Before Bendis wildly overexposed The Hood by making him the centerpiece villain of much of his Avengers run, Brian K. Vaughn and Kyle Hotz introduced the character in a six-issue MAX imprint mini-series.
They pretty much set the outline for Parker Robbins within the first few pages. He visits his mother in the mental hospital and tells her stories about how he's studying to become a doctor or lawyer, it changes each time. When an orderly mentions the discrepancy, Robbins threatens to knife him. He's got a pregnant girlfriend he's all sweet talk with, who he cheats on regularly with a sex worker (I imagine that, and all the cursing, are why this was a MAX book.) Hotz and Powell are good at making Parker look a little softer or more innocent when he puts on the charm, then shifting to a shit-eating grin or some bad boy glower when he is a bad mood.
He tries to rob a warehouse with his junkie cousin John, who has a hot tip about a 'major shipment', but all they find is what's left of a demonic summoning. Parker gets his levitating boots and invisibility hood by robbing the corpse of a demon he shoots with a regular handgun. With the way Hotz draws the hood, all we can see of Parker's face most of the time his jaw, or more critically, his mouth. Which is working double shifts getting him into and out of trouble. The hood itself is this immense, baggy-looking thing that drapes over Parker. With the amount of fabric Hotz draws, and how it bunches and folds over Parker, it looks like it would weigh a ton.
Ultimately, Parker's more ambition than brains. He figures with his new abilities they can swipe some blood diamonds being brought in. All he accomplishes is killing a cop (which his cousin takes the rap for), and putting himself in the crosshairs of some major underworld crime figure called "The Golem." For all Parker's hustling and scrambling, he's just barely able to get his cousin exonerated and The Golem off his back, with nothing to show for it, except that he's made a bunch of enemies.
You can do a lot with a villain who thinks he's hotter stuff than he is, or who jumps into things without really understanding what he's getting into, and as portrayed here, Parker's perfect for that. Vaughn writes him as smart enough to see opportunities, but not smart or careful enough to exploit them without fucking up. He's not cut out to be a henchman, like Jack O'Lantern, Constrictor, or Shocker, who all work as muscle for The Golem, but he really shouldn't be able to pull a Zemo and gather a bunch of super-villains under his banner.
It's as cynical a book as you would expect. Parker can't even enjoy the limited success he achieved, since that's also when he learns the cop he shot died. Naturally, said cop was cheating on his wife with his partner, and his wife is an engineer at Stark Industries, who built herself a suit to go after The Hood. Don't think that ever paid off. There's also a scene where she's reading to her husband while he's a coma, and one of the doctors in the hall remarks that stuff they tell people, that folks in comas can hear you, is total crap. Gee, why don't you say it a little louder and see if you can flatline a few people?
Vaughn adds in a few other scenes for, flavor, I guess. The Golem asks if any of his super-goons are mutants, because his daughter is a mutant and who like him to be more diverse in his hiring practices. Parker and his cousin are approached in a bar by a guy recruiting for HYDRA, who they accuse of being responsible for 9/11 as they kick the shit out of him. This follows directly on Parker recognizing Electro in civilian duds across the bar, and commenting that the reason to be a super-villain is that women are all over them. Gotta wonder how true that is, if Electro is hanging out in the same bar as a couple of losers like Parker and John. Probably doesn't help that Hotz' "halfway to Kelley Jones" art style makes Max Dillon look kinda ugly, and the suit he's wearing looks straight outta the '70s.
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