I'm still writing about the early years of Marvel Comics for the coming ebook, and I'm still being surprised, and at times even genuinely amazed, by what I'm stumbling across. By now, I suppose I ought not to be, but there seems to be no limit to how these old stories can reveal entirely unsuspected aspects of themselves. As such, I've found myself having to throw away beliefs that I've complacently held to for decades now, and a prime example of that is the matter of Hank Pym's psychological problems. It wasn't so long ago on this blog that I was arguing Pym's potrayal as a perpetually disturbed individual was an ill-judged later imposition, and yet now I'm convinced that's not the case at all. Doctor Henry Pym has clearly been a profoundly disturbed individual since at least 1963's Tales To Astonish #44, and that's the starting point for this week's post by yours truly over at Sequart Publishing. The introduction of the Wasp in that issue briefly delivered to Marvel's readers an untypically steely if naively lovelorn teenage super-heroine, as we discussed last week. What's disturbing is that the same tale established Pym as a spectacularly disturbed widower worthy of the antagonist's berth in a Gothic novel. The evidence tends to lurk between Jack Kirby and Don Heck's panels, mind you, but it's all there.
Should you be at all interested in Henry Pym's shiversome mental problems, and his unconsciously manipulative behaviour where the traumatised Janey Van Dyne is concerned, then you can reach Sequart Publishing here. And if you'd prefer just to have the visual evidence for such a contention, then I'll post it here on Thursday coming, following tomorrow's discussion of a baker's dozen of disastrous comic-books. Please do feel free to pop in then, or, indeed, at any time. The reviews and discussions which were traditionally a feature of TooBusyThinking will be returning in the close future, so there may yet appear some material here to while away the deader moments of the day.
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Poor old Henry. Not only did he have a rather strange super power, then he goes and gets a partner and makes her more powerful than he is! Plus, she's a little on the nutty side to begin with.
ReplyDeleteHello Sally:- It was all Pym's fault. She was a perfectly snotty society girl when he met her. I'm think I've got to point where I'm going to (1) blame him for everything while (b) feeling sincerly sorry for him, given that he's not a well man.
DeleteSo, I yes, I agree; poor old Henry :-(
It's just me or the The Creature From Kosmos' plot (an adult man desires an - illegally and immorally - too young girl and his 'love' can be fulfilled only 'cause this girl suddenly becomes an orphan) disturbingly resembles Nabokov's Lolita?
ReplyDeleteHello Thomaz:- Oh, dear, that's a worrying thought. Of course, Pym doesn't seem at all aware of what he seems to be doing, and he'd never ever wish Dr Van Dyne harm in any way. In several later episodes, he reminds himself - and JVD - that she's far too young for him too. (In fact, of course, she's not in terms of ages of consent, though she clearly has an uncomfortable lack of power relative to him in terms of life experience, degree of authority relative to him and so on) And yet I do get your point. Pym appears to be a terribly damaged man who means nothing but good. In that, his actions carry with them shadows of the utterly foul Hubert, because any discussion of such issues inevitably calls up the specter of the most extreme wrongs in such a case. The tragedy of Pym and JVD is - viewed through a particular prism - that they've smashed into each other's lives at a moment in which neither are in a shape to think and feel clearly. At such a point, it's Pym who's responsible for behaving ethically, and yet Pym just doesn't seem to be able to understand what he's doing.
Delete(Of course, as I said over at Sequart, he's doing a laudable thing according to the logic of super-books of the day, just as Bruce Wayne apparently helped Dick Grayson when the latter's parents were killed. But the conceit of these posts is just to look at the material in terms of what it now appears to say.)
Pym seems to me to be a walking example of how the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. His own pain and delusions seem to often rob him of the ability to judge the appropriateness of his decisions. But because of that, he does seem to ignore JVD's ethical rights, and that's a disturbing, deeply regrettable business.
