{"id":21062,"date":"2024-04-25T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-25T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=21062"},"modified":"2022-08-23T23:09:50","modified_gmt":"2022-08-24T03:09:50","slug":"tac-261","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/04\/25\/tac-261\/","title":{"rendered":"TAC 261"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We\u2019re back fo the big finish. It\u2019s kind of crazy that Glenn Greenberg was the only one swinging for the fences while the books went into an obvious holding pattern for the big event that will close out this era. As we\u2019ve seen, the other titles are mostly treading water, but this is 2 of Spidey\u2019s biggest villains of all time. One one of them is about to unmask our hero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is a very cliche reversal, but it works a little better here than usual since we can assume Norman wouldn\u2019t want anyone else to know Peter\u2019s secret. Hobby rips the door off the bathroom and they drag Daniel out. Then Hobby wraps the unconscious Spider-Man up in his own webbing, and the Goblins take off with their captives. And Daniel has passed out, so Green Goblin can\u2019t demand the location of the journal, which I\u2019m pretty sure doesn\u2019t exist. Pretending to have Osborn\u2019s journals is a weirdly common gambit down the years. Harry did it to lure out Hobgoblin in 260, Betty did it in Hobgoblin Lives!. Works every time on any Goblin of your choice! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I don\u2019t know what all future writers could do with Kingsley knowing Norman knows who Spider-Man is, but I don\u2019t recall any kind of follow up about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Don\u2019t worry, Betts, he\u2019s on it. Well, sort of. He\u2019s waking up in Obsorn\u2019s clutches, and embarrassed to find himself trapped in his own web. He\u2019s back just in time for Osborn to reveal he knows there\u2019s no journal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Luke Ross\u2019s action is still too weird. Cartoony. He\u2019s trying, but it\u2019s more like Looney Tunes characters fighting than supervillains. Look at Osborn\u2019s wacky reaction down there. Green goblin zaps back, but Norman calls him off, angry enough to take care of this himself. He leaps up onto Hobby\u2019s glider as Spider-Man reaches the point where the plot demands he break free of the trap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cLil Blood & Guts?\u201d That odd, downturned, clawed hand gesture is such a McFarlane thing. I should know, I integrated it into my own library of Spider-Man imagery when drawing for decades. Green Goblin goes flying into the other two, and then Spider-Man leaps over them to\u2026 unmask him. He was just so worried about Daniel. He does unmask Green Goblin, but can\u2019t see his face in the fire and smoke. So he reverts to saving Daniel, and does so, leaping them both out of the blaze and onto the street in front of a taxi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For some reason, Daniel is still outside, being questioned by a cop and treated by a medic, and begging to be taken anywhere else. In the fire, Norman just\u2026 walks out of the fight remarkably easily, leaving Spider-Man and Hobgoblin to their who-knows-how-many-th battle in a burning building. Norman\u2019s sweating it because he has no idea how he\u2019s getting out of this one without arousing suspicion, or worse, until he trips over his lackey\u2019s mask.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some firefighters burst in, and Spider-Man has to divert his attention saving them from a collapsing wall, which comes down on him, instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Later that night, we find MJ patching up Peter\u2019s wounds and he beats himself up for not accomplishing anything, until she reminds him of all the people he saved today. Don\u2019t worry, Peter, you couldn\u2019t have accomplished anything, there\u2019s a big crossover coming. But also\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Of course the world hasn\u2019t heard the last of Hobgoblin, but he does end up taking a remarkably long break. In fact, Kingsley doesn\u2019t really appear again until 2012! Fourteen years out of the limelight is almost as long as Norman\u2019s \u201cbreak.\u201d But I guess with Norman back, maybe people didn\u2019t think having multiple Goblins running around served much of a purpose. Even after he came back, after some initial scraps with Spider-Man, he tended to show up in other peoples\u2019 books afterward. But anyway. Stern kind of got to work on an ending for his guy. That\u2019s interesting. And now it\u2019s time to get down to the business of ending the Vol. 1 era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re back fo the big finish. It\u2019s kind of crazy that Glenn Greenberg was the only one swinging for the fences while the books went into an obvious holding pattern for the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21035,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[153,113,11,1251,1690,12,1256,40,163,13,976,442,629,21,39,117,121,2],"class_list":["post-21062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-al-milgrom","tag-ben-urich","tag-betty-brant","tag-billy-walters","tag-daniel-kingsley","tag-flash-thompson","tag-glenn-greenberg","tag-green-goblin","tag-hobgoblin","tag-j-jonah-jameson","tag-jill-stacy","tag-john-kalisz","tag-luke-ross","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-norman-osborn","tag-roger-stern","tag-spectacular-spider-man","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21062"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21063,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21062\/revisions\/21063"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}