Which Loki is the main character in Loki? It’s a valid question.

Time travel (and the regulation thereof) is central to the premise of the upcoming Disney+ series. In it, Loki’s latest adversary is bureaucracy (and in particular, one mustachioed bureaucrat), After being captured, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) finds himself in trouble with the Time Variance Authority and tasked with fixing the problems he created.

The TVA regulates time travel, and the organization is dedicated to maintaining the chronological threads of the universe as we know it. The Avengers upended the timeline in Endgame, but Loki’s jaunts through reality were apparently a step too far. In the trailer the trickster is apprehended by Owen Wilson as TVA agent Mobius and recruited for an important high-risk mission: piecing the fragmented universal timeline back together. 

Fans of the MCU will remember that this is not the Loki who in the films was on the path to redemption. As far as this series is concerned, that character is still dead after Thanos broke his neck in the opening of Infinity War. This is Loki circa 2012’s The Avengers when he had barely started his path away from the dark side. This is the Loki who disappeared to do mischief with the Tesseract and this series seems like it will deal with his timeline aberrations.

Also starring alongside Wilson and Hiddleston in the series is Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sophia Di Martino, Wunmi Mosaku and Richard E. Grant. 

The appearance of Wilson’s character, Agent Mobius M. Mobius, has had an interesting effect on one of the old comic titles. Fantastic Four #353 was the penultimate issue in Walter Simonson’s tenure as the writer and artist on the Fantastic Four and saw the team run afoul of the Time Variance Authority, who Simonson had invented during his earlier run on The Mighty Thor.

Once the trailer was released and fans got to see the Owen Wilson version of Mobius, the interest increased in the back issue. The back issue had been hovering in the $30 range for weeks, but the release of the trailer caused an ungraded copy of the issue sold on eBay for $65 and $60. A graded copy even sold for $399.99. Even the relevant issue of The Mighty Thor (#372) received a price bump, but nothing like what the Fantastic Four issue got.

The Mobius mustache has a real world source: Simonson based Mr. Mobius on the look of longtime Marvel writer and editor, Mark Gruenwald, who was famous at Marvel for trying to formulate specific rules when it came to time travel in the Marvel Comics Universe (and had been Simonson’s editor on The Avengers right before the writer/artist’s Fantastic Four run).

The new series, which is set immediately after the events of Avengers: Endgame, debuts on June 11.