The Bildungsroman Of Henry Pym

You know Henry Pym, of course. Wife-beater, multiple personality, irresponsible experimenter. But, that isn't the Henry Pym I mean to talk about here. That Hank Pym is (in my view, at least) a highly artificial creation, a character who's mostly been damaged by his plot over the years, loaded down with a lot of stuff that doesn't take him anywhere, and which mostly blocks him from further development.

But, he wasn't always that way. Once, he was interesting.

It's mostly Steve Englehart's story, I believe: “The Rising and Advancing of Henry Pym.” He's written it over the course of many, many years. But at its beginning it touches down in Steve Gerber's Defenders, too, so that's what I'm going to talk about here.

When Henry Pym, Avenger, finds his way to the marginal landscape of Defenders, the whole thing has a certain evocative feel about it. Here's a mature man, a proven and steady dyed-in-the-wool superhero, who abruptly learns that his life may not be what it ought to be, or that at least it may not be what it looks like most of the time...and he finds that there's a sense of revelation in this, as well as loneliness; triste, but also new possibilities. For the first time in years, he's on his own, separated from everything that ordinarily feeds him his identity, while at the same time he's confronted by the parts of his past he cannot control, ramifications of events that preceded his ability to choose identity for himself. The ghosts of formative things, that happened to him without his intention back when he wasn't “Giant-Man and the Wasp” or “The Mighty Avengers” or “Who Is Yellowjacket?”, swirl about him in GS Defenders #4. Janet Van Dyne is nowhere to be seen; she can't help. Nor can Captain America or Thor or Iron Man, because selfhood is not a group activity.

And what this is, is parturition: leaving the nest of secure identity, going out to the fringes of life, and learning something you can bring back with you is the essence of growing up and maturing, just as it's the essence of the heroic adventure. It's the essence of character development, too, the essence of change. Excursion. Rising and advancing. However you want to put it. And in Seventies Marvel it's the most important thing, for reasons I'll get to in a minute.

But first let's consider that what we're looking at here is probably pretty well-described as Hank Pym's mid-life crisis. I know, I know, it took years for Yellowjacket and the Wasp to separate. But that was dumb; really it should have happened here, where it feels like it does. It's only one Giant-Size and four issues, that maybe cover a month or so in Marvel Time, if that, but while it's going on it feels like Hank is a free agent...in the Englehart-penned Avengers #137 set shortly afterwards, Jan and Hank both make much of being a team of two, and Hank rejoins the Avengers because Jan wants him to, and from there it goes on quite a ways, and they both find out a lot of stuff, and their relationship changes for the better (not that it was bad)...and the size-changing microbe problems which have come back into Hank and Jan's life ( a whisper of mortality, natch) get dealt with finally and definitively...but first, there's this, where Yellowjacket shows up alone at Doctor Strange's sanctum and everybody's happy to see him for himself, and not for Jan's sake or Thor's or anybody else's, and it feels like he's on his own. If you read it young, it's funny how you recognize it when you get older:

“Hey, look who's here!”

“Uh...hi, guys...”

“Come on in, long time no see! You want a toke or something? How's it going? Y'know, Ginny was just asking me how come you don't come around anymore...”

“Uh, yeah. No thanks, I really can't stay...”

“You don't mind if I light up?”

“No, go ahead. It's just that I have to get back.”

“Right, to the old lady, eh? So how's that going?”

“Good. Good. You know.”

“She's cool?”

“She's fine.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah...look, maybe I will have that toke after all.”

“Hey, there's plenty to go around, man...”

...And then six months later you wake up to find yourself shirtlessly dancing at a Dead concert with the rest of the Defenders. You know, metaphorically.

...What?

Like that's so much worse than hanging out with the actual son of the Devil?

Anyway, don't let me distract you: the key to this situation is what it feels like to belong, and yet not belong...to have overlapping spheres of belonging that are yet somehow exclusive of one another. It's hard for Yellowjacket to be fully absorbed into the Defenders' world, as welcome as he is, because he has another identity, another set of values (“Avengers” values, that is) that excludes him from full belonging in his new group...and yet just by being there, his old identity is called into question, and of necessity he becomes more the solitary individual, and less the absorbed group-member, as the two attractors pull at him. It's a certain kind of anomie we've probably all felt at some point. And yet it's good to remember that this is all the Defenders is anyway, a bunch of disparate individuals who are only together because of accidental factors, washed up near each other on the shore, and making the best of it by forming bonds of friendship. No “there shall come a day unlike any other”; no unity-based sense of honour and conduct, no clubhouse, no great destiny. Just: life, as it is.

