The futureHobgoblin has one of the coolest ensembles in comics. One of the biggest problems superheroes and supervillains face is how to hide their costumes from prying eyes. After all, you never know when your nosy boss, parent, or girlfriend will start poking around your stuff and accidentally discover your super suit. Because of this, heroes likeSpider-Man used to wear their costumes underneath their clothes.
Other superhumans have opted for more creative solutions. Superman makes his costumes out of super-compressible materials that let him hide his costume in his mouth. The Flash (and Reverse-Flash) keeps his costume in a ring. And Iron Man once created a special armor that he could store inside hisbones.
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OneSpider-Man villain, however, came up with a way to hide a costume that was so innovativenobodycould find the suit. Although this villain has since fallen into obscurity (literally), Marvel’s Hobgoblin 2211 has some of the coolest tricks hidden inside her costume. That’s right – her. Although the Hobgoblin has normally been a male villain, the future Hobgoblin is a woman named Robin Borne. In a further twist, Robin’s father is none other than Max Borne, the Spider-Man of the year 2211!
Robin first appeared as the Hobgoblin in theSpider-Man Meets Spider-Man 2099 one-shot that showed Peter Parker’s first meeting with Miguel O’Hara, the Spider-Man of the year 2099. Toward the end of the comic, both Spider-Men found themselves thrown into the year 2211 where they learned the future Hobgoblin had been masterminding their entire time-traveling adventure in a bid to wipe them both out of existence with her “retcon bombs.” Hobgoblin was stopped by Spider-Man 2211 who sent the two confused Spider-Men back to their own times.
Readers finally got to learn who and what Hobgoblin really was inFriendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #9,in a storyline written bySpider-Man 2099writer Peter David. David revealed that Robin was once a brilliant scientist with an amazing grasp of time travel and alternate universes. Obsessed with making her father proud, Robin secretly built a suit that would allow her to travel through alternate timelines. Although this was illegal, Robin was convinced her experiments wouldsave her universe from being consumed by another reality.
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Unfortunately, Robin’s father – the leader of his time’s Temporal Oversight Team Eliminating Mistakes (TOTEM) – learned what his daughter was doing and chose to arrest her for crimes she wasgoingto commit. Robin was furious, but moments later her father put her in a virtual reality prison that pumped so many feel-good chemicals into her head that she was too oblivious to know what was happening. Years later, Robin’s fiancé tried to break her out by inserting a computer virus into the VR prison, but this only pumped new chemicals into the prisoners’ heads, enhancing their strength and driving them insane.
Now completely mad, Robin decided to use her special suit to get revenge on her father by destroyingevery version of Spider-Man throughout history. The time police had been searching for the suit without success, and Robin soon revealed why they couldn’t find it – instead of hiding it in some secret safe, she hid it in a “temporal fold” that wasalways ten seconds in the future. Since the suit was never in the same time frame as the police, it was always out of reach.
Of course, Robin knew how to retrieve the suit, and after making a few modifications she transformed into a new Hobgoblin and escaped her time period to go on a murder spree throughout history. Robin chose her name based on the nickname “Hobby” her father had given her. Her suit was also more metallic than other Goblin costumes and resembled the armor Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin/Norman Osborn wore in the original Sam RaimiSpider-Manfilm (it was also colored green and purple like the Green Goblin suits).
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In addition to protecting Robin and allowing her to travel through time and across parallel universes, the Hobgoblin armor contained finger blasters and could project 3D images – allowing the Hobgoblin to torment the original Spider-Man with realistic illusions of Gwen Stacy’s death. She also rode a glider that emitted biospores enabling her to take control of any mechanical device they infested.
However, Hobgoblin’s most devastating weapons were her “retcon bombs.” Instead of simply exploding like a pumpkin bomb, theretcon bombs couldliterally erase a target out of history.Not only would the victims of her bombs die in the explosions, they wouldnever have existed to begin with.This caused everyone who ever knew these people to forget about them and caused major time paradoxes. Robin demonstrated this when one of her first bombs erased her fiancé from existence, despite the fact that he’d freed her from prison.
Thus armed, Hobgoblin went after both Peter Parker andMiguel O’Hara, hoping to dominate their timelines with her own, but was stopped by her father/Spider-Man 2211. Thanks to the time travel technology in her suit, however, Robin could always evade capture and continue her mission in another historical era. She eventually reappeared during Marvel’s original Civil War event (while Peter was wearing the “Iron Spider” armor) and re-engaged him. Because Peter’s suit in this era was mechanical, Hobgoblin’s biospores were able to control his armor and render him immobile for a while.
Max Borne showed up and attempted to stop his daughter again, but this time Robin had had enough. Furious at how her father was never proud of her, she threw a retcon bomb at him, even though erasing him out of existence would erase her as well. Before the bomb could strike Spider-Man 2211, Peter Parker snagged it with a webline and – thinking it was an ordinary pumpkin bomb – deflected it back at the Hobgoblin. Robin was subsequently erased from history and everyone forgot about her.
Although her supervillain career was brief, Robin Borne created one of the most creative Goblin costumes in the Marvel Universe. Where other Goblins used weapons of force and toxins, the future Hobgoblin could literallyrip her victims out of reality with her time travel technology. This also gave her unique options for hiding her suit and escaping, although her tricks ultimately led to her downfall. Unfortunately, since Robin no longer exists, it’s unlikely we’ll see this cool costume return to plagueSpider-Man.
