It's Not the Falling Down

What matters is getting back up.

I missed a deadline, albeit self imposed. I'll try and not let it happen again. My wife was on the Internet linked pc, and I thought I'd relax a bit, and sketch. Ended up scripting a short comic for the Ultimate version of Giant Man.

For some reason, that character fascinates me. In the regular Marvel universe, he's boring at best. At his worst he’s schmaltzy.

Giant types are usually pretty boring. There are a few in the comics these days and I could probably list a bunch if I sat down and thought of it. I just fail to see their usefulness in most superhero situations. That and most writer/artist combinations don’t utilize the scale appropriately.

It would be cool to be able to change size like Henry Pym, but he’s such damaged goods. In the regular Marvel Universe, He’s merely brilliant. Compared to such geniuses like Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, Black Panther, etc.; he tends to get overshadowed. That and he tends to make things that try to destroy everything in sight. Not a very handy talent.

His history is a soap opera. One of the main reasons I just can’t get into The Avengers is that there’s too much melodrama. He has been several different superheroes, and has had several costume changes; this site has a good listing of his costumes and identities. It also lists others who’ve gone by some of his identities.

First he started out as Ant-Man, who could change to the size of, you guessed it, and ant. He also had a helmet that allowed him to communicate with ants. Cool, but mostly useless. Someone, either Jack Kirby, or Stan Lee said “Hey, since he can change size, let’s make him big” and Giant Man was born. Jack Kirby worked on the giant monster stories that were popular in The Day, so he had a grasp of how to handle the scale difference.

For the official bio on him, click here and look under 'H' for Hank Pym. Go figure. Here is a pretty detailed bio for him as well.

In the Ultimate universe, he’s bipolar, or ADHD, or something like that, because one of the first times they show him, the Wasp, Janet Van Dyne, says to him “Your on a roll again” and shakes a bottle of Prozac.

Later, in the series, he gets his ass handed to him by the Hulk. This of course happens during a highly publicized fight. Everyone else on the team holds their own, and his wife gets all chummy afterward with Captain America who takes down the Hulk in hand to hand. The Hulk gets back up and continues his rampage, and it’s the Wasp who stops him by zapping his brain after crawling in his ear. They later get in a knockdown drag out fight and he messes her up. It turns out this has happened before, and Hank gets beaten to a pulp by Captain America for being a wife-beater.

That could be why I like him. Smart, cool power, but with no real obvious use. He makes mistakes, and doesn’t quite know how to fix them. Makes him human.

That and it’s a kind of puzzle; what’s the advantage of being so big? This site has a program to figure out how much you would weigh, how much you could lift if you were a different size. Because when scaling things, area gets squared, while mass gets cubed. I remember reading an essay by Stephen Jay Gould about scale.

Fascinating. But mostly useless.