I think that if you had to choose a primary Marvel U character whose trajectory has been the most consistently tragic since their debut, Hank Pym would have to sit very near the top of the list. I'm not sure what it is about this character that has invited so many writers and artists to heap difficulty after difficulty on him. I've proposed a few times in these posts that there are characters in the Marvel U that emblematize particular human traits, and part of me wonders if Pym is just such a character. But what does he emblematize?
My initial thought was that he's a scapegoat figure, the one that we offer up as a sacrifice, with whom we imbue our most negative traits and narratives, so that we might escape them, purge them, ourselves. If we look back through his life, through the lives of alternate versions of him, he's beset with tragedy and violence. Severe mental breaks, abusive relationships, genocidal inventions, and, if this issue is to be believed (and it should, 'cause it's Mark Waid, and he tells truth), the mother of all persecution complexes. And these are just the ones I know about from what I've read of him. I'm sure there's more. So we heap these terrible things on poor Hank Pym, and hope that it appeases whatever fates run the universe and that we will not end up suffering as he does.
But you know what gets eclipsed by Pym's tragedy? He keeps coming back. In his inimitable style, Mark Waid, ably embellished by Andre Araujo, reminds us that perhaps one of the greatest attributes of humanity, super or otherwise, is that we keep getting back up. Waid's run on The Flash could probably be summed up in exactly those five words: we keep getting back up. We don't stop believing that we matter. That's what this comic is about. It's about a person realizing that he's been told he, and by extension, his art, doesn't matter, that he and it will never amount to anything. And in telling this tale, Waid and Araujo touch us all.
I have often been asked why I study literature. What difference does the study of literature make to the world as it is lived, to how we function in our rational existences? Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, calls literary critique an art form all its own, and in this sense, I identify with Hank in this comic. Do something productive, something that results in a practical application, that somehow has a perceivable and lucrative affect on the world. Frye also notes that through literature we envision different ways of living, of organizing ourselves, from the personal to the global. How, then, can anyone ever ask why we study literature? Surely one of the most important questions we can ask as sentient organisms is "Are we doing the absolute best, are we 'human-ing' as well as we possibly could be?" In this, we can respond either yes or no, or we can question what it is to "human," and both of these responses are fundamental to the continued evolution of the species. Why study art? Why create art? Why critique art? Because if we didn't, we be robots. And Age of Ultron has just shown us how that all turns out.
On to the quarter comics tomorrow! (Though I think the first issue of the Avengers A.I. series might be in there, so perhaps we haven't left Pym completely behind yet.)
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