"Goblin Up the Profits"

Hobgoblin #1 and #2

Published by Marvel Comics

Written by Kevin Shinick

Art by Javier Rodriguez and Alvaro Lopez

Who doesn't love a good villain story? If the current fever over DC's Suicide Squad trailer is any indication, I'm not alone in enjoying the occasional excursion to the wrong side of the tracks and letting the baddies tell their side of the story once in a while. Marvel's Axis event from a couple years back looked to not only tip the scales in favor of villainy, but reverse the poles, casting long time heroes as menaces and vice versa. The Axis event isn't of much import to today's back issue dive, except that Hobgoblin is a tie-in that has roots in the event, but I want to bring it up just because 2013/2014 was apparently the year the baddies took control of our hearts and minds. Just across the way at DC comics, the Forever Evil event was also raging on, mind you.

The "inversion" event in Axis serves as the catalyst for Hobgoblin. As to how the inversion thingamajig actually works, I'm not sure. Axis and Uncanny Avengers passed me by at the time. All I knew going into Hobgoblin issue one was that Roderick Kingsley had taken to leasing out superhero identities instead of villains and Phil Urich was living underground and calling himself the Goblin King.

The Goblin saga in the Spider-Man sub-division of the Marvel Universe has taken some interesting turns over the last couple of years, most of which I wasn't privy to firsthand. As far as I can tell, the Goblins are now a gang and the Osborns aren't even in the picture. I could be wrong about this, or not up to date, as I haven't been a regular Spider-Man reader in quite some time. Hobgoblin #1 and #2 were impulse buys, with Javier Rodriguez's simple-but-attention-grabbing covers doing more to sell me the book than any actual interest in catching up with the ol' Spidey soap opera.

The story Shinick tells here, about Roderick Kingsley cashing in on the disenfranchised by promising to reinvent themselves as superheroes, feels like a concept from The Venture Brothers. Kingsley is portrayed as a total shill, never missing an opportunity to plug his latest self-help book or stadium-filling seminar. The satire isn't subtle, or even completely original, but the humor is sharp and makes the story worth pursuing. Personally, I feel the most important aspect of a comic is its entertainment value, and Hobgoblin has that in spades.

Opposing Kingsley is the villainous self-proclaimed "heir" to the Goblin legacy, Phil Urich. Urich is scorched that Kingsley is using the once-feared Goblin name to perform half-baked super heroics and sell books (of which he is not getting a cut, I presume). Caught between them is the amnesiac Goblin Queen, found wandering the streets by Kingsley's recruiters and "rebranded" as superheroine Queen Cat. The King wants his Queen and many quips and fisticuffs commence.

There's an Axis banner at the top of each cover to Hobgoblin, branding it a "tie-in" and perhaps causing many fans to pass by, but they missed out. Ironic that a comic about brand management is hurt by the very same thing. I can't think of any other Kevin Shinick comics off the top of my head, so he's a new writer to me and I'd be interested to read some of his other stuff. The style and humor of this comic lives on in Chip Zdarsky's Howard the Duck and is reminiscent of Peter Milligan's X-Statix, if you need another comparison.

Thanks for reading! Pester me at @ChrisBComics if erection lasts more than four hours.