Ridiculously good news from Paul Cornell, via a Suicide Girls interview by Alex Dueben:

We haven’t signed contracts yet but I have every reason to believe we will be starting season two [of Saucer Country] in comic form next year. In February, even. We’ve been talking to some lovely people about this and I think Saucer Country readers have a huge reason to be hopeful. I’m very much thankful to them for that. The sudden cancellation meant that I had to wrap things up really quickly, far too quickly to actually wrap the whole comic up. I thought about all the different plot threads I had to answer questions for and Ryan had already started drawing the first issue of the last three issue arc. That was just going to be a regular arc so the only way I could have finished the whole thing in two issues would have been in a lecture hall with a series of diagrams and charts going so that meant that and this meant this.

Cornell’s Saucer Country – co-created by, and with great art from, Ryan Kelly – was a particular favorite of mine all the way up to its recent cancellation at Vertigo. A UFO conspiracy thriller that’s as much political drama as it is X-Files-esque paranoiafest, it was intelligent and self-aware and horrifically overlooked by an audience that had no idea what it was missing. Hopefully, when it returns, more people will jump onboard.

I smiled, I admit, when I saw this on Twitter from former Comics Alliance editor Caleb Goellner:

Here’s the thing: Task Force Rad Squad, a comic that pretty much does for Power Rangers what Jeffrey Brown’s Incredible Change-Bots does for Transformers, is kind of amazing. I’ve maybe seen two episodes of Power Rangers at most – and the majority of that time was likely spent going “What is this? What is this?” over and over again – so it’s not even as if I’m the target audience, but nonetheless, the skew-wiff charm and humor of the thing works even if you end up thinking of it as a messed-up Forever People reboot meets Voltron, as I did. It’s just weirdly, overwhelmingly awesome.

Caleb writes TFRS, with Buster Moody and Ryan Hill providing art; he also writes and draws the even-more surreal (and just as enjoyable) Mermaid Evolution. As sad as Comics Alliance’s closure is, if it means he’ll have more time to create comics as a result, it’s one good thing to come out of the whole sordid affair.

Task Force Rad Squad is available for download online on a pay-what-you-want system. You really, really should go download it already.

Along with Padraig O Mealoid’s Poisoned Chalice series about the history of Marvelman at the Beat, one of my favorite long-running series of critical re-appraisals running on the comics internet currently is Colin Smith’s Shameless, a look at the career of Mark Millar that’s been quietly running at Sequart for the last couple of months. Smith, a smart and fair writer, clearly has a lot of affection for Millar’s work but not so much that it clouds his judgment of it, as can be seen in his look back at (The) Saviour, Millar’s first published series:

Yet to list the fundamental problems with Millar’s writing for The Saviour does help establish just how limited his skills initially were. The plot was overloaded and events were often apparently added simply because they seemed interesting. As the narrative sprawled out to include a rebellion in Apartheid South Africa and a first appearance of American superpeople, existing characters and threads would suffer for development. With no effective opposition to The Saviour, the book lacked drama and variety. Characters would go unidentified, or even possess confusingly similar names and identities. Flashbacks wouldn’t be identified as such, with Millar seemingly desperate to avoid using captions. Establishing shots and the clear identification of locations were often missing too. Adolescent humor could undermine satire and all-too-frequent gross-outs subvert a sense of accumulating horror. The attempt to portray the life of an underclass of gangsters, con-men, prostitutes and poverty-stricken victims floundered on what seems to have been a complete unfamiliarity with any such characters or situations.

In the midst of this consistent underdevelopment, only Millar’s invention and energy matched with the story-driving skills of artists Vallely and Kitching maintained a sense of purpose and forward momentum. Though the final two chapters of the run saw Millar producing scripts which were far more streamlined and effective, the impression left by the series as a whole is one of promise largely untempered by know-how and experience.

I remember eagerly reading Saviour when it came out – In large part because of Daniel Valley’s artwork for the first issue and a hope that he’d return for later issues (He didn’t; he did go on to illustrate Grant Morrison’s sadly-forgotten Bible John, which I always hope will return to print some day) – and definitely remember that the feeling of foreboding and building tension was completely undermined by the shock reveal of the “final” issue (It wasn’t supposed to be the final issue, but the book just stopped coming out soon afterwards; the perils of working with an indie publisher).

I’ve always felt that a lot of what was in Saviour‘s DNA has been recycled into later material for Millar. Most obviously, Chosen (AKA American Jesus), but also the short-lived 2000AD strip Canon Fodder. In a strange way, I’d love to see Saviour come back in some form or another, even just as a trip down memory lane… Time to hit the back issue bins, clearly.

