Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby, [David Michelinie, Tom DeFalco, Roy Thomas,] Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, Paul Rudd, and Peyton Reed, 2015

That logo looks so janky because it dates back to the dawn of the Marvel Age.  Henry Pym debuted the same month as Fantastic Four #2.  He wasn’t Ant-Man, exactly, not just yet: the verdict wasn’t yet in on Stan Lee’s attempt to revive superheroes at Marvel, and aside from the FF’s second adventure, the lineup cover-dated January 1962 consisted of five romance comics, two westerns, and five anthologies that were basically Stan Lee’s ongoing audition for a gig writing for The Twilight Zone.  One of that month’s anthology comics, Tales to Astonish #27, led off with Pym as “The Man in the Ant Hill”, a scientist who perfects a shrinking serum and successfully tests it on himself, only to be so horrified by ants as large as he is that he pours the serum down the drain.  There was no reason to think that Henry Pym would be any more likely to return than, say, Bill Carter from the second story (who buys his wife a haunted mirror) or Barney Sloan from the third story (who runs afoul of a talking horse).  But then the sales figures for Fantastic Four came in.  By the May cover-date, the Hulk had been introduced; Thor and Spider‑Man took their bows in August, transforming Journey Into Mystery and Amazing Fantasy into superhero mags; and one month later, the same thing happened to Tales to Astonish, as Pym took over the lead feature as the Ant‑Man.  A year later he was a founding Avenger.

Ant‑Man’s tenure as an Avenger lasted one issue.  Pym stuck around, but by Avengers #2, he had adopted a new superheroic identity.  That is because Ant‑Man is silly.  Shrinking powers are fine, and a few months before Henry Pym’s first appearance, DC had successfully rolled out a new version of the Atom who could shrink to any size.  (The original Atom was just a short guy who was good at boxing.)  But Ant‑Man wasn’t just a guy who could shrink to the size of an ant: Stan Lee liked his heroes to be able to do basically anything the plot required, and therefore Ant-Man’s primary power was to accomplish virtually any task by ordering ants around.  Falling from a great height?  Cushion of ants!  Need to send an urgent bulletin across town?  Telepathi­cally order the ants over there to spell out the message!  Want to get the drop on a baddie?  Have some ants dig a hole in the ground beneath his feet!  This take on the character was hokey enough that it didn’t even outlast the Kennedy administration⁠—and yet this is the version of the character served up by the movie.  Sort of.

In my last article, I mentioned that Daredevil was a late bloomer, created in the ’60s but not given to a writer with a definitive take on the character until 1981.  Much the same is true in this case, right down to the year.  In Tales to Astonish #44, Henry Pym (now “Hank”, usually) had taken on a flighty young sidekick named Janet Van Dyne, whom he’d powered up to become the Wasp.  She’d joined him as a founding Avenger⁠—meaning that the team had two members with nearly identical power sets.  Whoops!  So Stan Lee had Pym change tacks and become Giant-Man.  A couple of years later he changed his name to Goliath (“Giant‑Man always sounded rather corny to me!”).  Stan then handed the reins on many Marvel books over to other writers.  Avengers went to Roy Thomas.  Team book writers can find themselves in a bind, in that casual readers tend to pick up such comics in order to see flagship characters interacting⁠—“Wow! Captain America and Iron Man and Thor all in the same book!”⁠—but the writers can’t really do anything with them: significant changes to those characters fall under the purview of the writers and editors of those characters’ solo titles.  So Avengers writers have tended to focus on those characters over whom they have sole authority: Hawkeye, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, and similar B‑listers.  Hank Pym had found himself demoted to that category, booted off Tales to Astonish in the summer of 1965.  So Roy Thomas tried to come up with some storylines for him.  He had him create Ultron, a genocidal robot who became one of the foremost Avengers villains.  Hank’s next storyline had him undergo a psychotic break due to the rigors of growing to Goliath size, rebranding himself as the hot-blooded, free-wheeling Yellowjacket and marrying the Wasp, whose romantic overtures the stuffy scientist version of Pym had always been cold to.  But having established that it was too dangerous for Hank to grow past his normal height, Thomas had to keep him as Yellowjacket even after he’d recovered.  Hank therefore became what in some circles is called a “trailing spouse”.  The Wasp was an Avengers mainstay⁠—she had a fun personality, gave the artists a new costume to draw every month, and kept the proceedings co-ed when the Scarlet Witch wasn’t around, as it wasn’t until 1973 that a third woman would join the team⁠—but when writers brought her in, they were saddled with her bland husband who duplicated her powers. Often they would shuffle Hank off to the lab so they wouldn’t have to bother to find something for Yellow­jacket to do.  What kind of storyline could there really be for Hank Pym?  He was kind of a loser!

