So, this one and the next two are a big deal, if you don’t happen to know their backstory, but I’ll talk about that at the end. Gil Kane is back, with John Romita back to inking on this one, as Peter Parker flies home from London, still dejected about not seeing Gwen. He rushes the pictures he got of Spider-Man in action over the The Bugle to satisfy the pretty vague “get me news photos” mandate of his trip…
Well, standing there dead silent while he’s talking to you isn’t gonna help, Pete! The next day, Peter’s back at school and runs into Harry, who tells him everyone’s going to see Mary Jane in an off-broadway musical tonight. Peter’s broke, as always, so Harry offers to lend him some money. Then he steers the conversation elsewhere.
Harry’s dad was The Green Goblin, of course. And, shockingly, hasn’t been The Green Goblin for over 50 issues! In the early days, GG was shaping up to be Spider-Man’s Joker, but then boom, 56 issues without him. I can only guess Stan thought, once they knew each other’s secrets, it could break the book if they kept fighting (An issue future creatives should’ve considered). So Norman got amnesia and went back to being a successful businessman, and that was that.
So, Peter heads over to Osborn’s business, still wearing that insane fringe vest. Norman is actually getting a check up from his doctor as Peter comes in, and Peter overhears a little of it…
Oh sure, this is going to be really great. Nothing could possibly go wrong. Norman tells Peter to figure out his part time schedule and let him know, then says he’s looking forward to seeing Peter at MJ’s show tonight (MJ is still dating Harry at this time). Out on the street, Peter runs into Aunt May…
Har har. Peter thinks about how healthy and happy she seems lately, and how with this new job lined up, the only thing missing is Gwen. His thoughts are interrupted by cop cars screeching by. He decides to investigate, and has a revelation about himself:
Hey, it beats “Spider-Man is a burden and I hate it” stories. He soon discovers the issue: a dude “stoned out of his mind” is about to fall off a building.
Spidey hands the guy to the cops, not breathing, but they give him mouth-to-mouth and tell Spidey he’s ok. Spider-Man gives a thumbs up and swings off. One of the cops asks if they should do something, but the other says he’s turn in his badge before busting Spider-Man after this rescue. Spidey worries that that guy will get brain damage from whatever he was on and thinks how glad he is not to be addicted to anything as he changes back to Peter. He worries that the drug problem is out of control, and wishes to himself that Spider-Man could do something. Later, he meets everyone at the theater, which Harry mentions his dad used to own, and MJ is not too cool to poor Harry…
Harry doesn’t take that too well. The last member of the gang to arrive is Randy Robertson, and as he often does in this era, he comes bearing exposition about a social conflict that will drive this story…
Harry tries to defuse the fight between his dad and his friend, and MJ once again ignores him for Peter on the way into the show. During the intermission, everyone is buzzing about how great MJ is, and even Norman seems happy. But then he looks at a door in the building and goes pale. This sets off Peter’s Spider Sense, and now both of them really want to know what’s behind that door. But, instead, they go back in for the rest of the show, and now Norman is clearly distracted and uncomfortable.
MJ yet again expresses more interest in Pete than Harry, so Harry doesn’t want Pete to come with them. Which suits him, as he’s really wanting to check out that door. And so is Norman. So they both come back when the theater’s cleared out. Well, you know what’s coming. The Green Goblin had safehouses hidden all over town, and seeing one has jolted Norman’s memory. Spidey rushes in to try to keep him from going in there, but it’s too late.
This is gonna get ugly.
So, the thing about ASM 96-98, if you don’t know, is Stan Lee was worried about drugs. As drug abuse got more public and more widespread in the US, Stan decided he wanted to use the platform of his comic about young people to address it. But The Comics Code, the extremely restrictive censorship body that governed comics content at the time, forbade the depiction of drug use, even in a negative light, so he couldn’t do it. But he really believed this was important, so he ran three issues of ASM without code approval, the first major comics to run without approval since the code was established in the 50s (And I believe the last until the 2000s). And not only did he get away with it, but this got a conversation going that eventually lead to a revision of The Comics Code, which relaxed a lot of its absurdly strict rules, allowing comics in the 70s to do a lot of new things. So, in addition to being this pivotal Green Goblin story, these issues have a pretty important cultural impact. I read the story in a trade as a younger person, and knowing how famous they are, these are issues I never thought I’d own in a million years. But tirelessly scanning eBay pays off sometimes, and I got them all for reasonable prices, so here we are! Next time: things get worse.