Hy Colin,
DeleteA little afterthought:
Wow, this mix of love and lust for scientific experimentations with his beloved's body... it's like Cronenberg's version of Lolita, actually..
Perhaps Marvel Movie should consider him for this Ant Man adaptation they're trying to do....
Of course i'm just exaggerating here. But just agreeing with Charles RB's comment bellow I believe someone should really use HP to discuss Comic's Scientific Ethics. I mean he experimented on JVD, created Ultron - which made Vision, a synthetic life that has a human 'soul' transplanted inside him as a 'software' - again a HP's idea... So many taboos being broken!
It's interesting how many people have worried about the possibility of Reed Richard's fall to the Dark Side, but no one has ever thought about the HP's present condition...
That said... I actually like the charm of Ant Man naivety... Seeing a man riding an ant and saving the day by sealing a gun with honey... May be dumb but it still could make someone get to be marveled.
It's just Hank Pym never was an interesting character (and the Giant man thing just destroyed the appeal of the tinny superhero who could do amazingly bizarre-if-not-impossible-at-all-in-every-possible-reality stuff).
Hello Thomaz:- That's a nice parallel drawn with Cronenberg. Of course, that scene has nothing of body horror about it, which is how Cronenberg would present it, but Marvel was often very negative indeed about what horrors might occur to the body if uncontrolled "science" was permitted to operate out of control.
DeleteAnd I'd have loved it if DC had been hired for the Ant-Man movie, though Mr Wright seems like a very exciting choice too.
I'm with you on the issue of ethics. It's not something which gets discussed enough. Even the endless arguments about Alan Moore and Before Watchmen rarely seem informed by anything other than a vague sense of what ethics might actually be concerned. (For example, it could be argued that DC had a duty of care to ensure that Moore was properly informed, let alone protected from exploitation, where the negotiations for Watchmen were underway.)
Yet I'm with you about the charm of those early Ant-Man issues. There's still a great deal that might be done with that tradition, although I suspect that film might be the most appropriate medium for that.
Pym is a lot more interesting if you assume he's a headcase who really, really shouldn't be doing superhero stuff but keeps falling back into it.
ReplyDelete- Charles RB
Hello Charles:- I can only agree. Indeed, I think we've discussed the matter before - huzzah! - but the difference for me is that I now accept that Pym's problems go right back to long before he ever breathed in any size-changing gas.
DeletePoor HP ...
Of course, many of the ethical problems displayed by Henry Pym in this story also apply to Reed Richards in the very first Fantastic Four story, in not only hijacking that rocket but also bringing along his young fiance, who was neither a scientist nor a pilot, as well as her teenaged brother! Yeah, those aspects of their origin definitely had to be changed for the movie because they're far too absurd to take seriously even in a sci-fi superhero flick.
ReplyDeleteAs to this intro to Janet Van Dyne and her relationship with Hank, this particular story is the only one from Astonishing Tales that I've read, and that was in the Marvel Superhero Woman tradeback. Seems that Stan was aware he had to make Hank more interesting as a character and part of that had to include giving him some sort of supporting cast (other than those ants, that is). I'm sure that Stan & the gang and their readership didn't see anything wrong at all in Hank's manipulative behavior in getting Janet to become his partner -- this sort of stuff was just so common in comics of that era. On the other hand, given the same scenario and modern sensibilities, the series could have been made much more interesting by playing on those psychological issues. Hank was a brilliant scientist, but like most of early Marvel's male heroes, despite being a brave, take-charge kind of guy, he was socially inept and didn't have many friends. Of course he wanted a female partner, someone to share his adventures with! Strangely, once he had that partner, he was afraid to fall in love with her, and often referred to her as flighty or silly. A weird relationship, especially considering that in the pages of the Avengers, Roy Thomas felt it necessary to have Hank go mad and adopt another personality before he would even propose marriage to Jan!
