Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby, [David Michelinie, Tom DeFalco, Bob Layton, Mike Deodato, Al Feldstein, John Jackson Miller,] Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer, Gabriel Ferrari, and Peyton Reed, 2018
The title of this one was a bit misleading. I assumed that, in adding “…and the Wasp” to the title rather than just calling the movie Ant-Man 2, the studio intended to suggest that the Wasp would receive an equal share of the spotlight. Or perhaps even more of it, on the theory that the front half of the duo was obviously the focus of the first Ant-Man movie. But no—the Wasp is a capable second player in the action scenes, but this is totally Ant-Man 2. Too bad, because the evolution of the Wasp from a ditzy teenager in the 1960s, swooning over every man she meets (from Thor to the Space Phantom), to the confident and competent leader of the Avengers for most of the 1980s, is one of Marvel’s most interesting stories—but perhaps one that works primarily as an emblem of its times. Still, if the filmmakers couldn’t tell that story, they should have come up with some story for her. Her name’s on the marquee.
The antagonists this time around also aren’t much. The basic storyline is that Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man both in the comics and in the backstory of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, had thought that his wife Janet Van Dyne, the original Wasp, had been lost forever in subatomic space. But then in the first movie Scott Lang, the second Ant-Man, proved that he could shrink down that far and make it back, so Hank and his daughter Hope, the second Wasp, have been inspired to attempt a rescue. Scott gets involved when it turns out that his visit to the subatomic realm has resulted in a “quantum entanglement” with Jan, who can beam messages to him. Getting in the way are:
…the cops, since Scott Lang is under house arrest for his role in Captain America: Civil War. They are led by Jimmy Woo, whose comics debut came in the Atlas Comics era, five and a half years before the rebrand as “Marvel” and the release of Fantastic Four #1—that’s quite a deep cut!
…Sonny Burch, an exceedingly minor villain who appeared in a handful of issues of Iron Man and in this movie wants to steal Pym’s tech…
…and, much more interestingly, the Ghost! Though this is not the anti-corporate saboteur who debuted in Iron Man #219 and was reinvented a couple of decades later in Dark Avengers and Thunderbolts. Instead, it is the daughter of Hank Pym’s sort-of arch-enemy Egghead, though he’s not called that in the movie. As a child she was thrown out of phase with reality in an accident that killed her parents, and as an adult she is not only finding it increasingly difficult to stay coherent and solid, but is also in increasing pain. So, sympathetic, but since her plan to cure herself involves stealing the heroes’ equipment and possibly ripping Jan apart on a molecular level, still an antagonist, and the least bumbling of the three. As with the MCU’s Wasp, though, beyond her origin story she’s kind of a cipher.
So, with these weaknesses, the movie is… surprisingly good! Thumbs up for this one. It is often genuinely funny, with some excellent line readings (“Do you really have that?”). The special effects are great: as noted in other articles, I am more than a little tired of punching and blasting, and the car chases in this one were a yawn, but the main draw of the Ant-Man movies’ action sequences is all the size-changing, and that remains very cool. The twist about the location of Hank’s lab was brilliant. The effects applied to show that a character is out of phase were also well executed. And of course I gotta give some bonus points for shooting some scenes on the campus of my alma mater. Appropriately enough, watching our heroes stroll through Sather Gate made my heart grow a couple of sizes.
