A novel microwire/carbon nanotube (CNT)/rubber multiscale hybrid composite is reported here. Compared to CNT composites, the hybrid composite shows enhanced conductivity and permittivity and decreased intrinsic impedance, giving rise to significant improvement of absorption yet along with the increase of reflection loss. The hybrid composite also shows a field tunable effect with a featured critical bias, which divided two opposite frequency dispersion trend with the field due to the different biasing mechanism decided by the field magnitude. The counter-influence of wires and CNTs plays an important role in formulating the resulting electromagnetic responses. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.