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September 19, 2006

Hob-gooba-gabba

The Byrne board discusses one of the great comic mysteries of the 80s, "Who was the Hobgoblin?"

Byrne weighs in:

other writers stepped in to destroy the mystery as quickly as they could. And to do it as badly as they could, too!

I can't count the number of times this has happened to me, having left a storyline with a question mark at the end, deliberately, only to have some hack come in later and answer the question. Of all the lazy writing we get in comics, this is the laziest.

Then someone reposts PAD's take on it all:

Basically, here's what happened:

There was a Spider-Man writer's summit, and it was decided there (since Roger was no longer connected with the books) that the HG would be Ned. DeFalco started doing a series of stories building up to that revelation.

But then DeFalco and editor Jim Owsley had a falling out and DeFalco departed the books. Owsley then sat me down and said, "The HG is going to be the Foreigner, and you're going to write the story in which that's revealed."

I said, "The hell he is, and the hell I will. It makes no sense. He's Ned."

Owsley said, "Well, here's the problem. Too many fans think Ned is the Hobgoblin. In order to close that door, I wrote this Spidey/Wolverine one shot and Ned gets killed by terrorists."

I nearly had a stroke. I said, "But...you CAN'T! Ned's the Hobgoblin."

Owsley said, "If you don't want the Foreigner to be the Hobgoblin, you come up with something else."

So I re-read Tom's run, looking for an out. There wasn't one. Tom had been too thorough. It was obvious why all the fans were figuring out it was Ned; there was no one else it could possibly be. I went out to lunch with Owsley, totally flummoxed about what to do. I said, "Wait...who kills Ned in the one-shot?"

"Terrorists," said Owsley. "The death isn't shown. Peter just finds the body."

And that's when it hit me.

I said, "I've got it. Ned will be the Hobgoblin. It won't be terrorists who killed him; it'll be the Foreigner's men. And we'll reveal it four months later. And for those four months, all those fans who were convinced Ned is the HG will be convinced that Ned is the one person who couldn't POSSIBLY be the HG, because who would be stupid enough to knock off the main villain months before revealing his identity? It's never been done. And no one could ever do it again."

And Owsley went for it.

And that's the God's honest truth of how it happened.

PAD

And then someone posts without reading the thread. Because the mystery was already solved. Like, twice:

In my mind it is still a mystery and probably always will be.

The best mysteries never need an answer--I wish more editors would appreciate that.

Three pages in and no ones asked Byrne what "question marks" and what "hacks" he was referring to...

Posted by YourMomsBasement at September 19, 2006 10:00 AM