Norman Osborn (Earth-61610)

Norman Osborn is an industrialist and politician within his homeworld of Earth-61610; he is also a domestic terrorist known as the Green Goblin, and a cult leader simply called Scrier. From a very young age, Norman has been possessed of an obsessive personality and a lust for power, which drove him to both the creation and destruction of the megacorporation Osborn Corporations (usually referred to as OsCorp), as well as to multiple murders even before assuming a costumed identity. He considers Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, to be his greatest enemy, and though Parker himself would likely agree, the foremost and most consistent obstacle to Norman's triumph is his own vice and ego.

Early Life
Norman Virgil Osborn was born and raised in the ancestral Osborn home in Hartford, Connecticut, the latest member of a once-prestigious family. His paternal great-great-grandfather, Alton Osborn, had been a titan of the steelmaking industry in the mid-1800s, manufacturing demand for a steel recipe of his own design until the Osborn family held a fortune comparable to that of the Rockefellers. But Norman's father, Amberson, was an idiot with an addictive personality and a habit of leaping without looking; throughout Norman's childhood Amberson gradually squandered the family fortune on reckless purchases and business ventures that went nowhere. Amberson blamed his own failures on his wife and son, and when the young Norman began to show signs of brilliance his jealous father's abuse became physical.

Norman had a childhood sweetheart in the form of Emily Lyman, the daughter of a similar old-money family who he had met in private school. However, over the course of his adolescence Norman developed a hatred of his father, both for the abuse suffered at his hands and for the gradual diminishing of his birthright. He began to grow obsessed with wealth and power, an obsession that would guide him for his entire life, and became cold to most of the outside world. He and Emily continued to date, and would eventually marry, largely out of obligation to their respective families.

The Osborn family retained enough wealth and prestige that Norman found it quite easy to get into Columbia University. He studied chemistry, electrical engineering, and business administration, but Columbia's policy at the time required him to take classes in liberal arts as well, and Norman was surprised to find himself enjoying his study of Shakespearean drama. Given his life up to this point and the repression he adopted to cope with it, it seems that Norman took full advantage of the catharsis offered by hamming up a dramatic role; this likely went on to inform his villainous persona later in life.

As Norman began to pursue a master's degree in chemical engineering, he developed a friendship of sorts with Dr. Mendel Stromm, who had been a professor of one of his courses in robotics. The two of them decided to form a business together after Norman earned his degree. To secure the finances for the project, Norman visited his father two months after graduating, and only a few days after his marriage to Emily. He murdered Amberson by injecting several milliliters of air into a vein as the man slept, inducing a fatal embolism which coroners mistook for a natural death. As Norman's mother had died nearly a decade before and no other immediate family members existed, Norman inherited the entirety of the remaining Osborn estate, which was nearly doubled when he sold the ancestral home; renting an apartment with his wife in New York City, he put the rest of this meager fortune towards the development of Osborn Corporations--OsCorp for short.

Fiers
The earliest years of OsCorp's existence were difficult ones. Norman, who dealt with the financial aspects of the company and was faced with competing with the likes of Stark Industries, struggled to establish a corner for OsCorp in the market. Frequently the company entered in short-term partnerships with other companies--sometimes smaller companies like OsCorp itself, sometimes manufacturing specific components for larger institutions. To facilitate these partnerships, Norman returned to his adolescent habit of self-repression. He cultivated the appearance of a nondescript businessman, with nondescript tastes and a generic, aggressively friendly demeanor. To cope with the maddening boredom this produced, Norman would fantasize about the violent murder of all who annoyed him. But he conducted himself effectively enough that, year after year, the young OsCorp continued to break even, turning enough of a profit to steadily grow in size and ambition.

in 1989 the company was approached by the U.S. military, who hoped for cutting-edge weapons technology in expectation of a brewing war in the Middle East. Stromm's department of the company produced several prototype tanks, turrets, and basic body armor, which the Pentagon eagerly purchased. But Norman's ideas for performance enhancers and a new generation of super-soldiers were rejected, deemed impractical and risky given recent international treaties and the military's previous failures in Korea and Vietnam. However, even as Norman was preparing to scrap these ideas, he was secretly contacted by higher-ups within the Central Intelligence Agency--particularly a man named Gustav Fiers, who had been a member of the organization since the very beginning in 1947. Fiers hoped to enlist the production of superhuman operatives for covert missions, especially those which could not be traced back to the CIA. As he talked to Norman about this over the months, he subtly floated the idea of additional superhuman operatives in the employ of American corporations--or criminal enterprises, depending on the bidder. Norman established a laboratory for development of this project and kept it a secret from everyone not personally involved, which included both his wife Emily and his partner Mendel Stromm.