers comic. (Or X-Men, for that matter. I already dropped them before Bendis took over.) When the last reboot happened I opted to go with Uncanny instead of the Hickman stuff because it was relatively self-contained and didn’t require buying three books a month. But now that this Axis nonsense is starting, I’m out. Kind of a sad moment, actually. She-Hulk is now my only monthly Marvel book. I enjoy your reviews so I’ll still check in here to read all about what I’m missing.
I’m thinking remember was going to the glaringly literal idea that those who fight monsters by becoming monster only create more monsters; bigger monsters, with tentacles. 😉
Norman Osborn’s importance prior to his resurrection was vastly overstated. He did have the “privilege” of killing the love interest, but a villain causing a major status quo change isn’t enough to make them an arch-nemesis (otherwise Bane would be Batman’s greatest enemy). Spider-Man went 25 or so years with Norman thought to be worm food, and in that time he fought new Goblins, met new arch-villains (Venom, for a time at least), and went on with a life largely unaffected by Norman’s scheming. He still mourned Gwen, and the Goblin stuff still came up at times with his friend Harry, but Norman was gone for good and the books hardly seemed wanting.
For that matter, Norman before his resurrection wasn’t 100% villain like he used to be, as he legitimately had the excuse of an evil split personality for his goblin crimes, and was able to be a respectable businessman (albeit an unpleasant person and distant, unpleasable father) who wasn’t involved in all sorts of evil conspiracies. It was much later that he became the the raving anti-christ he is today.
Wow. Okay, here we go…
Neil, Osborne discovered Spider-Man’s true identity back in the sixties. That alone is enough to get a villain out of the “minor threat” category if they were ever in it to begin with. There was a huge mystery surrounding the Goblin’s identity up until the reveal in AS #39. This was a pretty big deal amongst the readership at the time (which was a damned sight larger than it is today) and his identity was even a point of contention between Lee and Ditko.
The Goblin remained Spider-Man’s most popular villain throughout the Silver Age through the ’70’s and straight through until his demise. He was the villain used when Stan wrote his famous (infamous?) “No-code” drug abuse story.
And even after his death, his specter loomed large over the series for YEARS– inspiring the creation of the Hobgoblin and the move to have Harry take up his mantle. And when they finally brought him back, the reaction was polarized with many older readers citing that it undermined poignance of the story where he (and Gwen) were killed.
This has arch-nemesis painted all over it. You can scarcely get more arch-nemesis than this. Any creator who ever worked on the book would most certainly describe him as such. CBG, Overstreet, Peter Sanderson, every publication and comics historian that’s ever referenced the character would typically identify him as Spidey’s arch-nemesis. The comics themselves would describe him as such.
And they’re all what, “vastly overstating” just because you say so? You weren’t even alive in the ’70’s, Neil aka “Iron Centurion” (yes, I remember you from Alvaro’s). To suggest that Osborne didn’t become Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis until the (chuckle) ’90s is just…well, it’s actually hilarious from my viewpoint.
^Somebody apparently never read any Lee/Ditko/Romita Spider-Man.
There’s nothing wrong with setting up a moral equivalence between Magneto and a Nazi. After all, it’s often been a big part of his character that he’s not so different from the people who hated him.
But yeah, you can’t really do that with the Red Skull. Marvel has spent decades depicting the Red Skull as the most irredeemably evil person in the universe.
I always thought Doc Ock was considered Spidey’s arch-nemesis pretty much until the early 90s. Then once Osborne came back in the 90s, he was retroactively labeled his arch-nemesis.
Doc Ock is often billed as Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis or arch-enemy, yes, and I wouldn’t dispute his claim to that title. The broadly accepted definition of arch-enemy is “primary villain” but more than one villain can fit the bill. Doc Ock was at least A primary villain even if he wasn’t THE primary villain back while Gobby was still kicking.
The Riddler is occasionally billed as one of Batman’s arch-enemies (on covers, solicits, etc.) despite everyone being aware that the Joker is numero uno in Batman’s rogues gallery. Same with Two-Face and a few others.
But back to where Spider-Man is concerned, in the ’60s and ’70’s, the Green Goblin was indisputably the Joker to Spider-Man’s Batman. He was Spidey’s most popular villain and the one Stan Lee hand-picked to be the villain (along with the evil drugs) in the story the Department of Health and Welfare requested of him.
The problem in Neil’s logic is that he’s defining “arch-nemesis” on his own terms, which I’m still a bit foggy on, but for some reason seem to include: a) the villain’s mental state and, b) math.
Like Osborne not qualifying for the arch-nemesis job on the grounds that he had a split-personality and therefore wasn’t “100% villain.”
What this means is that Two-Face can’t be an arch-nemesis either. He only gets to be a nemesis. Nor is he truly a villain despite the fact that DC has been billing him as one for the past seventy years. He’s only 50% a villain. So, come to think of it, he’s actually just half a nemesis.
I can see the cover blurbs now…
“Thrill to the fifty-percent villainy of Two-Face! The Batman’s most fearsome (only?) half-nemesis!”
