 After Norman was defeated during his siege on Asgard, a massive overhaul of government structure was underway. The President had repealed the Superhuman Registration Act, H.A.M.M.E.R. was dissolved, Luke Cage was placed in charge of the Thunderbolts program, and Steve Rogers was asked to direct the next generation peace-keeping task force. The siege on Asgard decimated Osborn's Avengers team, as the members of his squad were either killed, imprisoned, or escaped. The only member of Osborn's staff that landed in a better position after the attack on Asgard was his Deputy Director, Victoria Hand. She was solicited by Steve Rogers to serve as a liaison for the New Avengers, Hand obviously accepted the promotion. Norman Osborn, of course, was stripped of all his power and placed into the high security prison known as the Raft. As Osborn was ushered into prison, a new era was ushered into the Marvel Universe, a markedly more heroic era. In the one-shot Enter The Heroic Age, Norman was publicly paraded through the Raft facility in an attempt to humiliate him in front of the other prisoners. The Bushwacker (aka Carl Burbank) postulated that the authorities intentionally embarrassed Osborn so that the prison population would lose all respect for him. In Dark Avengers #16, Norman's escort into the Raft was presented a bit differently. His march was depicted in a much more isolated and grim scene, as Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor personally saw to his incarceration. Osborn was placed in the sub-basement level 7 in cell #14, where he was to endure solitary confinement.  While Norman sat alone in his cell, he experienced a newfound resentment for the world he left behind. Describing the world as being a madhouse of mutants, terrorists, psychotics, aliens, and monsters, Osborn still felt that the world needed him. His predictions for the fate of mankind were quite inauspicious as he was convinced that the unchecked freedom of various costumed 'heros' would inevitably lead to the world's destruction. He claimed that all of his work will have been for nothing if that were to happen and that all he wanted to do was fix these inevitabilities. He was convinced that could have, had it not been for one thing...The Green Goblin. Norman's darker side began to question his capabilities as Osborn appeared to be fractured into two distinct mentalities. Osborn requested that the Green Goblin 'leave [him] alone', but the Goblin (who was now staring at Osborn in his cell) said that he cannot because '[He's] stuck here.' Norman's internal conflict with his Goblin persona came to a head in his lonely dark cell as he collapsed to the ground, a fitting end for his dark reign. This was an interesting development in the saga of Norman's psyche, since it was presumed that the mental fracturing Osborn underwent throughout his tenure as the Avengers leader was brought on solely by Loki. The God of Mischief had clearly infiltrated Norman's conscious mind and placed his delicate balance of sanity/insanity in jeopardy. But now that Loki was out of the picture, Osborn battled his Goblin persona as a separate entity. The flip-flopping back and forth between the good Norman Osborn and the evil Green Goblin was a common theme during the earliest conflicts between he and Spider-Man. However, it became very apparent that the 'good Norman Osborn' was a total farce and that Norman was an unstable, ruthless person prior to and during the years before his 'death'. Once Osborn returned to New York City, after his initial exile in Europe, he was pretty much evil all the time, as he and the Goblin persona were one in the same. The separation depicted in Dark Avengers #16 seems to be at odds with that as there appeared to be some dissociation going on, but that does not have to be the case. One could imagine that Osborn's soliloquy in his prison cell could be viewed as nothing more than ruminations of a regretful guy who does not want to fully blame himself for the downfall. In that sense, Osborn would be using the Green Goblin persona as an artificial scapegoat for his failures. It is unlikely that he has succumb to Dissociative Identity Disorder (or DID, commonly referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder) in which the Goblin and Norman are two separate psyches. The reason being is that for people who suffer from DID, its rare that the separate personalities are aware of each other, let alone having a conversation. Nevertheless, Osborn and the Green Goblin were back where they started...alone and powerless. As expected, Norman's story would not end in the prison cell and it would not take long for the surface world to find him again. |  Osborn is put on display during his arrival at the Raft as part of an attempt to humiliate him during his incarceration, as seen in Enter The Heroic Age       |