Jack Hobbs

The last character from the comics appearing in the first season of Jupiter’s Legacy (we’ve finally made it!) is again found in What’s the Use?, commenting the entire episode in a therapy session with The Utopian: it’s Jack Hobbs, portrayed by Nigel Bennett. In the series, he’s a former supercriminal who has started an unlikely friendship with his greatest enemy, and who serves as his psychological counselor… even if he does seem a bit malicious from time to time. In the comics, he is totally reformed by the time he advises The Utopian, and his friendship his real… but if you want to know what this Lex Luthor carbon copy did to spend his life behind bars, just read further.

Jack Hobbs was born in New York City, and he claimed, with reason, to be the smartest man on the planet: he graduated from Franklin Senior High School, in Upstate New York, just after his third birthday, and from there he only got smarter. As an adult, he was already the greatest scientific mind on the entire planet, and he had a future in research assured… but something had happened, and the world wasn’t the same anymore: the Union of Justice had appeared. Hobbs had nothing against the heroes, especially The Utopian, who seemed a genuinely good man, but he loathed their very existence nevertheless: he knew that their presence would have triggered a social Darwinism that would have escalated to the point of an extinction-level event, that he had foreseen for 2016. If heroes were now superheroes, criminals could only be supercriminals, simple guns would have all been replaced with nuclear bombs, and so on, until the whole world blew up in a new super-arms race. If there was someone who could save humanity by utterly destroying the superheroes, it was of course the finest specimen of the human race. Professor Hobbs put together a gang, consisting of his obtuse but beautiful lover Miss Wanamaker, and his goons, who he named after history’s greatest geniuses, Edison, Einstein, Newton and Darwin, albeit they were simply the muscle in all his plans. He tried times and times again to destroy the Unity, almost succeeding everytime, being captured everytime, finding some loophole or contradiction in the accusations and getting out of jail immediately after. His last arrest, however, was a bit different, as this time Hobbs needed the time to think his next move: he spent eighteen months in solitary, and finally came up with the idea of the century. The Utopian was waiting for him outside the prison when he served his time, but Hobbs could only mock him in response for his warning: this time, victory was assured.

Back to work, Hobbs built a device that could take away superpowers from the target, and redistribute them to others. He and his gang immediately ambushed The Utopian and Lady Liberty in an alley, as they were capturing some robbers, and the plan worked perfectly: he and his goons were now superhumans, more than capable to capture the depowered heroes. Next, he set an ambush for Blue Bolt at the Los Angeles Zoo, and when he had captured him as well, he had Einstein pretend to be a jumper in New York, so that he depowered and captured The Flare as well when he came to the rescue. He defeated Brainwave as he was at the White House for an emergency meeting with President Johnson, successfully incapacitating all the heroes. For the last act, Hobbs brought all the heroes to his old school, Franklin Senior High, where another one of his creations, the gateway to an Anti-Matter Universe he had discovered, was waiting for them. Just as he pushed all the heroes through the portal, though, a super-kid arrived: he was Peter Fleton, the son of Flare, come to the rescue. The kid had followed a localization device Hobbs didn’t know the existence of, and what was worse, somebody else had as well: Skyfox, who had apparently chosen to reform just in time to save his ex Unity teammates. Skyfox single-handedly knocked all criminals out, and gave the heroes their powers back, so that they could escape the gateway, and then proceed to depower and arrest Hobbs and his gang. The following days, however, were the weirdest of Hobbs’ life, as The Utopian had decided that a brain such as his could not go to waste, and wanted to reform him. What seemed to be a desperate mission at first became something more: The Utopian disarmed his old foe by revealing everything about himself, his fears, his weaknesses, even his secret identity, until, completely open and vulnerable, he offered his friendship to Hobbs… who, against all odds, accepted it. The two kept seeing each other again for years, and not only Hobbs started working on projects such as curing cancer, ending all wars or creating a fair monetary system, but he also became The Utopian’s counselor and confidante. Quite a change of career, for the world’s greatest criminal mind.

Jack Hobbs is impossibly brilliant, an absolute genius whose intelligence defines pretty much everything he is, and takes precedence over any other consideration, either of morality or of character. As the world’s greatest and brightest scientific mind, he masters every scientific field known to mankind, and even some other yet unknown to the public, and he harnesses such a knowledge in inventions far ahead of his time, such as the depowering device or the inter-dimensional portal. Professor Hobbs sees himself as the hero of his own story, a champion of humanity who seeks to defend his race from an extinction his calculations see as inevitable… and what is the sacrifice of a handful of lives compared to the survival of an entire species?