The Green Goblin first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #14 (July 1964), created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko as a masked, pumpkin-bomb-hurling menace who rode a flying “broomstick” and immediately set himself against Spider-Man. For two years the man under the grinning green mask remained a mystery; Norman Osborn, the ruthless industrialist behind Oscorp, was introduced separately and only later revealed as the Goblin in The Amazing Spider-Man #39–40 (1966), when the two enemies unmasked each other. Osborn had become the Goblin after testing an unstable strength serum derived from notes left by his jailed partner, Professor Mendel Stromm; the formula exploded in his face, granting him superhuman strength, speed, and intellect while shattering his sanity. He designed the grotesque green-and-purple costume from a childhood nightmare, armed himself with pumpkin bombs, razor bats, and electrically charged gloves, and upgraded his ride into the iconic Goblin Glider.

The rivalry turned personal once Osborn learned Peter Parker was Spider-Man, and it reached its most infamous peak in “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” (*The Amazing Spider-Man* #121–122, 1973). The Goblin kidnapped Gwen and threw her from a New York bridge; Spider-Man’s webline stop snapped her neck, a death that redefined superhero comics. In the following issue Osborn was impaled by his own glider and believed dead. His son Harry, Peter’s best friend, then took up the Green Goblin identity in a spiral of grief, addiction, and inherited madness, becoming the second Goblin and later dying from a flawed version of the formula. Other successors, including psychiatrist Bart Hamilton, briefly wore the mantle, while Roger Stern created the Hobgoblin as a separate heir to the same arsenal. During the 1990s Clone Saga a retcon established that Norman had survived the glider and spent years in Europe manipulating Peter’s life; he returned in Spider-Man #75 (1996), revealed himself as the architect of the cloning conspiracy, and killed Ben Reilly.

In the 2000s Osborn reinvented himself again. After helping turn back the Skrull invasion he was hailed as a patriot, given control of national security, and ruled during the “Dark Reign” as the Iron Patriot, leading a Dark Avengers team of villains in stolen heroic identities until the Siege of Asgard ended his government. Later stories saw him bonded to the Carnage symbiote as the Red Goblin and, after a forced reckoning with his sins, attempt a heroic turn as the Gold Goblin. Across six decades the Green Goblin has remained Spider-Man’s defining enemy: not only a physical threat on a glider, but the man who knew Peter’s name, destroyed the people he loved, and kept coming back.