Ant-Man/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Just try to watch Ant-Man pop pills to change his size, in 1960s comics, without thinking of Viagra.
  • Karma Houdini: While never out and out villianous, O'Grady was on both the Shadow Initiative and Osborn's second Thunderbolts team.
  • Never Live It Down: The page image features Hank Pym hitting Janet during a mental-breakdown-induced Face Heel Turn. (This storyline also included him killing old enemies in cold blood, and releasing murderous robots on New York just so he could look like a hero when he stopped them; the whole thing would be a Dork Age if it didn't end with Pym recovering, then single-handedly beating the Masters of Evil.) Writers have explored the issue with various levels of grace since then, but more than once his hitting Wasp has devolved into a crude running gag which still colors newer depictions of him. In particular, the Ultimate version of Hank Pym is an outright wife-beater -- and since The Ultimates is so popular, this has made things even worse for the "real" Pym.
      • Also, keep in mind that this is the woman who deliberately used his unstable mental state to force him into marriage with her, so she's not entirely innocent in the whole fiasco.
    • What's particularly frustrating is that Jan and the other Avengers forgave Hank long ago -- it's the writers (and Hank himself, really) who won't. Every time the incident is laid to rest, someone comes along to dig it up again. Most recently, Chuck Austen Did Not Do the Research; in his brief Avengers run, he wrote Hank as a misogynist, Jan as a pinball, and Hawkeye as a jerk who's held a grudge against Hank since the '80s. (In fact, they've always been close friends, and Clint's support was a big factor in Hank's redemption.) Hank and Jan have a profoundly messed-up relationship, but this was no more than a caricature of it.
    • This is shown to be a part of his character in-universe, too, as a consequence of the fact that this is all writers ever do with him; in The Initiative, Trauma loses control of his powers and Hank witnesses his greatest fear: a battered Jan telling him that no one will ever forget how he lost control exactly one time.
    • An earlier scene in The Initiative shows former Slingers hero Prodigy calling Pym a wife-beater under his breath. This implies that Hank's wife-beating past is common knowledge amongst the superhero set, and not just the Avengers.
    • Extending to the supervillain set too, in Dark Reign we have Norman Osborn ribbing on him about this. Hank just counters with his killing Gwen Stacy.
    • Perhaps the most extreme form came in Marvel Zombies, where the local Hank Pym bit Jan's head off - to his disgust (zombies hate the taste of zombies) and to little effect (zombie, anyone?). Well, that was because they were arguing over how he was keeping Black Panther as a secret living food supply, but still.
    • The incident in The Ultimates was just the tail end of a fight partially based on insecurities Hank had been suppressing for some time, aggravated by a recent humiliation in battle, he had a substance abuse problem, and the marriage was pretty much falling apart anyway. He seemed to immediately regret what he'd done[1], and the second miniseries seemed to be trying to turn him into a Jerkass Woobie. Particularly notable is that even after he got beaten up by Cap, no one really wanted anything to do with him. Like the 616 version, he lost control once, with extenuating circumstances, and it ruined his life and reputation. Just like reality.
      • In the case of Ultimate Hank Pym, Betty Ross revealed that that wasn't the first incindent in their relationship. She stated that Pym abused Jan while they were in college as well. That said, Pym's explusion for the team was more so because Nick Fury didn't want the team to gain bad publicity over the incident.
  1. Abusers often claim this and often mean it, at least until the next incident, but since Jan left immediately, we don't know if he would've followed through.