Always a treat to see Romita, Sr. art. The covers alone completely justify this storyline. We pick up right where we left off, with Osborn and Kingsley sizing each other up.
Nice recreation of the cover to ASM 250 there. A lot of place setting in this, but as I’ve said in the past, probably very necessary, as it’s not like people had ready access to back issues or wikipedia. Again, we credit the destruction of the journals to ASM 251 instead of 261. Tsk.
Some weird pacing. Next page and next day, we find Spider-Man watching the cops search Kingsley, Ltd. for evidence of the escaped con. Curiously, Ross swipes a McFarlane pose, but doesn’t do his old McFarlane impression in copying it. He’s developed his own take on Spider-Man, he’s just copied the pose. I guess that’s growth. Be better if he didn’t copy anything. Spidey does some more recapping about what happened in Hobgoblin Lives and also saves a guy wandering into traffic from getting killed as he worries what this turn of events is doing to Betty’s state of mind.
That’s a funny bit. Peter runs into Flash, who says neither Norman or JJJ has been in to work today, and they squabble over Norman’s role in the paper until Betty gets annoyed and chases them off. Then Peter randomly flashes back to how he & Flash were enemies in high school. So much backstory this issue. Then he asks Betty if she’d doing ok, and they affirm that they’ll both work hard to get this sorted.
Complicated relationship. Elsewhere, Spider-Man has also realized Daniel is a good angle, but also doesn’t know where he is. So he pops in on, who else, Detective Snider, his pal from the Stern days, in the most obvious evidence of Stern’s role in this story. In a rather aggressive stroke of luck, as Spidey is trying to convince Snider to tell him where Daniel is, Sinder gets notified that Daniel is being attacked. Spidey tells Snider he has to trust him. We cut to The Big Apple Hotel, which has a whole side blown off the top floors now, and where cops are having a hard time with Hobgoblin. He is able to swoop in and grab his brother.
Spidey and The Goblin get into it, Spidey trying to goad his foe into revealing his deal with Osborn, but as they struggle, Hobgoblin tries to shoot Spider-Man in the face, and Spidey grabs his wrist and redirects his shot, accidentally making him shoot a loose pumpkin bomb and causing a huge explosion. The Green Goblin, having been watching the whole time, decides to take a closer look.
I bet he doesn’t! A very long letter in this month’s issue tries to puzzle out who the new Green Goblin is. Editorial chides him for thinking they should’ve resolved it already, saying no one would look back fondly on the mystery of the Hobgoblin if it has been resolved in one issue. Maybe not a great way to frame it considering how badly all that went…