Superheroes Behaving Badly I: Yellowjacket

I've learned to hate to watch a superhero lose his commercial viability. Don't mistake this for some maudlin and obsessive concern over the well-being of characters who do not exist; something else applies here. When superheroes lose their appeal, their weakness invites writers into some truly grotesque forms of experimentation.

Previously, and in another column feature ("Truly Awful Comics"), I explored the fate that beset Ms. Marvel of the Avengers when writers decided to cycle her out of that team's title. If you have a strong stomach, you can view the remains here.

Yellowjacket, at one time, represented a superhero essentially on the wane since the early 1960s. As Giant-Man and Ant-Man, he hadn't managed to carry a title out of Marvel's days of two-story books. As Yellowjacket, he played a sometimes-in, sometimes-out role in Avengers, only truly coming off as important in the story where he, as Ant-Man, entered the inert form of the Vision to try to restore said Avenger's function.

Costume changes hadn't helped (he had about five Giant-Man and Goliath costumes in Avengers). Name changes hadn't helped (he had appeared in that book as "Ant-Man," "Giant-Man," "Goliath," and "Yellowjacket"). Personality changes hadn't helped (he had gone through at least two psychotic episodes by 1980).

When a character doesn't seem to work in his comics, two things often occur to writers. The first obvious notion - the temptation to kill him off - may pursuade a writer to pursue a bloody and melodramatic end to a superhero, which can work when well-planned (see Jim Starlin's work on Adam Warlock and Captain Marvel). The second involves reworking elements of his character (tried, and failed, before). If neither of these approaches seems particularly viable, a writer may attempt to exploit shock value or introduce current affairs into the plot. If it worked in Green Lantern/Green Arrow, why not?

So the able hands who produced Avengers in the early nineties moved to shock readers by moving Yellowjacket into the territory of smoldering issues of the sort that can reach deep into the hearts of readers even if newspaper headlines sometimes avoid such subjects. The results still evoke some controversy today, as you might find if you visit the "Women of Marvel Comics (WoMC)" site.

Inventor, Hero, Scumbag, Wife-Beater

Marvel, at the turn of the 1980s, made Yellowjacket a wife-abuser. The stink of this run in Avengers still persists, here and there, by a small but vocal subset of comics readership that argue that his continued presence in comics represents winking at spousal abuse. One can, however, address this notion with some skepticism. The supposed indifference to wife-beating has not expressed itself in any of the following ways: No one has called for a reprint of the wife-beating stories in order to enjoy them all at once; no one has put up a Web site featuring comics' best wife-beating battles; no one admits even to liking these stories; and few, if any, comics readers who recall this sad episode will claim to want to remember the incidents.

Yellowjacket had a history of personal problems, said troubles coming into a fine blom in the early 1980s, and, for four-color audiences everywhere, he began dealing with them by slapping around the missus. Avengers writers might not have enjoyed foresight about how this would foul the character so profoundly, despite occasional subsequent attempts to redeem him, that he would mostly languish until 1997, despite occasional attempts by Englehart, Byrne, and Thomas to involve the character in West Coast Avengers / Avengers West Coast.

I would rather read a comic book that showed the destruction of the entire populations of planets than scenes of wife-beating. The improbability of the latter events help distance it from the reader; one does not, in day-to-day interaction, run into many people who suffered through the comprehensive destruction of their homeworlds. Wife-beating does not enjoy such a distance; it remains as common as dirt and pervasive as the atmosphere. If the topic does not bring to mind someone who has suffered (or, for that matter, inflicted) physical abuse on a partner, it probably brings to mind someone who could have acted as an abuser or a target. It stirs up unwanted doubts of the form "...has he?" and "...has she?"

The Relevant History

Fate may have forced the mental illness angle into the adventures of Dr. Henry Pym. Combine an origin that began with the murder of his first wife (in his pre-heroic period) with a comics model that felt the need to pursue an ever-growing set of real-world issues, throw into this mix the need to shake the character up in order to awaken indifferent readers, run out of plots that throw light on the character, and you produce a volatile mixture, awaiting an exploitation that might produce a rare classic story or a common and embarassing flop.

