Crossing the Line

Upon his return to the book in Avengers 211 ("...By Force of Mind!", September 1981), Jim Shooter accomplishes more than his aforementioned shake-up of the roster: he uses Hank and Jan's failing marriage as one of the prime movers of his brief run on the book (211-222, 224), with repercussions that every writer who takes on Hank Pym is forced to address.  Repeatedly over the next two years, Shooter and his successors will have the case for Hank's life-long instability made by various Avengers members as they think back over the past, providing a handy recap for the readers along the way. This is not just a helpful narrative device; it is an attempt to smooth over the suddenness of Hank's precipitous downfall.

"Men of Deadly Pride!" (Avengers 212, October 1981, by Shooter, Alan Kupperberg and Green) (re-) introduces the new roster by showing their morning routines: Tigra nearly scaring poor Jarvis to death, Tony Stark donning his Iron Man armor after a one-night stand for the flying equivalent of the walk of shame, Captain America leaping out of bed and singing World War II songs, and Donald Blake transforming into Thor.  Each of these moments is a distillation of the character to his or her essence, and the same holds true for Hank and Jan when they get out of bed. Jan tries to be light and playful, but Hank is the embodiment of barely suppressed rage. In a  particularly odd turn, when Jan asks which costume she should wear, Hank (already dressed as Yellowjacket) incinerates one of them with his sting-blasts.  Hank's assertion of his identity always comes at the cost of Jan's.

This issue and the ones that follow undermine Shooter's careful thematic planning with character development whose pace is so frantic that it verges on caricature.  For whatever reason, Shooter no longer had the patience for a slow burn; overnight (literally, since the issue starts in the morning), Hank has become even more aggressive and overbearing that he was when his psychotic break led him to assume the Yellowjacket identity for the first time. His insecurities are nicely paralleled in the issue's main plot, which features a powerful fairy queen who has spent centuries catering to the ego of her much less impressive husband.  Hank makes the near-fatal mistake of attacking the sorceress at precisely the moment Captain America was getting through to her, and suffers the added humiliation of being saved by Jan.

All this leads to the moment that made Hank the most toxic character ever to appear on the Avengers' Roster: in the very next issue, he hits Jan, leaving her with a black eye.  Shooter would later claim that this was not what he intended for the story:

 [t]here is a scene in which Hank is supposed to have accidentally struck Jan while throwing his hands up in despair and frustration—making a sort of “get away from me” gesture while not looking at her.  Bob Hall, who had been taught by John Buscema to always go for the most extreme action, turned that into a right cross!  There was no time to have it redrawn, which, to this day has caused the tragic story of Hank Pym to be known as the “wife-beater” story (Shooter, "Hank Pym Was Not a Wife-Beater," March 29, 2011, https://jimshooter.com/2011/03/hank-pym-was-not-wife-beater.html/) [1]

Regardless of his intent, for most of Shooter's abbreviated run, the Hank/Jan dynamic plays out on the literal level with a shocking lack of subtlety exacerbated by the accelerated pacing, at the same time that their character development is refracted through other characters with a much later touch.   Tigra, the newcomer to the team, appears to have the same lightness of spirit that Jan affected (at least before her break with Hank), but we soon learn that she does not have the courage to meet the threats faced by the Avengers every day. [2] At the same time that Jan sets aside her affected insouciance, quickly stepping up to become team leader, Tigra takes the opposite path.  A similar parallel develops a few issues later, but with the valences reversed: Jan's newfound confidence finds a much darker counterpart in the behavior of former Avenger Moondragon, who uses her mental powers to enslave an entire planet.  Where Jan once meekly suffered physical abuse at her husband's hand, now Moondragon kills her own father for daring to stand up to her.

As for Hank, his own insecurity and arrogance are reflected not just in the fairy queen's husband, or the jealous and tormented Ghost Rider encountered in a subsequent issue, or the megalomaniacal but profoundly insecure Molecule Man, or the pathetically outmatched Fabian Fabian Stankiewicz, who builds an exoskeleton to challenge the Avengers, but in yet another (male-coded) robot creation. This time, Salvation-1 (or "Sal") is meant to attack the Avengers during Hank's court martial; Yellowjacket should then save the day by striking him in his vulnerable spot. Naturally, he fails (again) and has to be rescued by Jan (again).  This lampshades his ongoing hostility to Jan:  the real problem is that she knows all his vulnerabilities.

By the 1980s, Shooter had done more to flesh out the characters of both Hank and Jan Pym than all his predecessors combined, following up on the important groundwork he laid in his 1970s run.  The newly-assertive Wasp is certainly a better fit for the times, and her growth, in reaction to Hank's abuse, feels fairly organic.  Hank, on the other hand, is completely unhinged in the two consecutive issues that re-introduce him to the reader, while the Avengers' rush to justice after his mistake with the fairy queen comes out of nowhere. [19] What could have been an insightful examination of an unstable and abusive personality all too quickly devolves into near-caricature. For all that Shooter advanced the characterization of Hank Pym, his 1980s run on The Avengers was a missed opportunity, providing a great deal for other writers to work with over the next four decades, but falling flat in its execution.

Next: First-Person Shooter

Note

[1] Mark Millar, for whom subtlety has never been a virtue, revisits this scene in The Ultimates (in a separate, updated Marvel continuity) and manages to make it infinitely worse.  This is not the first time Hank has hurt Jan, and the writing seems to put some of the blame on her for being "difficult."  At the end of a knock-down, drag-out fight, Hank uses a vacuum cleaner to capture and nearly kill his wasp-sized wife.

[2] Tigra has little patience for Hank's insecurities, but years later, becomes romantically involved with him, or rather, with a Skrull masquerading as Pym.  She even gives birth to a son fathered by the Skrull duplicate using Hank's DNA, and, eventually, she and the real Hank embark on a romantic relationship.