If you’re a Harry Osborn fan, and I assume you are since you’re here and all, you might know that things are looking up for Harry’s future in the 616 comics now! Let’s celebrate with a look back at more of his early days.

In #50, Peter suffers yet another blow to his life when Aunt May falls ill. Harry is on hand to offer support, as a good friend should.

Don’t worry, she’s fine! Nothing can kill her!

Harry later mildly worries about crime,

and reminds Peter that Norman’s offer of a job still stands. Then we get a little more clarification, sort of, on what exactly the status of the Harry/Gwen relationship is. They aren’t actually “pinned” it would seem. We’ll stick with calling it casual dating.

Harry, please lose the bow tie, I’m begging you.

Oh, also this the famous “Spider-Man No More!” issue! You know the one.

But as we know… It didn’t take.

An issue later in #51, here’s Mary Jane stirring things up again! Oh, the sexual tension between this lot. It baffles me how come the 60s era is never mined for drama in the various Spider-Man adaptions.

That brief appearance is all we get of Harry in that issue, but next one along in #52 he gets more screentime (pagetime?) as Flash is back!

Ah, one for the Harry/Flash shippers there.

The “Westmoreland” mentioned here is William Westmoreland, commander of the United States Army during the Vietnam War.

Here the group joke about the Vietnam War, which seems very strange to me personally since I grew up with the understanding it was full of civillian casualties and new horrors scarcely seen in warfare before. (That was something about Vietnam I did learn.) But of course military humor is hardly an unheard of thing. And I imagine Marvel didn’t want to (or couldn’t?) dive too deep.

Here MJ references Rock Hudson, this famous actor who does indeed look quite a bit like Flash. You probably know of Hudson because of the sad story surrounding his hidden sexuality and his death from AIDs, but when this comic was written no-one could have guessed that was to come.

Harry once again defends Peter to Flash, who is just ob-sess-ed with making fun of him. An endearing trait of Harry’s, that, since Peter isn’t even there to hear it.

But NEXT issue things between these two friends (DUN DUN DUN) take a turn for the worse!

---

Want to buy these stories? They’re collected in Amazing Spider-Man Masterworks Vol. 5 and Amazing Spider-Man Masterworks Vol. 6.