Going back to the roots
With all the recent, and rather disappointing, news of the Ant-Man movie, it seems to become clearer and clearer that nobody at Hollywood will ever give Hank Pym a portrayal that respects his classic Silver Age adventures. This book, on the other hand, does.
I've always thought that Henry Pym was an incredibly underrated superhero. When most people hear his name, do they think of the fact that the Avengers remaining a team after their first adventure was his idea? Or how he used to punch out communist supervillains while bug-sized? No, almost everyone would automatically think of that one time he hit Janet during a mental breakdown. This is because Pym's entire character has been built around this one-panel-long incident from over 20 years ago (and not even any of the context that goes with it). In this story, however, that's not an issue. There's no domestic violence, no guilt over creating Ultron, no changing identities, even Janet herself is only briefly alluded to and doesn't actually appear. For once, it's just Pym, and the book actually manages to give him a personality without using any of these things as a crutch like Marvel's been doing for so many years.
The concept of a mentally unbalanced superhero (at least one that's not being played for humor) is rare, though not unheard of. In fact, one of the more creative parts of the book was when they subverted the whole "archenemy was behind everything the whole time" retcon. At first it looked like Egghead was behind Maria's death, but it turned out to just be Pym's paranoia. And that's very original by today's cliché-filled standards.The book actually remembered that Pym had a dead wife, as well as adding a rather uncaring father, to give him some personality.
Which actually brings me to my next point: in the original comics, we never really learned much about Pym's background. His parents and his childhood are all left to speculation. The idea of giving Pym a father who was rather cold toward him, but wasn't physically abusive and still actually cared about his son in the end, is again a much more original thing for comic books.
The main idea of the story is taking the early "Tales to Astonish" comics and re-inventing them to fit today's storytelling. For example, 90% of the foes Ant-Man battled back then were Soviet Union. Here, they were able to change that to hired thugs or terrorists in a different country. Also, they managed to tie Ant-Man's origin and his rivalry with Egghead together in a way that worked quite nicely. The book even retcons away some rather lazily-written things. In this case, rather than testing the Pym Particles on himself like a stereotypical mad scientist, Henry is exposed to them when some thugs are hired to dispose of him.
Now we get to one of the review's more controversial aspects. Egghead, the villain. On one hand, he's clearly more of a threat than past versions of the character. Back in the 60's, his main weapons against the tiny hero were things like anteaters and glorified mousetraps. Here, he uses Ant-Man's own gear against him and the two are more evenly matched. Not to mention he's genuinely more menacing, feeding employees to a swarm of hungry bugs. (It seems DeFalco may have been channeling Norman Osborn while writing him) On the other hand, Egghead was still a pretty flat character. We don't get to hear anything about his origins, and he never has any motivation beyond being evil and being in love with Pym's dead wife.
Overall, I'd say this comic revives the pint-sized Avengers origins quite well and gives him more character than Marvel has since the 1970's. Four-out-of-five stars.
