The X-Axis – w/c 11 August 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #32. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This is the start of a new arc, and I’ll warn you now that I’m going to spoil the ending, because that’s the real hook for the arc. Up to then, we have a framing sequence of Sean telling the story to Black Tom (nothing wrong with bringing those two together, and this is the natural book for Tom to be used in), and the story itself involving the return of… the Changeling. That’s the Silver Age Changeling, the one who was in a handful of issues from the Factor Three storyline and then got retconned into having replaced Professor X when they wanted to bring him back from the dead at the dawn of the 1970s.
The Changeling is… not a character anyone has really been crying out to see again, which is why he didn’t even get used in the Krakoan era. But presumably he was resurrected off panel – he was an X-Man for one issue (retroactive), after all – and now he’s gone back to mutant radicalism. Tim Seeley does a good job of setting up why Sean would care about this character, reminding us that he debuted as a pawn of Factor Three back in the sixties – and Audino actually makes that wonky costume look pretty fun, giving the guy some presence, even though we really have to stretch to believe that the Tesco Value Mystique is going to get anywhere in a straight fight with Banshee. I mean, Banshee has range attacks that he doesn’t even need to aim with, right?
But the actual point of all this is to bring in Morph at the end – presumably the Exiles version, but who knows. And that does kind of intrigue me, because the Changeling is a character with the rather odd legacy of being the notional template for a much more popular character who bears almost no resemblance to him whatsoever. There’s got to be a story in that, right…?
X-MEN #20. (Annotations here.) We’re back to the single issue format, it seems, and that’s fine by me – it works better for Jed MacKay than longer storylines. With a bit of downtime conversation in the B-plots, this issue is built around a third confrontation between Scott and Agent Lundqvist, which ends up with them coming to blows and going to jail. It’s the first time that Lundqvist has come out more or less ahead – or at least that Scott has failed to bring him down a peg. MacKay has taken an odd approach in building up this character, presenting him as fundamentally outclassed from the word go; I suspect the whole idea is that we’re meant to be underestimating and misreading him to some extent. Diaz does a rather good job of making him smugly satisfied with finally getting a partial win over Scott. The reveal here, if you take it at face value (and Scott doesn’t), is Lundqvist arguing that he isn’t anti-mutant, he’s just anti the really powerful ones who think they’re above the law.
That actually is a plausible reading of his behaviour to date – with hindsight, it’s unfortunate we didn’t get more of him and Scott interacting over “X-Manhunt”, where they actually seem to have had some sort of off-panel understanding – and honestly, it’s probably a more interesting direction for O*N*E. After all, we have Corina Ellis doing the anti-mutant lunatic angle over in Uncanny, so this gives Lundqvist something more his own. And “where do the X-Men get off acting as if they’re above the law” is a completely reasonable motivation for a law enforcement character to have, with a post-Krakoa subtext that you could also tap into. It’s an issue I like more, the more I think about it.
LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #9. (Annotations here.) This is… completely okay, I guess? I don’t really understand why Gabby was kept out of circulation in both this book and NYX for so long, especially if she and Laura are supposed to be in touch. Packing her off to hunt monsters with Xarus in the aftermath of Blood Hunt is at least a reasonable explanation for why she’s not been around and builds off the last story we saw her in, but it runs up against the problem that Xarus is not a very interesting character. Nor is Strega, the new villain, especially memorable. I kind of like Laura’s blatant inability to handle Gabby adventuring with a different partner, and it looks perfectly nice, but it’s all a bit surplus to requirements.
MAGIK #8. (Annotations here.) So this is an odd issue. Magik, Mirage and Liminal are packed off to Las Vegas, supposedly to recover a mystical artefact for the Society of the Eternal Dawn in order that it can be used to free Cal from Liminal’s possession, but in reality in order to deal with the Society’s dissidents on their behalf. So far, so normal. But the issue also features an extended hallucinatory fight scene (and I’m still not entirely sure why these Scarlet Eye dissident guys are dealing in hallucinogenics). It’s wonderfully odd, particularly as Matt Horak’s art normally strikes such a grounded tone even when dealing in magical dimensions; this is where he gets to go nuts. And there’s a subtler level of weirdness as Liminal gaslights his way through the issue blandly denying what other characters have literally just seen him do, and calmly insinuating himself into steering the story even though he’s meant to be Magik and Mirage’s prisoner. In isolation it’s all a little confusing, but the book’s earned the benefit of the doubt on this sort of thing.
GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #2. By Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Adam Kubert, Laura Martin & Clayton Cowles. Well, the House of M issue wasn’t bad, but on the whole I think we have to chalk this mini up as a misfire. I get that we’re trying to do stories about Kamala coming to mutant culture as an outsider, and in theory giving her a tour of X-Men history works with that, but in practice I’m increasingly convinced that this whole direction for the character is misconceived. She’s being dragged away from the neighbourhood hero role that was so central to her, yet she’s also too established a character to fit comfortably into this newcomer role. So none of this really leads up in a satisfying way to her coming out to her parents as a mutant – the strings are too visible.
As for the story itself, it’s basically just a fight between some of the major X-Men and Legion (or the abandoned personalities of Legion, who get packed off to the White Hot Room at the end). Kamala seems to have rounded up these characters… um, somewhere? It’s all terribly arbitrary, and it certainly wasn’t worth having Phoenix show up on Earth for this. There are other books where that would be a much more meaningful deal. Kubert’s art mostly delivers – the page of the two sides of Legion being reunited is genuinely lovely – but the issue as a whole is a bit of a mess.
The back-up strip is by Jed MacKay, Cafu & David Curiel, and basically consists of Mystique and Destiny trailing “Age of Revelation”. There isn’t much more to be said about it than that.
SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #4. By Marc Guggenheim, Gerardo Sandoval, Victor Nava, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Because you demanded it: a book whose only selling point is the Kaare Andrews art, with a fill-in artist.
“The reason why Hank went through four different identities was because the fans were lukewarm toward him and the writers were trying to change him to make the fans like him more.”
Are you just assuming that to be the case?
That may have been true of him going from Ant-Man to Giant-Man, sure.
Giant-Man to Goliath? I don’t know what prompted Stan to make that change. If you know better though, I’m listening.
Goliath to Yellowjacket didn’t appear to have anything to do with wanting to make Hank more popular. It seemed to have more to do with wanting to make Clint Barton more popular by having him become the new Goliath. Seems like Thomas just wanted Hank and Jan to have similar costumed identities. If he felt Goliath was a crap identity, I highly doubt he would’ve saddled Clint with it.
I fact, I’m not sure we can even make that assumption of Stan’s intent when it comes to the Ant-Man to Giant-Man switch. Unless he stated in an interview somewhere that his intent was to try to make Hank “more likeable” to readers. I can’t find anything like that.
I spotted some speculation that maybe Stan felt that sincenHank was going to be rubbing shoulders alongside guys like Thor and Iron Man, he needed to be leveled up. And Wasp didn’t get similar treatment because she was a girl.
@Moo- this is what Tom Breevort had to say about Hank’s Tales to Astonish strip:
https://tombrevoort.com/2022/06/19/wc-tales-to-astonish-38/
“It’s been said over the years that Marvel’s publisher Martin Goodman had an unwavering faith in the sales appeal of Ant-Man. How much of that was due to him hearing about the sell-through numbers on the earliest appearances of the Atom over at rival DC I do not know–but it does account for the reason why, as Ant-Man failed to catch on in a big way, editor Stan Lee and his cohorts continually attempted to retool the strip rather than simply retiring it. But ant-Man struggled on for several years, changing costumes, gaining partners and additional size-changing powers until eventually calling it quits and relinquishing his position to the clearly more popular Namor, the Sub-Mariner. The earliest Marvel super hero books are a mixed bag to begin with, but consistently Ant-Man was the weakest of the lot”
Breevort seems to be saying that the changes made to Hank in his Tales to Astonish strip were because Hank “failed to catch on in a big way”.
@Michael- Okay, that supports the Ant-Man to Giant-Man switch as an attempt to make the character more popular. And that’s because he was headlining a book and they wanted sales to pick up. Fair enough.
However, by the time he became Goliath, Hank had already been evicted from Tales to Astonish. At this point, he was only appearing in Avengers. And he certainly wasn’t carrying that book.
Then there’s the Goliath to Yellowjacket switch, and I think we can safely assume that whatever Roy Thomas had in mind when he had Hank become Yellowjacket and Hawkeye become Goliath, he obviously didn’t think of the name Goliath as a non-starter.
So that’s one identity switch confirmed as an attempt to make Hank more popular with readers.
Shrinking is a lame power. The most successful shrinking hero was Doll Man in the 1940s, and he was drawn by the great Lou Fine. People underestimate how much having a good artist affects a comic book character’s longevity. Lou Fine got people exited for freakin’ Doll Man.
The Atom had success early on (when Gil Kane was the artist), but there’s rarely been an ongoing Atom series since. The Wasp has almost never had a solo book. Ryan Choi had pretty good series, but it folded after a couple years or so.
Yes, some writers and artists can use shrinking creatively. Most don’t. Along with sonic scream powers, shrinking powers make the super-hero more of a liability. “Watch out, I’m now way more vulnerable and will have a much harder time reaching you!”
