But none for you, Norman.

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Arguably my favourite thing about Harry is that he’s a good father, or at least, as good as he could concievably be given his circumstances and the weird damn demons-and-wizards world he lives in. Harry’s relationship with little Normie constantly highlights how different a man he is from Norman even in the midst of madness and attempted murder.

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In the MC2 universe (the one where Peter’s daughter becomes Spider-Girl and Harry remains dead) Harry continues to protect his son even from beyond the grave… unlike Norman of course.

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Norman never stopped being an abuser but Harry broke the cycle, one way or another, and that’s so damn important. An achivement of Harry’s that doesn’t get talked about enough in the comics if you ask me.

A lot of good stuff about Harry as a parent came out after his “death”, actually. This is still the saddest, saddest line:

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“Don’t ever be like daddy.”

But Harry did come back from the dead and we got some great parenting moments from there too! Not least because Harry ended up with another child.

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We haven’t really seen all that much of the relationship between Harry and Stanley – the artists can’t even be bothered to keep Stanley with dark skin – but I suppose some of that is because babies obviously can’t, y’know, coherently communicate. I’m hoping that will change in years to come. On the other hand, Normie has been a 10-year-old or thereabouts for over twenty years now so maybe I shouldn’t hold my breath.

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We do know that Harry keeps Stanley with him in his office sometimes which is very cute! And takes him to the playpark of course.

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As if all that wasn’t enough, when Harry ran the Coffee Bean in the comics Peter used to observe him parenting random children which is just totally adorable.

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Even all this is just scratching the surface of Harry’s tremendous Dad-itude. My dearest hope is that we get more of it in canon soon.