Who is Marvel’s strongest villain?

The Green Goblin was introduced in The Amazing Spider-Man #14, then his identity was kept a secret for 25 issues until the final panel of The Amazing Spider-Man #39, when he revealed himself to be Norman Osborn.

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The truth about the identity of the Hobgoblin will not be so simple. Accepted Marvel comics canon states that the one and only Hobgoblin is Roderick Kingsley, but it’s been a long, bumpy, 14-year journey to get there — as Glenn Greenberg covered on “Preliminary edition!” magazine. In When the Hobbit Met Spidey, Greenberg interviews various 80s Spider-Man writers/editors to explain how the Hobbit’s origins became such a tangled web.

Let’s set the scene: It’s 1983, and Roger Stern is writing The Amazing Spider-Man. He notices that readers writing to the letters page want the Green Goblin back, which inspires him to create a successor villain: the Hobgoblin, designed by John Romita Jr. To capture the old Lee/Ditko magic, Hobgoblin’s true identity will be revealed too to be a mystery. (Tom DeFalco, who was Spider-Man’s editor when Stern was writing, claimed in Back Issue! that the mystery was his idea.)

Almost from the beginning, Stern assumed that the Hobgoblin would be Roderick Kingsley; Stern introduced himself to Kingsley in an earlier story. According to his notes to “Prerelease!”, Stern planned The Amazing Spider-Man #238, not knowing who the Hobgoblin was, but once he started writing the villain’s dialogue, he knew it had to be Kingsley. He set up a red herring in The Amazing Spider-Man #249, when a hobgoblin tries to blackmail New York’s elite and Kingsley finds himself among the victims. For Stern, it was Daniel Kingsley, Roderick’s weak-willed younger brother, whom he used as a double.

According to Defalk’s recollections, Stern kept the truth so close to himself that he didn’t even tell him, his editor: “I told Roger, ‘I’m going to keep a list of suspects and I’m going to cross the guys out. when their time comes, and when it’s time to reveal, you tell me who it is, and if I agree, it will be who, and if I don’t agree, well, I’m the editor!”

Stern intended that the Hobgoblin mystery would last one issue longer than the Green Goblin mystery (meaning it would be wrapped up in The Amazing Spider-Man #264 or so). Unfortunately, Stern left The Amazing Spider-Man due to a personality conflict with new editor Danny Fingeroth. Stern’s last issue, The Amazing Spider-Man #251, teases on the cover that the Hobgoblin’s identity will be revealed, but the issue itself doesn’t go all the way.

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After Stern left, DeFalco went from editor to writer of The Amazing Spider-Man. He finally learned the truth about the Hobgoblin from Stern, who left, but the problem was that DeFalco wasn’t convinced. In particular, he thought the proposed double stunt with the Kingsley brothers would be cheap storytelling. So he went back to his list of suspects and concluded that the hobgoblin must be someone else: Richard Fisk, son of the King. As a mob prince, Fisk Jr. would of course have connections to the underworld and a desire to pass himself off as a hobgoblin.

So DeFalco intended to cast Richard Fisk as the Hobgoblin and Roderick Kingsley as Hobbie’s accomplice, Rose. Even Stern agreed that would be a “great” answer. But that didn’t happen; after all, accurate reverse Defalk’s resolutions played out. Richard Fisk was the Rose, and Kingsley would ultimately be revealed as the Hobgoblin much later.

However, in the meantime, the Hobgoblin was attached to Ned Leeds. Fans of Marvel movies might think, wait Spidey’s best nerd Ned (played by Jacob Batalon) from the Homecoming trilogy? Well, not quite. See, Ned Leeds’ version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is more like an adaptation Hanke Leethe Asian-American best friend of Miles Morales. Comedian Ned Leeds was an adult reporter for the Daily Bugle and the future husband of Betty Brant. (Even his name is “Leeds”. looks like a journalistic pun.) Ned was one of Spider-Man’s first supporting characters, debuting in The Amazing Spider-Man #18, and was mostly friends with Peter. So why make him a hobgoblin?