Anyway, Hank Pym also suffered from a lack of standout stories. He created Ultron, but wasn’t the star of the early Ultron stories. As great as John Buscema’s Yellowjacket design was, the story that introduced it was a mess. The Avengers issue in which he goes on a Fantastic Voyage inside the Vision was great, one of Neal Adams’s best. It wasn’t enough to establish Hank Pym as a fan-favorite character, however.
@Mike Loughlin- Okay, but back to what I asked earlier, how do you know that every identity switch was an attempt to make Hank more likeable? Michael already proved the Ant-Man to Giant-Man switch was done exactly for that reason. What about the others?
@Michael: Regarding Spider-Man, his earlier anger issues were also rather fantastical in their basis. As you note, he was driven in part by the discover that he’d been duped by a posthumously executed plan of his dead best friend who’d gone insane in a scheme that involved robot parents and the Chameleon.
The contrivances used to make Peter’s anger go out of control were pretty absurd, and the whole ting was not played as realism. We can try to read “person with anger issues in denial” into it, but the stories present much of it as a response to unrealistic traumatic experiences.
The fact that it was all tied to the Clone Saga certainly didn’t help, either, as you note.
In contrast, Hank Pym was given a fairly realistic motive. He’s bitter about his own sense of inadequacy and failure next to his more celebrated colleagues and his financial dependency on his wealthy, younger wife whom he’d always kind of looked down on. That’s the sort of thing one could easily see happening outside of a world of robot doubles and costumed maniacs.
And then when he does hit Jan, she’s not hurled across the room. She winds up with a relatively realistic-looking black eye and conceals it in just the way real domestic violence victims might conceal it.
Beyond that, Hank’s story is pretty much all about his downward spiral, and it’s relatively groundbreaking for a mainstream superhero book at the time. Spider-man’s rage-freakouts, by contrast, are of a piece with the brooding antihero trend and come across as an effort to shift the readers’ loyalties to the more marketable substitute Marvel has waiting in the wings.
There’s also the way that Spider-Man’s story was quickly steered into a “happy ending” in which he gets over it and goes off to make a normal life with MJ so that Ben can take over with minimal baggage. So even the original story and its writers don’t really stay with any sense that this was significant, as opposed to representing the short-term consequences of villains messing with everyone. It seems much more like a pro wrestling angle to get over the new guy than like an examination of realistic anger issues.
The story has no interest in any psychological subtext, so it does little ot highlight it. And the text is a mess that no one much wants to revisit because of why it was done and how badly it all turned out from a quality and marketing perspective.
The Spider-Man stuff just isn’t as grounded or as innovative, and it came from a very different sort of intent than the consideration of Hank Pym’s downward spiral. As a result, it lacks the emotional power and the memorable qualities of the Hank Pym stuff.
Where other characters have had bad moments “stick,” it’s because they were not only brought up again in the future, but also persistently tied to something a bit more realistic. I think they also have to contain elements that we can connect to both longstanding patterns of character behavior — not just some relatively recent turn in the character for sudden drama — and has to be executed in a manner with some attention to recognizable human psychology and recognizable consequences for other characters.
Xavier as a manipulative type with problematic ideas of love and romance, for instance, has stuck because Silver Age Xavier pulled all sorts of manipulative shenanigans and because he was (likely accidentally) given a pattern of behavior beyond one stray thought bubble about teen Jean. We also got stuff like his relationship with Gabrielle Haller when she was still his patient and his moment of weakness trying to mind-control Amelia Vought into staying with him.
Even then, Deadly Genesis was bit hard to take for a lot of readers, since it was a big leap in terms of how ruthless Xavier could be. So it required a few additional stories by other writers who wanted to marginalize Xavier by giving him additional “dark secrets” to get the character to the point he’s at now.
Likewise, Reed Richards as a guy who puts his ideas above people and has emotional distance comes out of the way he was persistently written by Stan Lee and then by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, all of whom likely thought they were just building up melodrama in the FF’s family dynamic before putting the toys back in the box.
But this all created an eventual basis for writing Reed as a guy who has real trouble understanding and valuing people, especially when he has a big, driving idea or project, and it shows up in various forms across many later writers well before Reed’s behavior hits a nadir in stories like Civil War and Hickman’s New Avengers.
@Mike Laughlin: I’d go further and say that, for most heroic characters, size-changing by itself doesn’t do that well for their popularity or their long-term status in the informal hierarchy of a shared universe.
I can’t think of a hero whose central gimmick is growing to giant size who’s been consistently popular, for instance. It seems to work well for villains, but not for heroes, perhaps because of the whole “underdog” thing and perhaps because of the challenge sit poses for fight choreography and plotting. (How often would becoming a giant be useful for something other than wreaking destruction?)
