Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man Nearly Had Green Goblin As Its First Villain

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, see how close Green Goblin came to being the first villain of Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man series

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and fifty-ninth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

Green Goblin was originally going to be the first villain of Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man series.

STATUS:

True

Recently, I did a Comic Book Legends Revealed about Todd McFarlane's 1990 launch of a new ongoing Spider-Man series for Marvel, and specifically how the idea WASN'T his, but rather, something that Spider-Man group editor Jim Salicrup came up with so that he would not lose his superstar artist from the Spider-Man offices.

In Comics Scene Spectacular #2, McFarlane explained what happened to Daniel Dickholtz, "If it was my choice, I wouldn't have created another Spider-Man book. You've got four, so you're going to hit them with a fifth book? But the decision to do a Spider-Man book wasn't mine. I just wanted to go into a new book and do some writing as well as the artwork, and they [specifically Salicrup - BC] wanted me to continue doing Spider-Man, so the best way to keep everybody happy was to create another Spider-Man title. And I'm going to turn that down, being the character that he is. I mean, I would have had to go to a lesser character or create a new one that nobody really knew about, but this way, I can have my cake and eat it too."

By the way, the four books at the time that McFarlane is referring to are Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man and Marvel Tales, a book that reprinted older Spider-Man stories (I don't think a lot of people think of that as a "Spider-Man" comic book, but it was in the Spider-Man office at the time).

McFarlane noted, though, that that led to his fears over making his book standout, as he pointed out, "Since I'm doing it, my biggest thing is to make this book different from the others, just to justify having it out there."

One of the ways that Salicrup decided to help McFarlane was to make the book a bit different from the other titles, in terms of continuity, in the sense that McFarlane's Spider-Man comic did not have to follow the same sort of strict continuity of the other three books, which often reflected each other's ongoing subplots in them (for a time, Gerry Conway was actually writing Spectacular Spider-Man and Web of Spider-Man, giving those two books a REALLY tight continuity). Before McFarlane left Amazing Spider-Man, the books had just recently done a quasi crossover where Spider-Man gained Cosmic superpowers that was pretty tight, continuity-wise.

McFarlane noted about this continuity approach that "They were doing it basically to save me from floundering and to minimize my mistakes," however he also realized that the tradeoff also allowed him "to do bigger storylines. So, we're going to play it like a mini-series within a series, although I can't very well do anything major-major. I can't chop Peter Parker's arm off because then we would have to chop it off in the other books. I can chop it off within my story; I just somehow have to re-attach it by the time the story's over."

However, the freedom that McFarlane had had some limitations, including him not being allowed to launch the series with the original villain he wanted to use, the Green Goblin!

He recalled, "I wanted to start off with a Spider-Man/Green Goblin confrontation. I figured the two classic guys in the first five issues, I mean, what better way to start off a story? but they've already got plans for the Green Goblin. With some of the others, I would go, 'Well, how about this guy?' 'No, he's tied up.' By the time we ran through the list, I was limited as to who I could use, so I made it a hybrid, bringing in an old guy, crossing it over with a new bad guy, to see if I can pull off a semi-interesting story."

In the end, McFarlane chose one older Spider-Man villain, the Lizard...

but he mixed the Lizard up with a newer villain, Calypso, a minor villain connected to Kraven who had only made two appearances in the mid-1980s before McFarlane brought her back as a mostly behind-the-scenes villain in "Torment," with her full reveal not even coming until the penultimate issue of the story...

"Torment" definitely was an interesting story, and it was a huge hit! Spider-Man remained mostly in its own sort of continuity until it briefly tied in with Maximum Carnage with issues #35-37, before then REALLY looping into the other three Spider-Man books with issue #44, as Howard Mackie left Web of Spider-Man to take over Spider-Man with the late, great Tom Lyle.

Thanks to Todd McFarlane and Daniel Dickholtz for the information!