Black Hero Appreciation Month: Hobie Brown (The Prowler)

While he didn’t start out as technically a hero, I have always been a big fan of Hobie Brown, The Prowler, and not because we share the same last name. No, I credit The Prowler with helping keep me from my otherwise inevitable transition into a racist redneck.

OK, some explanation is clearly required. I grew up in rural Maine in the 1960s and ’70s, in my early years on a 15-acre farm. It was there in a corner of our southern field I found my first comic book, issue #180 of Dr. Strange with Eternity and Dr. Strange on the cover. Later that same summer, in between 2nd and 3rd grade we moved to a slightly less rural setting, the small town of Fryeburg where both my parents were from. I was thrilled to discover that, just a few blocks down Main Street from our new house, Oliver’s Rexall Drug store carried new comic books every week (Solari’s Country Store, a few buildings closer, also carried comics, but they were in the same rack as the girlie magazines and I didn’t want to get in trouble, because I was obviously going to look at those instead of comic books).

The next year, after spending much of my allowance every week on comic books, issue # 78 of The Amazing Spider-Man came out, and the main antagonist (villain is so not the right term) was Hobie Brown, a black man, a brilliant mechanical and electrical engineer, who was working as a window washer and who got fired from even that job. So he took the inventions he had made to make his dangerous job safer and turned them into the tools of a masked super-criminal.

There he was on the cover — some kind of zapper wristbands like the Black Widow, claws for hands to climb brick walls, and a hood, collar and cape that in retrospect clearly inspired Spawn many years later. And he was a criminal only so that he could take things as The Prowler in order to return them as Hobie to get the much smaller reward — if there was any.

Here was a struggling man making a poor decision with noble intentions — clearly a good man in a tough spot, and he looked nothing at all like my white, rural friends and relatives, but I still identified with his struggle. To be absolutely clear how my destiny was to become a racist redneck, a couple years later a black family moved into town, the dad opening up a barbershop, and they were run out of town within a year. I had relatives who didn’t get electricity to their farm until I was in my 20s. So, yeah, racist redneck future awaited.

It was Hobie Brown that allowed me to talk to the first black person I ever did, later that same fall. I went to Oliver’s on comic book day and there was a black high school student kneeling at the rack, also looking at comics. He said “Hi,” I responded and we talked about our favorite comics for quite a while before he made his choices, bought them and left. I knew he had to be a high-school student because of the unique nature of our local school district. The local public high school was Fryeburg Academy, also a well-known boarding school, which was proud that its first headmaster was Daniel Webster (yes, that Daniel Webster). By the time I got there, I was going to school with black students from New York City, Bermuda and all over, as well as kids of all sorts of ethnicities from Sweden, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia.

If it had not been for Hobie Brown, and that other comic book fan (I was only 9, so my memory is pretty hazy, but I think his name was Mike), I would have been just like a bunch of my fellow townie freshman when I got to high school, trying to pick fights with those dorm students just because they looked or talked differently.

The Prowler’s status as a criminal pretty much ended in the very next issue after his first appearance, when Peter Parker let him go once he heard Hobie’s story. However, his path kept crossing the line between criminal and hero for years, always because circumstances put him in a tough spot. Hobie even had his own series for a while, and in the current run of Spider-Man stories, he is working for Peter as a fake Spider-Man to help him dodge the greater chance of discovery now that Peter is globally known as CEO of Parker Industries.

Before Scott Lang became the poster child for criminal-turned-hero for Marvel as the second Ant-Man, Hobie Brown did it, again and again. But because of his influence on me, The Prowler will always be a hero in my eyes.