There is also a link between this movie and the TV side of the MCU. Trying to cure the MCU Ghost is Bill Foster, Marvel’s first African-American character; Stan Lee introduced him in 1966 as one of Stark International’s top scientists, whom Tony Stark loans out to Hank Pym to serve as a lab partner. In the 1970s he went on to become the third Goliath and second Giant-Man. Much of that history is presented as MCU backstory, so that was cool. Not mentioned was that, at least in the comics, Bill Foster was the first husband of Claire Temple! And we last saw the MCU Claire Temple as the romantic partner of…
Luke Cage (season 2)
Archie Goodwin, George Tuska, Roy Thomas, John Romita Sr., [Tony
Isabella, Steve Englehart, Alan Weiss, Chris Claremont, Don McGregor,]
and Cheo Hodari Coker, 2018
When I last wrote about the Luke Cage series, I discussed how the character was Marvel’s response to the “blaxploitation” boom that swept through movie theaters in 1971. The box office and critical smash of 1972 was, of course, The Godfather. Well, here we have the second season of Luke Cage, and it is in large part about how the new boss of the Harlem mob finds herself targeted by the Jamaican mob operating out of Brooklyn, and how she responds by trying to cobble together an alliance with the Chinese mob, the Korean mob, and the actual Italian mafia. All these organized crime syndicates have turned New York City in general and Harlem in particular into a war zone, and Luke Cage finds that shielding individual bystanders with his single bulletproof body is woefully insufficient in keeping the people of Harlem from harm—he has to become a player in New York’s underworld power struggle himself. It’s kind of weird, because the golden age of prestige television is generally thought to have begun with The Sopranos in 1999, and the premise of that show was that over the course of the 1990s crime rates had plummeted, and the mob as an institution was on its way out, prompting so much anxiety for a rising mob boss like Tony Soprano as to send him into therapy. Looks like the crew on this show never got the memo, though. The copyright notice may say 2018, and the violent crime rate in New York may have dropped 70% from its peak, but on Luke Cage, it’s 1972 forever.
Shoehorning Luke Cage into a Michael Corleone type of role is enough of a head-scratcher to suggest that these showrunners probably had a series in mind that they wanted to write, discovered that the only shows getting greenlit were superhero fare, and decided, okay, let’s do our show about the Jamaican mob but have Power Man running around in the margins. But that’s probably not the real story. I mean, they do try to hit the highlights of Luke Cage’s journey through the Marvel Universe. In this season we see him go through a brief “Hero for Hire” period. We see Power Man and Iron Fist in action. And the creators do build their story out of characters from the comics, thoroughly reimagined though they may be: Piranha Jones, Cockroach Hamilton, the Rivals. A major arc of the season is dedicated to the origin of Nightshade, who is not a Z-lister in the Marvel Universe like these others but a solid C-lister. And it occurred to me—imagine someone doing something like this in comics. A twelve-issue maxiseries weaving together the scraps of a 1970s blaxploitation comic to create Marvel’s answer to The Godfather? Digging into nothing characters like Bushmaster and Black Mariah and fashioning portraits of them that provide depth and nuance and make them seem like major threats, as if they were the Green Goblin and the Kingpin? That’s the sort of thing that could make a career! The acclaim it would get could very well match that earned by recent critical favorites such as Al Ewing’s Immortal Hulk or Tom King’s The Vision. And yet, as a TV show… it doesn’t feel like elevating the source material by using the techniques of prestige television, but instead like falling short of the standard of prestige television with a weird admixture of silly source material.
So does that mean that television is the superior medium—that what would make for a highly acclaimed comic would only make for a middling TV show? No, because it works the other way around, too. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a generation-defining show, but when it moved from TV over to comics, even with big names from the TV creative team (including originator Joss Whedon) declaring the comic canonical and writing issues themselves, it just didn’t land in the same way. I remember really looking forward to it, and then bailing after a couple of issues. And it wasn’t just me—yes, the series was Dark Horse’s flagship for a while and did well enough to run for several years, but ultimately it was just a blip on Marvel and DC’s radar. All right, so does that mean that adaptation itself is a fool’s game and that stories always work best in their original forms? Again, no—to name a couple of exceptions that pop to mind, The Sweet Hereafter made a much better movie than book, while Buffy itself made a much better TV show than movie. And on the level of commercial success and cultural impact, Game of Thrones far surpassed A Song of Ice and Fire, and while circa 2007 the Avengers were obscure outside of comics fandom, five years later their movie made over a billion dollars. I think what it comes down to is this: spinoffs and adaptations fall flat when they feel ancillary to their sources. To a comics reader, the Luke Cage show feels ancillary in a way a prestige series wouldn’t, despite its larger audience, because it doesn’t affect MU continuity; to an MCU fan, the Luke Cage show feels ancillary because it’s tucked away on Netflix instead of playing in theaters. And, like, thirteen hours of this—really, it feels like an exercise in flooding the zone with content while the MCU is still hot.
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