So, yeah, Jim Shooter's depiction of Hank's mental problems had a strong basis in prior storeis in both A.T. & the Avengers, although I believe Shooter should have handled the reaction of the other Avengers much better. Thor, Iron Man & Cap were all part of the classic team that had fought with Hank & Jan during the first year of the Avengers and many times since, yet none of them stopped to wonder what caused Hank to behave so uncharacteristically abominably. Particularly as by this point they'd even known Hank's true identity for ages and had enough shared adventures to regard him as not just a teammate but a friend, I would've thought that even if they rightfully condemned his bad actions, they would've still been more sympathetic to him as someone they knew to be fundamentally good but was obviously having significant pyschological problems.
Great column, Colin, and much food for thought on those old comics!
Hello Fred:- I'm absolutely with you about Reed Richards!;
Deletehttp://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/on-stan-lee-mark-waid-jack-kirby-mike.html
And I'm with you on the issue of what was intended by TTA's creators, and said so several times too, as you'll know! It's a fascinating business to me, to note how taken-for-granted assumptions - including the ethics of a particular culture and time - feed into a book which at first seems unremarkable and then, with the passing of the years, appears very odd and even disturbing. I can, for example, recall seeing the original Sabrina as a young teen and thinking nothing more than Bogart seemed abit old for AH. Now I can barely watch it, for all its charm. The culture's changed ...
I entirely agree that Shooter should've handled the Pym situation better. Those issues are not well-written, and the portrayal of the Avengers suggests that they were callous and ignorant. And as you say, if Hank's defined as mentally ill, then his previous actions have to be seen in that light. So in making that problem explicit, Shooter did indeed make their lack of knowledge and care obvious too. It's something which Roger Stern - bless him - went a long way to dealing with, and Steve Englehart did later present Thor as someone who saw the world in such reactionary terms that he struggled to see Pym in anything other the terms of ally/enemy. But yes, Shooter seized on a valid point and executed it poorly.
In fact, I agree with everything you've written! It's first thing in the morning, I'm typing as I remember how to think again, and I can see that I ought to have posted in a huge YOU'RE RIGHT with a smiley face and left it there! Mea culpa ..
You'll adduce from my blog post about Ultron's origin my dislike for Hank's later psychotic break and spousal abuse of Janet.
DeleteI can't see why no one up until now has attempted to reveal it as just another scheme of Ultron's, akin to his mentally controlling the butler Jarvis when in the guise of the "Crimson Cowl" (Roy really did do the definitive Hank didn't he)?
Shooter himself even had Pym brainwashed to kidnap the Wasp so she could be converted to a metal mate for Ultron in 161.
Crikey, Justin Hammer had his scientists working over a long period of time to figure out a way to control Iron Man's armour remotely so what is so hard to believe about a robot with an Oedipus Complex scheming to make its "father" fall out of favour with its "mother" so it can step in and become the "surrogate" husband?
This to me would seem to be the best, and simplest, way to redeem Hank and it gels with previous continuity. Just reveal it and then move forward.
Hello Nathan:- Regardless of whether I can accept that Hank always had had psychological issues or not - and I now can - I think the violence against Jan in the Shooter issues of The Avengers was both ill-judged and, as a social issue, ill-served.
DeleteAs for explaining the situation away, well, that's part of the fun of being a fan. I certainly can't fight your logic! The problem, of course, is that Hank's psychological problems are now so well established that such a ret-con could appear to be running away from the issues. I have come across recent stories where Pym's problems have been sympathetically and responsibly dealt with. As such, I think that aspect of his character is here to say.