Hank's first breakdown occurred before the exhaustion of the character. We might need to give Roy Thomas some credit here, the last writer until Busiek, thirty years later, who could make a superheroic version of the character work, if said hero nonetheless failed to compel the vehement adoration of comics readers.

Said breakdown did not contitute the be-all of the particular story that featured it. Consider what Roy Thomas sought to do in a single story arc: explain the robot who took the persona called the "Crimson Cowl" to mentally control the butler Jarvis a few issues previously; introduce a new superhero (the Vision) based on a Golden Age character of the same name; connect said superhero to a dead character from the first dozen issues of Avengers (the currently not-dead Wonder Man); give an existing superhero a new look and name; resolve a romance that had gone in circles for seven years or so by marrying the principals; and introduce one of the most central Avengers villains that ever strode across a panel during their thirty-seven years of almost-uninterrupted publishing history. With that much going on, we can forgive Thomas for playing with overused psychological plot devices like amnesia and multiple personalities.

The Plot Consequences

Extreme behavior followed erratic behavior. From snappishness, Kirby's creation Dr. Henry Pym escalated to striking his wife, the Wasp; this soon resulted in their separation, a development he chose to deny.

At this stage, Yellowjacket's fouling of his personal life spread into his functions as an Avenger. In a pathetic (and unpleasant to read) sequence, said adventurer attempted an ill-conceived hoax where he would rescue the Avengers - including, most importantly, his estranged wife Janet - from a robot he had programmed to attack them in their compound. This hopeless ploy failed, as it should have, and the Avengers expelled Yellowjacket, who had appeared, on and off, under various names and in various costumes, as an Avengers from 1963 to 1983.

Generally ruined by the dual developments of his expulsion from his home and his expulsion from the Avengers, Dr. Pym renounced the life of a costumed superhero altogether, but more trouble followed him. Framed by the ridiculous villain Egghead, Pym took the rap for a number of crimes and found himself behind bars. Within a few months, subsequent encounters with the malformed villain revealed evidence that cleared Pym's name (for the charges that landed him in jail), but that mattered little to the life his actions had earned him.

Comics writers wanted to use the character; they wanted somehow to redeem him; but the nature of his offenses made him a contraversial item to impose on a readership divided about him. Roger Stern used him in a peripheral role in the West Coast Avengers miniseries that provided the impetus for the regular series by the same name, and Steve Englehart used the character.

This period of his life includes even more lows. The Englehart run of West Coast Avengers involved a convoluted series of almost-on, then off, romantic attachments, generally surrounding the disposable character Tigra. Pym attempted to bond to said feline superheroine. When she rejected him, he came as close to suicide as superhero comics will generally allow a character with a history of more than a single back issue to approach that particular violation of the bylaws of the Comics Code Authority. Not too long after his nearly-tragic crisis in coping, he tried again with Firebird (later called Espirita), who similarly repelled his advances, but this time he coped much better.

He spent these years using his own name and wearing a red or purple coverall. Perhaps Englehart approached the character as he first appeared, before taking the identity of Ant-Man, in a science fiction comic of the Lee/Kirby/Ditko monster comics era. Rather than changing size himself, he used the Pym particles (the onetime source of his abandoned and problematic powers) to reduce handy objects so he could carry them in his pockets. This allowed him to do things like produce an Avengers jet on demand from a handy breast pocket. Occasionally, too, he might use the particle gun he carried to shrink an enemy to a more manageable size.

When John Byrne took the reins of West Coast Avengers, he made Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne a couple again, at least casually, in a move that evoked some controversy including the recurrent canard about normalizing or justifying his prior, groteque, misbehavior. Byrne had no such intention with this approach. His own tastes often drag him backwards towards the high points of Kirby's Marvel career. To repair the separated duo, as far as Byrne did this, involved an attempt to rekindle a Kirby spark in characters that had drifted far from their origins in the early sixties. Nonetheless, Byrne's decision did invite the obvious criticisms about returning the Wasp to the company of an established wifebeater.

After this stage, Pym and the Wasp would sometimes act like a couple again. By 1994, Pym even resumed his Giant-Man identity, though it would take Busiek and Perez to do so in a fashion that resonated with a feeling akin to what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had intended with the character.

