Look Out! It's Norman Osborn!

Yes, it's another comics-related post. (But I swear this one won't be as long.)

Here's a question about the end of Secret Invasion/the beginning of Dark Reign in the Marvel Universe: how is it that no one knows outside of the superhero community that Norman Osborn is a bad guy? That he was the Green Goblin? (Okay, two questions)

It never really made sense to me that a known villain, no matter how many anti-psychotic drugs he's on to control his evil impulses, would be trusted to become the director of a government agency like The Thunderbolts (for non-comics readers, that's a group of villains forced to enforce the Superhuman Registration Act by hunting down unregistered good guys like Spider-Man). I mean really, who in their right mind would put a person actively taking anti-psychotics in charge of a bunch of psychotic bad guys? Isn't that just asking for it? Was it Tony Stark? I'm about 51% sure it was, but I honestly can't remember, and I'm not digging through the boxes to find out. But if it was, that was an example of colossally poor judgement on Stark's part. Really. How could one of the top minds of Marvel Earth not see that maybe Norman Osborn is too much of a risk to take?

Norman Osborn was the weakest part of Civil War for me, and I admit to not reading Thunderbolts, so maybe I'm missing something (perhaps he made a deal with Mephisto, and no one remembers he was the Green Goblin?) but I know I'm not missing the fact that HE'S A BAD GUY! So I don't care that he's the guy that killed the Skrull Queen, effectively ending the invasion...
...if I'm the President of the Marvel United States, I'm not handing him the keys to the security kingdom as the director of a S.H.I.E.L.D. replacement organization. I guess Dick Cheney is still V.P. of the Marvel U.S.A. at the end of Secret Invasion. This just seems so Cheney-esque.

Stepping off my irritated comics fan perch and putting on my writer hat, I also think the way that Norman finds himself catapulted into power was extremely weak from a plot perspective. He couldn't have planned his ascent to power, to his Dark Reign, this way. He was just in the right place at the right time, standing with any number of people who could have taken the killshot: Bullseye (bad guy) could have aced her with one of his trademark high-velocity playing cards; Thor (good guy) could have called down a bolt of lightning and fried her; New Captain America could have shot her with his trusty pistol; The Hood (bad guy) could have gunned her down; and so on. We needed to see Norman doing something shifty to put himself into position to be the hero - having it just happen to be him robs his ascent of any power.

Final note on Norman Osborn, a suggestion if you will. Now that Norman's in charge, let's see him start rockin' the cravat again:








He carries it off even better than the Kingpin.

-EB