The Triumphant Downfall of Hank Pym
Jim Shooter's high-handed leadership of Marvel makes him an easy, and justified, target of criticism. His enthusiasm for handing over established heroes' costumes to newcomers led to a formulaic set of predicable transformations, while his demand that Doug Moench kill of the cast of Master of Kung-Fu and turn Shang-Chi into a villain showed a preference for dramatic change over character-based evolution. As a writer, however, Shooter demonstrated a knack for changing a character's status quo without doing violence to the character's history. In his two stints as the writer of The Avengers (spanning a ten-year period between 1976 and 1986), Shooter turned an underdeveloped B-lister into a tortured soul whose mental instability undermined the cohesiveness of the team, ruined his marriage, and set him on a path to near-villainy, at the same time showing that the hero's breakdown was the logical outcome of years of storytelling. By delving into the psyche of scientist and adventurer Hank Pym, Shooter implicitly argued that, for years, we had been understanding the Avengers all wrong. Fans paid attention to flashy headliners like Captain America and Thor, along with mainstays like the Vision and the Scarlet Witch, whose exploits were told almost exclusively within the pages of The Avengers. But the inadvertent and unnoticed prime mover behind so much Avengers drama was the hero originally known as Ant Man.
Created by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber and Jack Kirby in 1961, Hank Pym was a character who never quite made it to the big time, no matter how many opportunities his writers and artists gave him. Not long after his first appearance in Tales to Astonish 27, Pym, along with his partner and future wife, Janet Van Dyne (the Wasp), became a founding Avenger, featured in the comic's very first issue. But he and the Wasp would leave the Avengers only a year after they founded the team, returning periodically ever since.
For Lee, Thomas, and their collaborators, Hank Pym was as much a problem to be solved as he was a character to develop. If Ant-Man was not a runaway hit, why not turn him into the 12-foot-tall Giant Man (Tales to Astonish 49). If Giant Man was an unremarkable name, why not call him Goliath (Avengers 28)? His costume would also change repeatedly (as would the Wasp's--Jan was, after all, a fashion designer). In their attempts to make Hank more interesting, his writers continually put him through the wringer. He would be trapped at giant size, stuck at ant-size, and even be responsible for the creation of one of the Avengers' greatest foes, Ultron. His sudden marriage to the Wasp under the new guise of the Yellowjacket was surprising, as was his decision to maintain the identity, but the ramifications of his assumption of yet another heroic persona were left undeveloped until Shooter came alone. [1]
Reader, I married him
What Shooter made clear was that Hank suffered from a life-long, slow-moving identity crisis. [2] Some of this could be dismissed as editorially driven: as we have seen, Hank's chroniclers spent years trying to give him a compelling hook, effectively rewriting his history and altering his personality repeatedly. In his first appearance, he has neither a costume nor a superhero name, because he is not even part of the superhero genre; as "The Man in the Anthill," he is only one of countless throwaway sci-fi/monster protagonists in the Lee/Kirby repertoire before Lee decides to make him part of the superhero revival. Just a year and a half later, Ant-Man's origin is retold to make him simultaneously a more tragic and more passive figure. Now his choice to experiment in size-control is an oblique result of his Hungarian first wife's (mis)quotation of Proverbs: "Go to the ants, thou dullard!", humorously but pointedly suggesting her new husband lacks drive. After her sudden and mysterious death, Hank resolves to fight injustice as Ant-Man, eventually (but in the same issue) recruiting Jan to be his partner after she, too, suffers the loss of a loved one (her father).
No matter his size, Hank suffers from the instability of his ego and a limited understanding of his own agency. Thanks to revelations, retcons, and sudden changes in plotlines, the very continuity of Hank's consciousness is under repeated threat. The Marvel universe's first, and most powerful artificial intelligence, Ultron, was created by Hank in between issues of the Avengers, but Hank himself had no recollection of these events after his own creation turns upon him and wipes his memory. Just a few issues after Ultron's introduction, the Wasp agrees to marry the mysterious, swaggering Yellowjacket, who turns about to be an alternate personality resulting from Hank's accidental exposure to chemicals in his laboratory. In the shorthand of mad science, it just so happens that the chemical release Hank from the self-consciousness and inhibitions that have prevented him from asking Jan to marry him (despite the unambiguous signals she gives him that she would say yes). As the writer of The Avengers, Roy Thomas showed that Hank Pym was a mess. Yet on the comic's pages, Yellowjacket is simply the latest redesign of a character that never acquired the popularity of his teammates, while as the next step in Hank Pym's evolution, this new name and costume were a cry for help that neither the characters nor the writers noticed for another decade.
Next: Daddy’s Issues
Notes
[1] Hank's chemically-induced breakdown, assumption of a new identity, successful deception of most of his teammates, and shotgun wedding with the Wasp were finally given a believable psychological context by Joe Casey, Will Rosado, and Tom Palmer in the 2006-2007 eight-issue miniseries Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes II, which built on the work Shooter did Pym during his runs on The Avengers.
[12] Eventually, Pym would be diagnosed as bipolar.