A mirror for character, perhaps, rather than a reinforcement of it.

Which is needed, I think, because the Avengers have never been the most “with it” crowd in the Marvel Universe. Basically, they're the Superhero Establishment, and therefore somewhat set in their ways as the originals, the centre-group of volunteer hero teams. But change is inevitable, whether you're set in your ways or not – in Avengers #137, it's..um, not un-resonant that when they start calling up all their old buddies to fill out the ranks of the team, no one's available because they're all off doing their own thing. Because a centre can't persist if it can't adapt to what's around it, and it's not the Sixties anymore, not high-school anymore, and everybody's changing, so it's time for the Avengers to change too. And in fact that happens, that's precisely what Englehart's run accomplishes, but first we get to see how some of the Avengers' constituent members change, to make that change possible. Or necessary, depending on how you look at it.

And here's the point, that we also get to see the Marvel Universe change along with them. Because the two changings are really identical. In 1975 the MU is still only fourteen years old, and moving pretty much in synch with “real” time, so central spaces are running out of gas everywhere, and it's time for things to be shaken up a bit. The symmetry needs breaking if things are to stay “realistic” – so Reed and Sue separate, Gwen dies, the X-Men retire, historicity gains a foothold...around this time is the beginning of whatever Age the bloggers will finally decide to call it, that comes after the Silver Age or Bronze Age or whatever it is. And like I said it's also the time for the Hero's Journey, time to go out into the uncharted places and bring something back. Except as I also said, superhero stories by their nature must always describe a closed circle, too, and end up where they started from. So, how to do it? How to have real character development, while really changing nothing? I'm afraid it's location again: you turn time into place, qualities into settings, embrace the metonymical, and use your continuity as a character-building device. Because in transiting different memberships, associations, geographies, attractors, the character can do different things without having to become irrevocably altered from what they were, and they can still have a place to return to that they can enliven with new associations once they get there. Each character arc becomes part of the universe's diagram, showing where different meanings are concentrated: Yellowjacket goes from the centre to the outskirts, where he re-encounters the roots of his identity...and then he goes back, to revivify the Avengers by bringing that new dynamism to them. Because instead of stodgy old lab-rat Hank Pym, he's something else, now, having broadened his horizons by having different, less authoritatively-preinterpreted experiences. It happens to every character, eventually: call it the Great Guest-Star Diaspora of the Seventies. But it especially happens with Hank, because he 1) reclaims an old false identity and makes it true, 2) reconnects to his first identity that's vanished in the mists of history, 3) changes his powers, 4) abandons his diffidence, 5) operates independently, 6) makes new friends, 7) examines his character and his desires, and 8) decides how best to be himself, by realizing who he is. Englehart puts Cap through the same thing a few months earlier: it ought to be axiomatic that to explore you must disassociate, re-read, re-invest, add new elements...

And then return. Nothing really changes; it's just perked up a bit. The character stays essentially the same, only their universe gets bigger. Ours, too! But the key point in all this is that it doesn't happen by accident: in Seventies Marvel, at least, the characters change because they want to change, because they want to leave their old places and go out into new ones, and that's significant. Basically it means something that Hank Pym leaves the Avengers, but doesn't just go into cold storage: it means that characters are still active even when they're not where they're supposed to be, and can “leak” from one title into another, and then out again. They have wishes and desires that don't get switched off as soon as they leave the title: there's lots of business going on behind the curtain, too, as continuity gives character a greater moment, and then is made more vital by it in its turn.

It's what we're missing today, possibly. Maybe because there aren't any different spaces in the Marvel Universe anymore, to hold the different meanings that characters must pass between in order to secure the illusion of change? Until there's only a bunch of characters inhabiting the same space, somewhat claustrophobically?

Maybe because there's no Defenders there anymore, or anything like it, to define where the edges of activity are?

I don't know, is all that clear?

I may have to come back and edit this a bit, I think. But for now...hey, it's a blog. Hank Pym: a great character, especially in Gerber's and Englehart's hands. I know of nothing else that could be called a collaboration between the two writers.