ASM 177

Feels unlikely that the guy being shot in the face has a chance to say “How can we STOP him?!?” I like the one goon shooting the floor as GG drags him along to give the piece some movement, tho. Mike Esposito is back to inks for this one. And, you know, Flash is falling to his death.

Spidey whipping Flash up onto the roof is pretty hard to buy. And is GG responding to Spider-Man’s thought balloon in panel 4? His inability to distinguish this Green Goblin from the original seems awfully silly. And speaking of silly, watch him Krump through this car!

Our hero dejectedly walking back to the car with the doors under his arms is pretty funny. The angry dude drives off and immediately hits another car. Spider-Man swings up to check on Flash, who now thinks that was “the real Green Goblin” rather than Harry acting out his delusion. Flash and everyone else, of course, don’t know Norman or Harry were Green Goblins, and since he was knocked out during the fight, he stays that way.

Ok, so… ok. In ASM 175, Harry and his psychiatrist tussle in a dark room, and the victor declares he’s The Green Goblin, but we don’t see who it is. And now we have The Goblin refusing to let us see the face of his captive. And it’s just… the twist is not hiding very well. This is all quite awkward, really. But, no reason to dwell on that now with 3 more issues after this one in this story. Peter goes to check on May, who is also visited by MJ & Aunt Anna. He finds her in even better spirits today, and leaves her in their hands to go look for The Goblin. For his part, GG is roughing up various underworld types until someone tells him where this meeting he wants to crash is. Meanwhile, Peter Parker inexplicably walks the mean streets of the “almost abandoned Warehouse District” to recap the history of The Green Goblin. It’s been a long time, after all, and access to old comics wasn’t nearly what it is now. So he takes one page to explain Norman, Gwen, Harry and all that.

Seems like the mask going on would be more important than the jacket coming off. Peter manages to defeat the goons without being ID’d, and gets one of their invitations to the same meeting The Goblin wants into, so that’s that. Hey, this is the somewhat more valuable Pizzazz version of this issue. There’s a bound-in ad for Stan’s vanity project celebrity magazine by that name in some copies of many comics of this era, and it ups the value. Score for me. My 176 could have been a Pizzazz variant, but was not. Hey, what’s goin’ on back at the hospital?

Boy, Ross andru could draw some creepy Aunt Mays. So, it’s time for that well-worn subplot, “Aunt May is dying.” But Peter’s not home for that call ‘cuz he’s on his way to the meeting in Top of the World, a restaurant atop the World Trade Center, where Silvermane is introducing himself to the assembled mob. So, I’d been very eager to see how Silvermane came back from being de-aged out of existence in ASM 75. But that apparently happened in Daredevil a few years prior to this, wherein it was revealed that, afte de-aging to nothingness, Silvermane immediately re-aged to 39 years old after Spider-Man left. How convenient! Restored to the youth he craved, he became the new Supreme Hydra somehow, and I guess when that didn’t work out, he went back to The Maggia and also turned old again? I guess he doesn’t look that old here, despite his giant head of gray hair.

We should note Kingpin is missing and presumed dead since ASM 164, which was also the last time we saw Richard Fisk before the recent 1991 block. Spider-Man arrives on the scene and rather inexplicably chooses to crawl in through an air duct and survey the situation before getting involved, despite seeing a broken window. Back inside, Silvermane’s not buying what GG is selling and orders his men to kill him. Which, of course, doesn’t work out very well for his men. Goblin dispatches all manner of goons while telling Sivermane they should just talk about this.