Wow, just read your column on Waid & Weiringo's "A very arrogant man...." Great piece, Colin. Funny how a story that seemed so right, even progressive about 51 years ago now comes off as bizarre. Well, actually it was bizarre back then too but it seems even the relatively few adult comics readers didn't expect much better. What's interesting to me in re-reading many of those stories from the first decade of Marvel is their slow transformation from incredibly silly to more thoughtful. Spider-Man was the only series that IMO was consistently good from the first story on as nearly all the others had really terrible stories during those first few years, until about 1965 when the overall quality significantly improved in most of the mags. It's as if that's the year Stan realized he had the potential of not only keeping his current readers as they got older, but also of reaching a somewhat older audience. However, he could only do that with a more mature style of writing, and art that wasn't so obviously rushed and in which his artists were allowed to display their incredible creativity.
DeleteHello Fred:- Thank you! I'm just giving that post a serious rewrite for the coming ebook, and doing so has only raised my regard for the Waid/Weiringo take on Mr Fantastic. And that's actually something that's pretty difficult to do, giving how I adore their work on the character.
DeleteI think the received opinions of later generations of Marvel fans - from perhaps the late Sixties to the early Nineties - led to a belief that the early Marvels had been psychologically complex and sensible in their plots. And of course the truth is that they were nothing of the sort. They had far more soap in them, and far more explicit conflict between "heroic" characters, but they were children's comics working in the context of a long tradition of stories for boys. It's easy to read them and miss how daft they can be, or see all that daftness and think that the book's are silly and lack worth, but things are far more complicated than that. Judged in the context of the age, as you're doing, those comics were radical and impressive. Judged from the context of today, they're wonderfully bright-minded, often ambitious and brilliantly executed kid's books. To read them again is to feel all that wonder again, and anyone who chooses to look down on such comics is missing out on a great deal of fun as well as a fair measure of interesting thinking.
In fact, it's odd that you mention 1965 as the turning point, because the end of that year marks the point for me at which Marvel's comics start to decline in quality. With Ditko and Wood either gone or going by that time, and with Kirby becoming progressively more disillusioned, Marvel seems to me to have declined - with some admirable exceptions - until the 74/7 period. By which I mean, I think that early period, for all its silliness, is so packed with entertainment and ideas, so full of contradictions and energy, that it's inspiring and enjoyable in ways which more carefully-judged work can't always match.
Horses for courses of course. I'm not meaning to suggest you're wrong, because that'd be a ridiculous business. It's all a question of personal taste, of course. It's just that for me, the likes of the Silver Surfer book of the period are an example of Stan Lee writing dull, portentous material without anything of the pizzaz of Pop Art Marvel. I think Lee was brilliant as a comics writer of wonderfully out-there kid's comics, in collaboration with Kirby and Ditko. His skills, for me, were in the crazy, every-panel-must-be-impossibly-entertaining approach of 61 to early 66.
Mind you, I can't say that I thought that at the time, or even until relatively recently. And I suspect that if I pick up those Surfer issues again, I'll find I'm talking tosh ...
This post is good motivation for pulling out those issues from the 2005 Earth's Mightiest Heroes series and thumbing through them again. If memory serves, they give an interesting take on Pym's state of mind as an Avenger--even going so far to say that his teammates recognized his charade as Yellowjacket right off the bat. (Which, frankly, I was kind of surprised they didn't in the original story!)
ReplyDeleteHello Comicsfan:- Joe Kelly's work on Earth Mightiest Heroes certainly didn't stint in trying to make sense of the Yellowjacket origin issues. I thought it was a fun and even touching love-letter to those early Avengers books, but I was no more convinced by the explanations he gave than those that Thomas was. That's the problems with comic-book super-science, and that goes for psychology as much as any other discipline. When you have to call upon daft explanations to explain away daft explanations, the whole thing tends not to be convincing.
DeleteBut it was good fun, and well done too. But the idea of a Yellowjacket so mentally ill that he had to be allowed to persevere with his superhero career despite being quite out of his mind .... I wasn't convinced, though I did respectfully smile. Mr Kelly worked terribly hard and I doubt anyone could've shown more respect than he did.