The Editorial Consequences

Mark Twain, as a piece of obscure parody, wrote a tale in which a princess disguised herself as a man to assume the throne of her kingdom. Events developed such that she had to choose between revealing herself as a female (the law of her kingdom required death for any female who sat on the king's throne) or making a false confession to have fathered the child of a pregnant and unmarried duchess (which might have carried similarly unpleasant legal consequences). Twain ended this story without letting the she-king answer the question. He said he had put his characters in such a bind that he didn't know how to get them out again, so he deemed it best to stop the story before things got any worse.

Comics can't really do that, except in the occasional case where it cancels a story in the middle of a story line. An ongoing, popular, and recognized title enjoys a scrutiny that would do a prosecuting attorney proud; plot and historical inconsistencies occasionally evoke howls of disproportionate outrage from those readers too far immersed into the minutae of the magazine's previously published narrative. Comics therefore must plod on, and, as long as it can, endure the consequences of its mistakes.

Therefore, the ugly spectacle of Henry Pym's banishment from superheroing followed. Plotters and writers who remembered the best days of the character kept experimenting with ways to reintroduce the character, in attempts to redeem him without undermining the inherited history that still persisted like the bad taste after a particularly ambitious belch. In this function, writers like Steve Englehart, Roy Thomas, and John Byrne all worked toward the rehabilitation of the character. Some readers still prefer their version of Dr. Pym, who really seemed to extend the character that first appeared in the Atlas-era monster comics as a scientist playing out the "incredible shrinking man" role.

Time May Heal All Wounds

Joe Stalin, during the years when he enjoyed the ability to grind most of a continent under his gore-soaked heel, had a way with certain problems. He eliminated malaria in Russia, for instance, by forbidding doctors to acknowledge it. They subsequently found other causes to cite when putting a cause of death on a death certificate. In the real world, playing thus with the present and with history has tragic consequences. Not so, however, with comics.

If we dispense with the most dogmatic aspects of the Continuity Principle, we can ignore, and ultimately forget, story threads and events that foul the waters of the comics-universe pool. On the other side of the comics aisle, DC has addressed problems with its timelines with obnoxious revision events; but problems on this smaller scale do not require such drastic measures.

Those who enjoy fictional works, particularly fantastic ones, dabble in a skill sometimes called "willing suspension of disbelief." Without it, the impossible grates. After all, Superman's powers do violate known laws of physics; comic book conincidences do violate actuarial interpretations of probability; Bugs Bunny could't really talk in the real world. With comic books, I think we should cultivate a related talent we could call "willing suspension of memory." Other comics events, by judicious avoidance, have dwindled from overblown importance to simple footnotes. We should allow this to happen to certain aspects of Yellowjacket's disgrace, or, failing this, relegate the character to the comics ashcan.

Busiek and Redemption

I wish I could forget the Wasp-beating stories from the dawning years of the 1980s. They did much to help me to break the comics habit altogether between 1983 and 1996, when curiosity about the peculiar books bearing the Image imprint, which started showing up at the dollar store, tempted me into buying a few books again.

Kurt Busiek, however, as a rising star enjoying recent celebrity from excellent work on Marvel Comics titles in the late 1990s, seems inclined to work in redemption themes. His creation Thunderbolts depicts a superhero team composed of semi-reformed supervillains attempting to make good in new guises, including a few who plagued characters like the Avengers for decades. Furthermore, within Avengers itself, Busiek has pursued redemption of characters who took unfortunate detours in their superheroic careers. Recently, his work sought to remake the problematic Wonder Man after a career in the eighties and early nineties which rode a pendulum between "jerk" and "flibbertigibbet."

Even if Henry Pym's flaws center around matters more difficult to forgive, his crimes essentially occurred within a window between 1980 and 1983, and therefore, unlike Wonder Man's, did not ultimately come to define the character. From this basis, Busiek presumes that Dr. Pym can put his past behind him; he must feel he has something worth fixing in the character Jack Kirby intended, or else he would abandon him to the vile domains of a very short, but very troubled, period in his past.