Taken from an online article that makes a really good case for Doc Ock, and not Norman Osborne (at least, pre-90s resurrection):
“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. He didn’t even really have a backstory, because Stan Lee and Steve Ditko couldn’t decide who he was going to be under the mask. (Ditko wanted it to be a totally unmemorable nobody, to show that villains didn’t always have to be someone important to the hero. Lee felt like they’d spent so long building up the mystery of the Goblin’s identity that the audience would be upset if it wasn’t someone they recognized. The dispute was one of the reasons that Ditko left the title.) Basically, the Green Goblin was by no means the most important of Spider-Man’s bad guys.
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. He represented a moral dilemma; how could Peter hold Otto responsible for his actions if he’d suffered brain damage? And thematically, he represented everything that Peter could be without his conscience holding him in check. He was science stripped of its moral center, power and privilege without any thought to the consequences of exercising it. Both men were human beings made better by science, and both originally thought of their gifts only as a way to gain material benefits. But Peter learned differently, and Otto never did. Whenever Spider-Man fights Doctor Octopus, he’s fighting the person he could have become. That’s arch-nemesis material.
What weight Norman has, by contrast, came from his last two major appearances as the Green Goblin. In the first, Stan Lee finally unmasked the character and, in an effort to give him that extra dimension as a threat, showed that he was no more responsible for his actions than Otto. Norman was high on Goblin serum when he committed his crimes, which meant that Peter felt like he couldn’t cut loose on his friend’s father. But this was pretty much a dead end for the character–for him to keep that aspect of the character, he had to be mostly Norman and only rarely the Goblin, so his use was highly restricted as a result. You can’t have him go insane again and again and again and again, not without diminishing returns, and you can’t really do anything else with him.
The other big story was, of course, ‘The Death of Gwen Stacy’. This was huge, and not just because it was an iconic moment in Spider-Man history. It was huge primarily because of the last scene, where unbeknownst to Peter, Harry watched his father die and swore revenge. This transformed the entire concept of the Green Goblin, far more thoroughly than Gerry Conway probably intended at the time. He probably just planned for Harry to take over as the bad guy…but it went a lot further than that.”
http://mightygodking.com/2013/08/02/a-long-sad-talk-about-norman-osborn/
That’s an interesting article. I followed the link and read the whole thing.
And I actually agree with it, for the most part, but it’s central message seems to be that Norman Osborne isn’t that great of a villain.
But I’m not trying to make the case that he is. I also agree that Ock is a superior character.
I’m simply disputing Neil’s claim that Osborne wasn’t regarded as an arch-nemesis to Spider-Man until after his return in the 90s. That simply is not the case. A retrospective look at just how crap Osborne is/was doesn’t alter history.
I don’t think he was Spider-man’s arch-nemesis until his return. Osborne was probably in the elite category of Spider-man villains, but was never seen as the #1 villain. Then, once they decided to resurrect him, he began doing too many big things (revealed to being behind the clone debacle, kidnapping Aunt May and replacing her with an actress, bastard kids with Gwen Stacy, etc) and was then moved into the slot of arch-nemesis. Yes, he is arguably Spidey’s arch-nemesis NOW, but he certainly wasn’t before his “death”.
I no longer have the will to continue this discussion with the “If I wasn’t alive to see it, then it probably didn’t happen that way.” generation.
I will say I find it interesting how you started that last post out with “I don’t think he was” and then ended it with “but he certainly wasn’t.”
I am so glad you find it interesting. It warms my heart. And does it really matter how I said it when the result is the same? To each their own. You see Osborne one way, others see him another. Oh well.
Of course it matters how you said it.
You went from “I don’t think” to “I’m certain” in the span of a paragraph. And now you’re asserting it depends on how an individual sees it.
“I don’t think he was, but I’m certain he wasn’t, but it depends on how you see it.” is not a coherent train of thought.
At least I don’t think it is, even though I’m positive it’s not, but it’s up to you I guess.
A few other points on the side of “Osborn wasn’t the archvillain.” Under Ditko, Doc Ock was the guy who did all the big stuff: he organizes the Sinister Six, he’s the baddie who first unmasks Spider-Man; and he’s the Master Planner, the villain of Ditko’s longest-running serial.
Even in the Romita era, once Norman went into his amnesia period, the Kingpin generally got the lengthy arcs and the buildup. Part of the problem was that the Goblin just wasn’t around enough to be an archfoe, especially since the Norman side was turned into an actual, honest-to-gosh good person once he had amnesia.
But all Stan really did with him as the Goblin was have him remember his true personality and identity, threaten to attack Peter, and then suffer convenient amnesia again beforew much of anything could happen. Int he same period, the Kingpin is carrying off multi-part schemes and getting loads of character development. It’s not hard to see who Stan and John were building up to be the major villain of their later run.
And Gerry Conway, he brings back the Goblin in a big way and gives him his most memorable story…and then promptly kills him off. Which sticks for twenty years.
So I tend to agree that the Goblin really wasn’t an arch-villain, albeit mainly because no one really knew what to do with him after the big double-unmasking story.
His editors should be catching this stuff though.
Ha! “Editors”. Good one.