Hi Colin,
ReplyDeleteAs always, interesting reading. As noted, the main motivation to bring in a sidekick was for Pym to have someone to talk to. The idea of a female sidekick was not new, as comics had Bulletgirl, and Hawkwoman, to name two. In this period at Marvel there was often little follow-up to tragic situations. Junior Juniper, Pamela Hawley and Franklin Storm were also rarely mentioned or the consequences of their losses played upon. One exception was Peter Parker, who did live with the guilt of his Uncle's murder, a fact that played an important part of his characterization and ongoing story.
The murder of Pym's wife was obviously a plot that was used to make him a more interesting and motivated hero, however Lee did not follow-up on these stories and Pym went back to being an uninteresting character. Janet also lost any sense of purpose, other than to be a flighty and flirty female. character development was just not in the cards at this point.
I would note that H. E. Huntley was a pseudonym for Ernie Hart, who was a writer, editor and artist for Timely. While Stan came up with the plot, Hart probably provided a full script for Kirby, as was the standard at the time with folks like Hart, Lieber and Bernstein. It is also possible that the script noted the resemblance to Pym's wife and Kirby ignored or forgot to depict Janet in that manner. Everyone at Marvel, especially Kirby was super busy and errors could easily have been made.
It would have been interesting to see a really good writer in the 1970s, like Steve's Engelhart or Gerber, feeding upon past stories, developing the characters of Hank and Jan. The issues you point out, along with his changing into multiple identities and marrying Janet under false pretense would have been more than enough for them to play upon.
Hello Nick:- I've been reading everything I can find on the early years of Marvel - and coming across your name as I do so! - and one of things which always surprises me is how the Pym strip was always the runt of the litter. Reading that Kirby, for example, never wanted to find himself stuck on the strip again is to grasp something of why Pym's adventure's sank as they did. Those brief attempts to spark the strip to light were never consistently followed, which as we've discussed before, was a shame. Of course, the talent at Marvel could only be stretched so far.
DeleteI do take your point that Marvel didn't always emphasise over time the consequences of tragic events. Yet both the FF and - as you say - Spider-Man did. Even when the precise details of a particular loss wasn't mentioned, the general tragedy of an origin would be returned to in those strips. In Spider-Man, Uncle Ben was relatively rarely mentioned, but the consequences of his death - such as Aunt May's repeated bouts of ill-health and poverty - were often in the front of events. Indeed, most strips often returned to the general facts of a tragic origin, but Pym and Van Dyne's only did once, when Pym's marriage was referred to before a mission to Berlin. (Some strips, such as Captain America, of course returned all too often to the loss of Bucky without adding anything to the mix.) Memory tells me that Iron Man's adventures alone referred to the physical consequences of his Vietnam adventure at least three times in the first year of the character's publication. By which I mean, the tragic aspects of certain characters origins were kept in the forefront of stories, whereas with Hank'n;Jab, neither tragedy nor origin was discussed at all. Perhaps because both Pym's and Van Dyne's origins were about psychological rather than physical suffering, it may have been that their pasts weren't considered interesting enough.
I didn't know that Hart - I've used the pseudonym for the convenience of it all - probably provided full script. I assummed, as seemed to be standard for the time, that Lee set Kirby and/or Heck into motion with his plot and Hart worked from the pages. I'm grateful for the information/correction about Hart, Lieber and Bernstein's work. Huzzah for you!
The apparent error about the similarities - or not - between Janet and Maria is of course absolutely understandable. In discussing what the pages suggest in the context of 2011 in terms of story, I don't mean to mock the creators of the tale in the hectic and creative time of 1963. Indeed, the frantic pace of work in the Marvel of the period threw up contradictions and confusions which helped the work breathe and involve both readers and future creators in making sense of things.
