Joe "Robbie" Robertson

Joe Robertson, known to all as Robbie, is a freelance journalist chasing the stories no one else will touch, a Black man clawing for a foothold in a 1930s New York stacked against him. Driven and stubborn to a fault, he hunts the dangerous scoops that might finally earn him attention and a paycheck, lately the ones that lead toward the mob boss strangling the city. He is also Ben Reilly's friend and one of the few who knows what Ben once was, a confidence that doubles as the inside track on the only story that matters.

Over coffee he lays the city's rot bare for his old friend, the crime running unchecked, the police bought and paid for, the crime boss who walked away from a fire that should have killed him. The people, he insists, are crying out for a hero. But where Robbie sees a call to answer, Ben hears only a wound he refuses to reopen, and the plea lands on a man determined not to hear it.

Robbie Robertson stays on the Addison story even as his friend Ben Reilly warns him off, refusing to drop a thread that leads straight toward the crime lord strangling the city. Chasing the dead arsonist's widow, he searches the man's home, crosses paths with a massive guarded stranger who points him toward the Geoffrey Hotel.

He reaches Vera Addison all the same, and when she tries to slam the door, he turns her own situation against her, warning that the most dangerous man in the city would not like to hear how her husband's blood money is being spent. She relents and lets him in. She reveals that Addison had been setting fires for six months. Later, it's Robbie that calls Ben with the bitter truth that by intecepting Silvermane on his way to the docks, his friend unknowingly spared the crime lord from a police ambush waiting to take him down.

Robbie Robertson digs deeper into the mystery of the powered men surfacing across the city, recognizing the guarded stranger from the Hooverville in an old wartime photograph and learning his name is Lonnie. He returns to the Hooverville to find him, only to walk into a police raid sent to clear the camps on the mayor's orders. When the officers begin beating the residents, Lonnie's hardened skin and Flint Marko's sand both come out in the open as the two men turn on the police, and Robbie captures every moment of it on his camera.

He carries the story to his old editor at the Daily Bugle, Howard Walters, selling it as an exclusive only he could get. Walters buys it, but Robbie later finds his work rewritten to cast the powered men as monsters and the police as heroes, the truth twisted out from under him. Back at the office, he shares what he has learned, that Lonnie, Marko, and the dead Jimmy Addison were all prisoners of war together, the photograph taken the day they were freed.

Robbie keeps pulling at the thread of the powered men, leaving Ben Reilly's office to search Harlem for the man called Lonnie. A local peddler points him toward the spot where the war veterans gather for lunch. Ultimately, following a generous parishioner that brings Lonnie a bowl of soup, Robbie is able to track down Lonnie and convinces him to come back to the office to chat.

Lonnie is slow to trust, until a pack of Janet's playing cards eases the tension and gets him talking. He opens up about what the Germans did to him and his fellow prisoners of war and directs the pair toward a figure named Dr. Faber. Later in the night, a call from Ben sends Robbie running to the Diamond District with his camera, where he slips in among the gathered crowd to document The Spider's battle against a stranger crackling with electricity.

Robbie Robertson turns his footage of the Spider's battle with the electrical man into leverage at the Daily Bugle, bringing a fresh article to its editor Howard Walters. He agrees to let the paper run it, but only on his own terms: the story prints without changes, the paper issues a retraction of the earlier piece that smeared Lonnie and Flint as monsters, and he gets his old desk back. Walters relents, and Robbie reclaims his standing as a full reporter.

He keeps digging at the source of the powered men, heading to the hospital in Queens to confront Dr. Alethea Faber and her secretary Ogden over the four patients in her care who emerged with abilities only after her treatment. While Faber is occupied answering his questions, Ben slips upstairs to steal her files, and the two flee together, not realizing that Ogden had just recognized Ben from France. Back at the office, piecing it together with Janet, Robbie helps establish that every one of the powered men began changing after meeting with Faber.

Robbie Robertson searches the city for Ben Reilly after Janet sends him looking. Finding his friend drunk and defeated in a bar, fresh off a brawl in the Spider mask, he pulls Ben out and listens as the detective declares he means to take the antidote and quit the Spider for good, then talks him down with the hard truths Ben needs to hear, that Flint and Lonnie are actually dying, that they deserve a cure as much as he does, and that unlike with Ruby Williams, this time Ben has a choice in who he saves.

He proves more than a voice of conscience when the action turns. As the Spider struggles against Lonnie Lincoln in a fight he is too battered to win, Robbie steps in and ends it, driving the antidote needle into the one place Lonnie's hardened skin cannot protect; his eye. The cure works, and Robbie makes amends with the freed man, helping carry Ben back to his place to recover. When Lonnie asks who the Spider really is and why he helped him, Robbie keeps his friend's secret, saying only that the Spider is just a guy and a good person, whatever he wants people to believe.

Robbie makes good on every ounce of loyalty he has shown by climbing into the Spider's suit himself. With Ben in Silvermane's hands, he answers the crime boss first by telephone, doing his best impression of the masked hero, then walks into the Alcove in the costume to buy his friend cover and time. It is the boldest thing the reporter has ever done, and he does it knowing exactly what it could cost him.

The gamble nearly kills him. When Silvermane's men haul in Janet and the cures, Leyden tests a dose on the masked figure and drives a bolt of lightning through him, dropping Robbie to the floor. When the hood comes away and his face is revealed, the ruse is finished, but the moments he bought are what let Ben turn everything around. Robbie survives the ordeal, his place as the steadiest hand in Ben's life beyond any further question. In the end, he finally gets his very own newspaper to run.