Regarding shrinking, both Ant-Man and the Silver Age Atom seem to reflect efforts to add an extra gimmick tot he shrinking. Ant-Man had his insect control, and the Atom controls not only his size but also his mass.
And even then, both characters have worked best in the context of a super-team ensemble, not as solo stars.
@Omar- But what about Flash Thompson? He hit Sha Shan when she accused him of cheating on her. That’s pretty grounded. And we later learned that Flash had a drunken, abusive father. And he has a history as a bully. But weirdly, what’s stuck is that Flash has a pattern of hurting the people he cares about when he acts like his father but he’s not demonized the same way that Hank Pym is.
@Michael- At a guess, I’d say that readers don’t hold Flash to the same standard that they hold Hank to. He’s not regarded as a classic, traditional superhero (who I think readers for the most part believe should be unimpeachable). Despite all of this Venom/Anti-Venom nonsense of recent years, I believe he’s more widely known as Peter’s old high school bully. Therefore a past incident of him hitting his girlfriend isn’t going stick to him as it did Hank. At leat, that’s my view of it.
Come to think of it, I think poor Hank has the misfortune of resting in what you might call the opposite of a sweet spot.
He’s held, or at least, he was held, to a higher standard than Flash Thompson, and that’s at least partly why he’s never been able to live down the slap incident.
But he’s not held to the same standard as the vastly more popular Spider-Man. And because that standard is so high, that when something happens like the striking of MJ incident happened, it causes readers heads explode and they just can’t accept that it happened, so they’ll happily pretend that it didn’t. A luxury Peter enjoys that Hank Pym is not afforded.
@Moo: Did becoming Yellowjacket make Hank Pym more likable? He was being scripted by Roy Thomas, so probably not. I haven’t read much Avengers between the Vision’s intro and the Kree-Skrull War because I don’t like Thomas’s scripting.
Despite that, it was Hank Pym’s most successful new identity up to that point. The costume was good enough for him to use that identity for the next decade-plus, though (barring occasions in which donned the Ant-Man costume). On the other hand, he was out of the Avengers comic or a minor character for several issues at a time. He was used well in a Defenders story, at least.
That speaks to my point that Hank didn’t have enough personality or good stories to make fans forget about/ dismiss/ forgive his actions. Daredevil has messed up in ways that got people hurt (see recent discussions about “Last Rites” on this blog), but he has had his own series continuously since the ‘60s. Batman has been absolutely horrible to supporting characters at times, and he’s one of the most popular fictional characters in the world. Hank Pym? He’s the guy who hit his wife.
@Omar Karindu: yeah, giant characters aren’t usually the most popular either, for the reasons you list. I love that Giant Man image from Busiek’ & Ross’s Marvels, but I have to wonder where he’s going to step next and what or who he’ll break when he does.
@Mike Loughlin
Still haven’t answered my question, Mike. I’ve asked twice now. At this point I’m less interested in talking about Hank Pym than I am in knowing if information you present as fact can be taken as reliable or if you’re in the habit of presenting your assumptions as facts. I’d like to know for future reference. Guess which way I’m leaning at the moment.
@Moo: Roy Thomas, from a 2014 Hollywood Reporter interview around the time the first Ant-Man movie was released:
“… Giant-Man never became a big hit, however, not even under the later and more dramatic name Goliath. I myself, in 1968, tried to invigorate him in the Avengers comic by having an amnesiac Pym adopt a new secret identity: Yellowjacket, a (temporary) villain…”
Also: If someone absolutely disproves something I say or it becomes apparent that I could have been clearer with what I said, I’ll own up to it. Agree or disagree with others, I try to stay respectful and expect others to do the same. Comments like “Guess which way I’m leaning at the moment” come off as disrespectful. I hope that wasn’t the case, as I’ve been enjoying these comments section back-and-forths.
@Mike Loughlin
Thank you! That’s exactly what I was looking for.
And I apologize for coming off as disrespectful, but if you look at it from my point of view, since you hadn’t indicated a source in two consecutive posts, I got the sense that you were deflecting and trying to steer the conversation away from having to say, “Okay, I actually didn’t know that for a fact.” So I really was just trying to think of a way get your attention. Guess it worked, but I again apologize for how I came off, because I have been otherwise enjoying the discussion as well.
Peace.
@Moo: All good, appreciate your response! I look forward to continuing these long comment threads, wondering if Paul’s asking himself, “why on Earth are there over 100 comments about this?”
@Mike Loughlin
He’s probably trying to calculate whether or not it’d be worth it to just disable comment sections entirely
@Moo: Ha! After listening to the podcast for so long, I can practically hear him saying, “… they’re still going on about the Morrison run? And now HANK PYM?!? That’s it, I’m shutting it all down.”