I too regret that the likes of Steve Gerber never got his hands on Pym and Van Dyne. Reading/listening to a few old interviews with the Gerber of 1974, I note that Pym was a character that SG had claimed for the Defenders, and that Englehart had then claimed Yellowjacket, along with the Wasp, for the Avengers. I very much enjoyed Gerber's take on Yellowjacket in GSD#4 and the Sons Of The Serpent four-parter, and regret that Hank didn't spend more time hanging out in Greenwich Village. Though I have a great deal of respect for Englehart's Avengers tales of the day, I don't think that he added anything to the Pyms history. However, Gerber would have almost undoubtedly done something significant. He always did in the years of his very best work at Marvel.
Colin,
DeleteKirby had different things to say about Ant-Man at various times. In one interview I recall he said he was fascinated with ants and was sorry he didn't have the time to explore the character. kirby was occuoied with a load of strips at the time and likely contributed little to nothing in the plotting of most of the Ant-Man stories he drew. Full scripts were produced by the likes of Lieber, Hart and Bernstein, and while some suspect that Kirby may have revised some of those scripts, there is no proof to go on.
You're right about Englehart not adding to Pym's story. My thought was that if Englehart had been given an Ant-Man series to write in the 1970s I suspect he would have done something similar to his Captain America run; added layers to the story based on past events. That did not happen in the Avengers.
Hello Nick;- Thank you for the background. I've not come across that Kirby interview - if the reference for it is at hand, or appears close by, I'd love to know :)- But I'm not surprised at all that Kirby would have found aspects of the strip to focus upon and think of developing. I think Kirby could've found something exciting to say about just about any premise in the world.
DeleteI have no doubt that, as you say, Englehart would've done a splendid job on a solo Pym strip. His half-a-dozen or so Beast tales in Amazing Adventures basically set that character's future path for the next forty years! I wish he'd beenb given the chance.
He seems to have something planned for Pym and Van Dyne in the Avengers, hanging on to them in the reshuffle that was his last issue of the comic. Odd that the likes of Hellcat should've been given such prominence in his last run of Avengers tales when the Pyms slipped largely into the background. But then, it was an era when plans could be made from month to month. (Gerber, it seems, often had no idea at all how the next month's comic could proceed from the previous issue's cliffhanger, as of course you'll know.)All of which raises the possibility that a terrific Pym/Van Dyne tale might have been just a month or two away when Conway bumped his colleague and established his forgettable and brief reign.
Hi Colin,
DeleteI couldn't find the exact quote (or perhaps I'm misrembering) but here are some interesting quotes from an interview in 1969, published in the Nostalgia Journal # 31 in 1976.
TCJ: Surely you've noticed that the Fly and Ant-Man are very similar?
Kirby: Not only that, but I feel man's intellect hasn't actually collided with the insects. In other words, I feel that somehow there may be some kind of rapport that man has never had with insects, which he may find if he was on the same level in some way. That should be explored. Maybe the insect in his own size has some kind of intelligence we can't fathom because we're so damn big.
...if people won't read Ant-Man, not WON'T read Ant-Man, but feel that not enough has been done on the character, they won't respond. All the characters are good but there is not enough time to follow them all out individually.
Hello Nick;- THANK YOU for being so generous with your time. (And I very much doubt you'd be mis-remembering :) )
DeleteI love the idea that Kirby's mind was always open to thinking of ways to make even the least apparently promising character interesting. Just when I think I can't possibly respect him anymore, I'll spend a few days re-reading some of his comics and he'll seem even more impossibly impressive.
Well, I find nothing to disagree with in your analysis. Ant Man and the Wonderful Wasp are a pair that I've always wanted to like in comics, but seldom do. It's a personal problem: I always want them to be portrayed as a superheroic version of Nick and Nora from the Thin Man films, with a affectionate if sometimes adversarial relationship: witty banter in the service of solving murders and loving each other. They seldom are. Maybe someday...
