How Scott Lang saved Marvel's Ant-Man

When Scott Lang became Ant-Man in 1979’s Marvel Premiere #47, he seemed like a strange choice to take on the role. The original Ant-Man Hank Pym was one of the world’s greatest geniuses, on the level of Reed Richards, Bruce Banner, and Tony Stark. Meanwhile though Scott Lang had been a brilliant electrical engineer, he was more recently an ex-con thrown in jail for using his talents to steal from people. He’s also a father with a sick daughter.

But as unusual as his background was, it turned out Scott Lang was exactly what Ant-Man needed.

The Hank Pym Problem

While some point to storylines that come decades after his origins as the moments that “broke” him as a character, in truth Hank Pym is a problem pretty much from his introduction in Tales to Astonish #27 in 1961. From that very first experiment, Pym regularly puts himself in totally unnecessary danger, and often to seriously negative consequences. He actually takes up the study of ants because upon shrinking for the first time they almost kill him. When he learns how to grow large he eventually gets stuck there, and later discovers his size-expansion is dangerous for his heart. An accident in another experiment will create a temporary psychotic break in him. At times he spends days locked in his lab working with a certain mania, only to emerge with results like Ultron, one of the Avengers’ most dangerous enemies.

As Ant-Man, Pym also never seems to respect the ants themselves. Even as he discovers just how intelligent ants are, and comes up with a way of communicating with them, he mostly treats them as his servants. They are there to drive him around, to serve as a sort of message service for others who need him, and, most often, to cushion his landing when he launches himself from a catapult—his main and very silly method of transportation. Never once does he show any interest in whether his weight and velocity might hurt them.

After Janet van Dyne is introduced in issue #44 and Henry gives her the wings of a wasp so that she can join him in fighting crime, he immediately begins to treat her in the same cold way. He gives her orders, ridicules her interests in fashion and justifies his treatment by noting how young she is. The rest of their 20+ run on Tales to Astonish has their oft-tempestuous relationship as its through line. She’s in love with him but can’t get him to see her as a person; he can’t treat her as an equal even after he does eventually fall for her.

It may seem like this is just the time period in which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are writing the characters. But Hank’s sexism is clearly identified as