Ant-man and The Wasp: Fiction Hack Episode 006

Fiction Hack

Marvel Studios is about to release its 20th movie, Ant-Man and The Wasp! As a long-time comic nerd, that blows my mind. Ant-Man is a very unlikely hero who has been around since the beginning and has a hard time keeping his own series. The Wasp has generally been a tag-along character to him. Along with Guardians of the Galaxy, he’s been one of the most obscure characters picked to headline his own movie. So who is Ant-Man and/or The Wasp? Who are they in the comics, and who are they in the movies?

• My Fantastic Four review site is called FF 1 by 1, and it is totally ongoing (even though I’ve been taking a break this year).
• The best info on comic characters (apart from me) is still probably Wikipedia. Here are the entries for Ant-Man and The Wasp.
• Peyton Reed isn’t a name you probably knew before Ant-Man, but he directed the first Bring It On (2000), as well as Yes Man (2008), and every episode of The Weird Al Show (1997). For those alone I will forgive him Down With Love (2003).
• My personal favourite tale featuring (the original) Ant-Man and The Wasp is Kurt Busiek’s 12 issue limited series Avengers Forever. Carlos Pacheco’s art is top tier and although it reaches deep into pre-90s comic lore, it’s friendly for a newcomer.
• I don’t know if I made it clear, but Hope Van Dyne did appear first in Marvel Comics, although not in strict continuity. MC2 (Marvel Comics 2) were a spin-off imprint from the late 1990s, created when Tom DeFalco (one of my personal favourite writers) was removed from marvel as Editor-In-Chief in 1994. Fan outcry (or, let’s say, demand) was such that Marvel gave DeFalco creative control over a small group of titles, MC2, which essentially showed how the key marvel characters would have progressed under his supervision. Spider-Girl, with Ron Frenz, was the forerunner success and became known as the comic they couldn’t kill after fan outcry (it really was an outcry this time) forced Marvel to rescind several cancellations–eventually going on to be Marvel’s longest-running female-titled comic, hitting 100 issues. Other titles were The Fantastic Five, J2, Wild Thing, and A-Next. Hope Van Dyne, as the daughter of Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, appeared in issue 7 of A-Next as The Red Queen, leader of the Revengers, squaring off against Cassandra Lang (that name familiar?) a size-changing hero called Stinger.

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