One could be forgiven for not knowing who The Hood is; it has been nearly two-and-a-half decades since his baffling ascension to Avengers Big Bad in the pages of The New Avengers, and while he’s been around here and there since, very few of those appearances feel particularly memorable.
The comics collecting in The Hood: The Saga of Parker Robbins, out this week, throw us back over two decades to the character’s origin in 2002. Released in the second year of Marvel’s half-hearted MAX imprint, it’s clear that The Hood has not aged as well as some of its peers.
Nor does it stand up next to the other works of its writer, Brian K Vaughan, whose most celebrated books stand as masterworks of the medium. The Hood, by contrast, is frankly embarrassing. It reads as if Vaughan was so excited by the prospect of filling his comic book with swears that he lost his inborn ability to filter even the most repugnant of slurs from the script. There are curse words in sentences where no curse words belong – and the insistence of filling the dialogue with them makes every character feel like a hyperactive thirteen-year-old experimenting with their first naughty words.
Marvel Comics
This isn’t to imply curse words are inherently bad or wrong – we’re all adults here – but when MAX’s crown jewel, Alias, opened its first issue with a lone, beleaguered “f*ck”, it cemented a new, meaningful endeavor for the Marvel Universe; it was placed there as a sort of mission statement, a totemic paradigm shift. Here, the language fills like a lazy tone-setter.
Certainly, The Hood’s exhausting overtures into foul language (and a fair amount of hate-speech and micro-aggression) was meant to illustrate the sort of characters the book is dealing with: two-bit (ahem) hoods, so intellectually low and criminally incompetent in their endeavors that their biggest pay-off happens to be two pairs of shoes and a stretch of red fabric.
That stretch of red fabric – and its dumbass puppet, Parker Robbins – isn’t a bad concept, however. That an everyday failure might stumble into an impossible power isn’t new to the Marvel Universe, where most powers seem derived from disastrous super-science mistakes. What’s remarkable is Robbins’ steely ingenuity; he’s clever enough to succeed where all the animal-themed dopes continuously fail.
Sadly, the best parts of Parker Robbins’ journey – becoming the crime head of a super-powered mafia and the major conflicts with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes – aren’t contained in The Saga of Parker Robbins. 2002’s The Hood is followed by 2009’s Dark Reign: The Hood, a minor footnote in one of the early 2000s’ endless Marvel events. Jeff Parker steps into the writing role and attempts to tease out the threads left dangling when the character was abandoned seven years earlier, attempting to conclude the story of trivial Hood-antagonist White Fang while also deepening Robbins’ personal and professional narrative.
While Hood co-creator Kyle Hotz returns for the second miniseries and bridges the tone with his sinewy, block-shaded creeps, the two stories feel overwhelmingly disconnected; as with most of the The Saga Of. . . books, the saga presented is a broken and incomplete one.
As it is, The Saga of Parker Robbins feels, at best, a handy auxiliary handbook – a book of footnotes for further reading. At worst, it feels like a document of a period of comics best obscured by time, back when dude-bros called each other “queer” and ceaselessly maligned women, and when Marvel made the mistake of expecting continuing greatness from Marvel MAX.
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