{"id":153,"date":"2015-05-19T02:50:19","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T02:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/?p=153"},"modified":"2015-05-23T15:59:30","modified_gmt":"2015-05-23T22:59:30","slug":"ant-man-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/?p=153","title":{"rendered":"Ant-Man 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeah, okay, I\u2019ll talk about Ant-Man. \u00a0I\u2019ve been thinking a lot lately about the millennial, Apatowian\/Always Sunny influence\u00a0on modern comics, where\u00a0these days we don\u2019t just want a hero who\u2019s flawed, we want a hero who is actively botching up <\/em>their\u00a0own life. \u00a0Perhaps my fellow comic-nerd man-children and I are meant to relate to affable underdogs like Chris Pratt and Paul Rudd, haplessly goofing around while shirking responsibility and avoiding consequences for their actions, only to achieve, every once in a while, the occasional victory, a quiet moment of grace before starting the cycle all over again. \u00a0So Nick Spencer brings a lot of that same vibe from Superior Foes of Spider-Man to this series, where Ant-Man is a screw-up trying to con his way back to being a respectable superhero, so\u00a0you can\u2019t help but root for him. \u00a0Alongside his daughter and ex-wife, he even has a supporting cast of would-be supervillains, \u00a0Grizzly and Machinesmith, giving his fellow ex-cons the chance to redeem themselves by hiring them on to his fledgling security business.<\/p>\n

What some of you may not know is that his daughter, Cassie, was the one who indirectly\u00a0inspired Scott Lang to begin a life of crime as Ant-Man, in order to procure the funds to help treat her heart condition. \u00a0Since then, Cassie realized that her exposure to her father\u2019s size-changing Pym particles also allowed her similar abilities to grow and shrink at will, and she jointed the Young Avengers as Stature. \u00a0Through trans-temporal hijinks, both Scott and Cassie have recently died and<\/em> returned from the dead \u2013 which you\u2019d think would be a fun topic for father\/daughter bonding! \u00a0But okay, I can understand wanting to make this comic series \u201caccessible\u201d for \u201cnew readers\u201d (sigh!). \u00a0The first issue actually got things off to a very\u00a0promising start, in which Cassie was going on to\u00a0her dad about how Hunger Games is \u201ca ripoff of a vastly superior foreign film,\u201d Battle Royale, prompting Scott to think, \u201cAnd this is why my kid is cooler than yours.\u201d \u00a0That\u2019s beautiful, that is. \u00a0Sure, a case could be made that a teenage fan of foreign movies\u00a0isn\u2019t exactly groundbreaking, but it was something<\/em>. \u00a0In contrast, based solely on the trailer, my biggest glaring concern for the Ant-Man movie is this stupid little wretch<\/a> right here. \u00a0Because that<\/em> is not a supporting character. \u00a0That is not a \u201cchild actor.\u201d \u00a0That<\/em> is a Raggedy Ann doll that\u00a0says \u201cI wuv\u00a0you Daddy!\u201d when you pull its\u00a0string. \u00a0I mean, can you imagine a Marvel movie where the struggling dad has a willful teen daughter <\/i>to play off of, all texting on the latest product-placement smartphone and wearing T-shirts featuring that band you love, instead of this little idiot who may as well have \u201cKIDNAP ME\u201d stamped on her forehead?<\/p>\n

But I digress. \u00a0In this issue, Augustine Cross \u2014 a great example of a villain one loves to hate \u2014 kidnaps a doctor\u00a0to save his father, obscure Ant-Man villain Darren Cross. \u00a0His heart, you see, can\u2019t take the strain of changing size, so what else can Augustine do but kidnap Cassie, extract her Pym-particle-infused heart, and surgically implant it in Darren Cross\u2019s body! \u00a0(Don\u2019t worry, he\u2019s not a monster \u2014<\/em>\u00a0he\u2019s also got plenty of homeless people on-hand to swap her one of their <\/em>hearts instead!) \u00a0Cassie\u2019s body starts to reject the transplant, but Ant-Man saves her life by going inside her bloodstream and fighting off her white blood cells until she recovers, which is just good classic comic fun. \u00a0But I think this story mostly serves to sweep Cassie\u2019s size-changing powers under the rug and have her more closely resemble her move equivalent. \u00a0To be fair, I can absolutely understand having the title character of the series be the only one with size-changing powers\u2026 but as illustrated above, I don\u2019t think movie Cassie is a standard for which we should strive.<\/em>\u00a0 As Ant-Man\u2019s fatherhood is one of his defining character traits among the other Marvel superheroes, I can only hope his daughter remains a part of Scott\u2019s supporting cast in one form or another, and, ideally, a character in her own right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeah, okay, I\u2019ll talk about Ant-Man. \u00a0I\u2019ve been thinking a lot lately about the millennial, Apatowian\/Always Sunny influence\u00a0on modern comics, where\u00a0these days we don\u2019t just want a hero who\u2019s flawed, we want a hero who is actively botching up their\u00a0own life. \u00a0Perhaps my fellow comic-nerd man-children and I are meant to relate to affable underdogs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comic_round-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":199,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}