He’s still Green on the inside. I had such complicated feelings about all this at the time, as a Spider -Man person. You know, Norman is supposed to be his big bad, but now he’s been so far removed from the character who fights Spider-Man. Now he’s more or less taken over the world. He’s an Avengers level threat. So… how does he work in a Spider-Man comic? They keep trying to find ways to square it, and it doesn’t quite work for me. He has resources so far beyond Spider-Man now. It’s like when they leaned into Phoenix being this primal universal force. She’s higher and more powerful than the Asgardian gods and whatever. And, ok, sure, but like… How is she supposed to go back to fighting the Juggernaut now? She can unmake whole planets, even Magneto or Apocalypse should be light work for her. The power differential is all messed up. When all this is over, Norman Osborn is still an Avengers-level threat. He can’t go back to just harassing Spider-Man sometimes. It’s awkward. At any rate, this month, ol’ Normie is being interviewed on live TV about his rise to power. The interviewer notes some people are uncomfortable that his is not an elected position, but he counters that he was appointed by elected officials and has to earn the peoples’ trust. He says that, in his short time on the job, he’s already come into contact with some amazing people.
Norman takes his helmet off, does more of his “say there is no Void with me” bit, points out Lindy in the window and suggests they go say “hi.” The rest of the team remain freaked out in the Quinjet and we return to the interview, where the lady brings up and plays a clip from Clint going on TV in NA 50. And she asks Norman if he was the Green Goblin, and he says he was. This is public knowledge. Even he mentions that…
I always have trouble with what the average man on the street knows about the superheroes and their doings in the Marvel U. Like, in the 90s, when they started showing kids having Wolverine posters in their room and whatnot, I would wonder, “Could that kid really know who Wolverine is?” But the last time Norman was the Green Goblin, he was defeated live on TV, in the Pulse #8. I just… this lack of fact checking in a fictional interview is really bothering me. Like it does in real life. We cut back to the recent past, with the rest of the team being delivered the medications they’re kept on to seem semi-sane in public, and Venom and Bullseyet in a spat. Ares tries to stop it with a kind of not-so-good speech, and when Bullseye is sarcastic about it, he gets slapped in the face. Everyone thinks it’ll be a fight, but he just takes his meds.
If we’re going to do stuff like this, I would want the interviewer to ask him who, exactly, his Hawkeye is. I think that’s a fair question after a speech like this. And after we go back 3 hours to find Ares discovering his son, Phobos, has been missing school, because Ares doesn’t yet know that Phobos joined Nick Fury’s Secret Warriors, she does. Sort of.
Cut to Moonstone seducing Marvel Boy. This gets to another thing I just don’t understand, which is the Registration Act. Shouldn’t the Avengers’ identities have to be public? Maybe not on TV, but on record. Shouldn’t someone be able to file a Freedom of Information Act request or something? You may not know who all is in the army, but you can find out. SHOULD they be public-public? None of that was ever defined in anything I read. It annoys me. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, what appears to be this year’s Atlantean invasion of the surface world kicks off.
Noh-Varr simply having no idea what he’s gotten into is pretty good. He’s an alien from another dimension. He’s not even a Kree from this reality. He’s spent most of his time here in jail. His knowledge is pretty limited. What will he do with this revelation? Anything?