But when Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter returned to Avengers in 1981 for a second stint as its writer, he came in with a key insight: that was the storyline.  One of the founding Aven­gers was, essentially, a failure⁠—at least in his own eyes.  His original powers were ridiculous and were in fact a subset of his sidekick’s.  He’d tried to switch things up and become the team’s muscle, but he was never as strong as Thor or Iron Man: Shooter had the latter reflect that “The growth process was such a strain on his body that he was generally too wasted to accomplish much!”  Trying to become the team’s brain worked out no better, as not only would he never measure up to Marvel’s intellectual luminaries like Reed Richards, but nothing he accomplished in the lab would ever make up for Ultron.  “Can he ever be more than a haunted, hollow man drowning in a sea of guilt over the wrongs done by his monstrous creation?” Iron Man wondered. “Can he ever rid himself of the desperate need he has to redeem himself in his own eyes?” But the linchpin of Shooter’s take on Pym was that he had spent years being eaten alive by feelings of inferiority to his wife.  She was a beloved celebrity, while he had her fans asking, “Has he ever done anything?”; she was a weal­thy heiress, while he was dependent on her money; she took naturally to superheroics, while he constantly had to be rescued by her.  Early in Shooter’s run, Jan tries to build Hank up by playing the role of the worshipful sidekick and eager bedmate, especially after he gets himself into a fix, facing a court martial for being overly aggressive on an Avengers mission.  “Jan, baby! I just don’t get it!” Tigra thinks to herself as she watches her fawn over her fuckup of a husband. “Don’t you know you’re worth ten of him?”  This turns out to be an underestimate, as Hank, in the act that would forever define him as a character, completely snaps and hits Jan.  Legions of later writers would try to write redemption arcs for Hank Pym, but while mass murderers rou­tinely make face turns and join superhero teams⁠—for a while the Avengers had a member named, no joke, “Deathcry”⁠—having a former wife-beater put forward as a hero was beyond the pale for many.  While death is never permanent in comics, eventually the writers elected to close the issue, or try to, by killing off Henry Pym.

Meanwhile⁠—nature abhors a vacuum, and comic book companies abhor leaving intellectual property unused.  So as Hank aban­doned one identity after another, writers devised new characters to take up those mantles.  When he quit being Yellowjacket, the name was taken up by a villain named Rita DeMara, who soon did a face turn and helped out the Avengers a couple of times.  When he quit being Goliath, that identity was immediately taken up by Clint Barton, the former Hawkeye (theorizing that it might be more effective to fight crime with superpowers than with archery), and then by villain Erik Josten.  Even the Giant‑Man name made a comeback, taken up by Pym’s former lab assistant Bill Foster.  But all of these characters either got killed off in turn or switched to other codenames.  The one who stuck was Scott Lang, who in 1979 became the new Ant‑Man.  Lang was a di­vorced dad who’d spent a few years in the pokey for burglary.  Pledging to go straight, he’d landed a job at Stark International, only for his young daughter to develop a heart condition that could only be cured by a surgeon who was currently being held hostage by an evil tech CEO with a heart condition of his own.  Breaking into Hank Pym’s house in hopes of stealing enough money to hire some mercenaries to rescue the doctor⁠—I guess David Michelinie was trying to win an award for “most labyrin­thine superhero origin”⁠—he instead finds the Ant‑Man suit and decides to put it on and rescue her himself.  Seeing that Lang’s intentions are noble, Pym gives him the thumbs‑up to keep the suit.  Ant‑Man, silly power set and all, had returned to a Marvel Universe that, in an era when Howard the Duck was one of the line’s most visible characters, had grown expansive enough to accommodate some silliness.  And Scott Lang is the Ant‑Man featured in the movie.

What’s more, the filmmakers don’t mess with Scott Lang’s story very much.  They don’t tell the Hank Pym story and then call him Scott Lang to keep comics fans from bracing themselves for the wife-beating to start.  The movie’s Scott Lang is still a divorced dad fresh out of jail who steals the Ant‑Man costume from Hank Pym’s house.  This requires a continuity implant, as the cine­matic Avengers had no Ant‑Man, nor any other alter ego of Pym’s, on their roster.  The filmmakers’ solution to the question of how to introduce a second-generation superhero to a universe that’s still rolling out its first generation is to make Hank Pym a generation older than the Avengers: we learn that his heyday was the 1980s, when the MCU’s WWII characters like Howard Stark and Peggy Carter were still kicking around but had reached retirement age.  Now Pym himself is long in the tooth, but needs to recruit a new Ant‑Man in order to stop his technology from falling into the wrong hands, and we have ourselves a movie⁠—specifically, a heist movie.  It’s fine.  You can probably tell that I’m way more interested in the adaptation decisions than in the finished product.  For instance, if Hank’s in the movie, where’s Jan?  The answer is that she’s lost in sub-space after a mission in the ’80s.  We are introduced to a potential second-generation Wasp, though, in the form of Hope Pym.  Now that’s a deep cut!  Hope Pym isn’t part of the Marvel Universe⁠—she’s from MC2, of all places.  See, while DC regularly reboots its universe, Marvel’s pattern has been to roll out alternate universes to run alongside its main one, from the New Universe back in the ’80s to the Ulti­mate Universe (a heavy influence on the cinematic Avengers) to the still-running Earth‑65, home of “Spider‑Gwen”.  One of these parallel universes was former editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco’s MC2, in which the Silver Age heroes debuted a generation earlier than in the mainstream MU.  To clarify: the standard Marvel Uni­verse operates on a sliding time scale so that the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X‑Men, and other characters from the ’60s all first appeared about ten to fifteen years ago, Marvel time.  Spider-Man was fifteen years old in his first appearance, so that would put him in his late 20s today.  The MC2 timeline bumped that back so that as of “now” (i.e., the late ’90s), Spider-Man had aged enough to have a fifteen-year-old daughter of his own.  The MC2 Hank Pym had a daughter as well, Hope.  She was a villain who called herself the Red Queen.  I did a quick search to see which Marvel characters had appeared as often in the comics as Hope Pym.  Results: a robot called Arch‑E‑5912, Firebrand’s sister Roxanne Gilbert, and Thog the Hell-Lord.  Somehow I don’t think they’ll be getting major supporting roles in a movie with a $130 million budget anytime soon.

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