ReplyDelete-mikesensei
Hello Mike:- There was very much a sense that Lee was wanting to create exactly that kind of bantering relationship, and yet he couldn't find the balance between angst and adoration. The truth is, Lee's method and attitude towards gender at the time in his comics was incompatible with a Nick'n'Nora relationship. This is not to hack away at the man with PCness and hindsight. In the context of the age, his work was quite understandable. But there was a delicacy and charm missing from his work combined with a lack of awareness of how women might be portrayed which meant that the whole concoction fell short. Lee was writing often radical and usually compelling boys stories for an audience of boys in a time that was even more sexist than ours. I'm not blaming him for not writing Thin Man super-books, but I do think it's a shame that somebody didn't ever pick up that potential and run with it.
DeleteBut maybe someday. I'd still like to see that too.
Interesting stuff, Colin! I have commented over at Seqart, but have it here too!
ReplyDelete/////
Ah, the Hank/Jan pairing - dead wife substitute and father figure profess to fall in love. Lovely.
One thing I never got with this is Hank's assertion that Jan looked like Maria - was he blind as well as as disturbed?
Can we read anything into the first two big romances at Marvel involving men falling for women half their age? Probably some TV trope of the time ...
Hello Mart:- Thank you for commenting here. I find - from the perspective of 2012 - the falling for the far younger woman tradition a worrying business. At least Sue Richards seemed more than old enough, and at times - such as during the origin issue - strong enough, to have chosen her hubby-to-be rather than be pressurised into it. The more I look at TTA - and chance has meant I've read it several times recently - the more worrying the whole business. Yet it was a trope of so much fiction of the period and beyond; the young innocent girl, the weary, broken hero ... I never thought twice about it in the day. Now it all seems .... a reflection of some dubious if typically - I presume - unconscious attitudes.
DeleteBut as you say about Hank not noticing how different Maria and Janet were; the man's clearly not well at all. There's a cultural studies paper to be written where Pym's importance as a symbol of the crisis of masculinity in the early Sixties might be discussed.
But not by me:)
Just read part two of the Year in Comics piece, to which I say over there:
ReplyDeleteAnother fascinating piece, Colin. That story begs a couple of untold tales - what did early Marvel urbanites think to seeing a gun slowly moving across the sidewalks; didn't anyone try to pick it up?
And did Hank go so far as to actually audition potential partners? What if that costume was actually made for an enemy agent attempting to steal his secrets - 'the beautiful but deadly Madame Natasha'. And did Hank's poor efforts make Jan think, 'I can do better than this' and set her on the route to fashion legend?
Hello Martin:- Oh, I would LOVE to see a graphic novel which saw the events of this tale from the outside. You're right; what did folks think about that rifle being inched across town? What did Hank and Jan DO while things ebbed forwards? Did they discuss the weather, or sit there quietly? Was Hank all angst and guilty libido, and Jan all adoration despite being the Queen in a parade of millions of insects?
DeleteI posted one last piece about this issue this very mid-day, and by coincidence, I ask pretty much the same question that you have here about that costume, in the sense that it must have existed before Van Dyne first knocked on his door. It's creepy stuff. (I love the idea that it was first made for the Widow. Now there's enough psychological distress in that idea to power a decade of stories :) )
As for the inspiration for Jan's fashion career? It would make perfect sense, and it would be thoroughly amusing too.
It's a wonderful story, isn't it? As a kid's adventure for 1963, it's a cracking tale which set a pace which only the two-part Kirby Giant-Man tale which featured Whirlwind matched. Read with the irony lent by the passing years, it's a deeply disturbing/hilarious collision of unintended meanings.
That piece you wrote today is what reminded me to pay catch-up ... that's my next treat.
ReplyDeleteCan't wait to see your ebook!
Hello Martin:- Thank you.
DeleteBeing at the point at which "rewriting old posts and articles" actually turns out to mean "keeping the title and changing everything else", I'll be amazed to see the ebook. But I assume that it's there, some time relatively soon in the future, and it only seems unlikely at this point in the writing .... :)