New Brevoort Formspring

>Tom, I’m reading your Newsarama interview about Axis 9 and I have to admit I’m a bit frustrated to see the Hank Pym comments. I know I’ve posted about this before (and you’ve responded) but doesn’t it sort of keep coming up because you keep having it come up? We’ve seen Hank move past this storyline time and time again: his near-suicide in West Coast Avengers, the Busiek run on Avengers, Dan’s Scientist Supreme story … but the editors keep greenlighting stories where it’s like those previous events have never happened. I understand the idea of letting the writers write the stories, but … shouldn’t editorial guidance suggest if you want to move beyond this one (horrible) character beat, you need to do a new story?

I’m reminded of Dan Slott’s Avengers Academy 3 (or was it 2?), where Hank seemingly sacrifices himself and everyone acts like he’s a big hero again. To me it felt like a direct address of the Shooter assassination of the character, but one that failed, because it TOLD us that Hank was a good guy instead of SHOWING us. I thought Dan did much better with with character with the scientist supreme angle — a new story for the guy with unlimited possibilities, but then it was just ignored in his next appearance. Now maybe the next writer didn’t want to deal with that particular aspect, but that doesn’t mean we need a story about the slap again, does it? Don’t you need a writer to come up with a big storyline for Hank, something that’s going to be a new defining moment for him?

I’m glad Marvel seems to have realized these issues are problems, since I’m still upset about the godawful treatment of Wanda in Avengers Dismembered and House of M, when the character deserves far better. There’s still so much repair that needs to be done and I honestly don’t know if it can be. But if you keep having the writers go back to the same well — in this case, Wanda’s thing is going to be that she snaps for no particular reason every half-dozen issues, it seems like — nothing’s ever done to fix the characters, is it? And as the guardians of the Marvel characters, shouldn’t the editors steer the writers into trying to undo that sort of damage?

They don’t need to be perfect, of course, but Wanda can’t really be a hero if half the readership hates her because Marvel thought she made an effective plot device to deal with the burgeoning numbers of mutants.>

Here’s the thing of it: Marvel exists to tell interesting stories, we don’t exist to keep our characters all pristine. So Marvel’s goal isn’t necessarily the same as your goal in this instance.

And really, the issue with Hank Pym, really, is that the story in which he struck the Wasp became very quickly the most memorable and significant event in that character’s history. That’s not something that anybody chose, but once it had happened, it’s incredibly difficult to reverse. That moment is the thing that most people, readers and creators alike, think of first when they think about Hank.

I and various other creators spent a lot of time and effort over the years trying to redeem Hank as a character, and I ultimately think that there really isn’t any way to do it, not in the manner that you’re talking about. That moment casts just too long a shadow, and exponentially more people know about it and think about it than they do Dan’s scientist supreme stories or virtually anything else that’s been done with Hank in the thirty years since then.

Putting a moratorium on referring to that storyline isn’t going to do what you want it to do either. in most cases, it’s just going to make writers not want to write stories about Hank, since they can’t deal with any of the emotional complexity that hakes him who he is. And those writers that do are going to be forced to write him one-dimensionally, as a paragon do-gooder.

This problem isn’t just Hank’s, but he’s a good case study, in that prior to that, while he’d been in comics for twenty years and appeared in some of the classics of that era, he didn’t have another moment that resonated with such emotional power. That’s the real reason it keeps coming up–because people feel it. Whereas it was easy for Spider-Man to get past that one moment during the clone sage when he strikes Mary Jane, because he had dozens of other strong emotional moments that were a much greater part of his history and character, going all the way back to his origin.

As for Wanda, it remains to be seen. But it seems to me that most of the readers who have a beef with her aren’t actually upset at the character at all, they’re upset about the depowering of a favorite mutant character or their own concerns and fears that the X-Men as a component of Marvel is being sidelined. All of those are difficult emotions to outweigh as well, but most of them aren’t directly connected to what the Scarlet Witch might do next–so we’ll see.