One of the casualties of the sudden closure of Comics Alliance has made its way online – Dylan Todd and Ziah Grace taking a look at the first year of the new Valiant Entertainment:

Yeah, there’s a lot I like about Valiant. They tend to have solid creators working on their books and, for the most part, they tell stories that are at least competent, and, in the case of Archer & Armstrong and Bloodshot, are often fantastic. I like that almost all of their books manage to take the superhero concept and blend it with another genre; horror for Shadowman, sci-fi for X-O, action for Bloodshot, historical conspiracy for Archer & Armstrong. Their books are well-designed and the fact that they seem to be organically expanding their line is admirable.

There are some rough spots, though: the coloring across the board is kind of boring, and the “just get it out the door” mentality to the art is often problematic, making the art fairly interchangeable, house-style stuff which I feel diminishes the role of a penciler from a collaborator to just a cog in realizing the writer or editor’s vision. These problems that I feel are present across the industry, though. Also: Harbinger. I can’t overstate how disappointed I am with that book.

Lots, lots more in the piece, which is well worth reading. So go do that.

Lost amongst the various C2E2 announcements this weekend was this IDW series announced at Stumptown:

That’ll be Judge Dredd: Mega City 2 – City of Courts by noted comic book critic, creator of the spectacular Dredd Reckoning blog and all-around wonderful human being Douglas Wolk and the amazing Ulises Farinas, then.

Firstly, look at that cover; that just looks so good. Secondly, as a Dredd fan for some time, I’m surprised that it’s taken so long for someone to really take a look at Mega City 2 (The west-coast equivalent of where Dredd normally spends his time; it got destroyed very early in the series’ continuity). Thirdly, I’m not surprised that it’s Douglas doing this, considering his love for the Dredd character and especially the world co-creator John Wagner and others has built around him. Fourthly, I was already sold on this book before I saw Douglas write the following on Twitter:

Seriously, one of my most eagerly anticipated books of the year. Apparently, it’ll be released towards the end of 2013; when it gets solicited, go pre-order.

(And if you don’t know who Joan Didion is, there’s always the Internet.)

The Hollywood Reporter has Greg Rucka considering the rating given to June’s Man of Steel:

Superman is precisely what we should be teaching our children. Superman inspires us to our best. I haven’t seen Man of Steel, haven’t read the script, and I’ve assiduously avoided spoilers. I genuinely don’t know if this “reality” will be present or not. I want it to be brilliant. I want it to be glorious. I want it to be inspiring. I am keeping the faith.

But that PG-13 on Man of Steel is making me nervous. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it’s a warning that there’s another k-shiv coming for the kidneys, or if it’s just the cost-of-doing-business, or even if it’s an MPAA-bias against all superhero violence. I don’t know if this is a genuine caution to parents, or a marketing decision aimed at a demographic too-cool for Superman’s brand of hope and idealism, yet embracing of Batman’s self-loathing rough justice, to assure them their ticket will be money well-spent. I don’t know if that PG-13 is there out of sincerity or cynicism or politics.

Over at his Tumblr, someone asks whether or not this desire for an all-ages Superman movie is inconsistent with his own comic book work on the character, and Rucka responds:

I’m just nervous, as I said. The last time they made a Superman movie, my son was 8. I couldn’t take him to it, it was too dark for him. He wanted to see it desperately, because it was Superman. Superman means a lot to a lot of people. A lot of those people are children.

No, it’s not Warner Brothers’ job to parent my child. But I do think that, especially in the case of an icon as powerful as Superman, there is a responsibility to remember how diverse his audience is. The more of that audience you try to reach – and they’re trying to reach EVERYONE with the MoS campaign – the more, I think, that needs to be considered.

I hadn’t, I admit, given a lot of thought to the rating of the Man of Steel movie, although I agree with Rucka, when I think about it, that a Superman movie should be as available and suitable to young audiences as possible. I was thinking more about the tone of the film every time I saw the trailers or the photos or the whatever from it, and worrying that the movie will be try to be something other than… I don’t know, than “fun,” for want of a better way to put it. I mean, I want drama and I even want beauty, but shouldn’t Superman, of all superheroes, have a movie that’s also just fun?

(Related/unrelated: I loved Rucka’s Adventures of Superman run, as weirdly truncated as it seemed at the time. Very few people in recent memory have written a scene that “gets” the character as much as the one where Superman returns a lost child to her mother and then, calmly, happily explains that, no, there’s really not anything more important than that that he should be up to. I’d love to see Rucka do some more Superman; I’d really love to see Rucka do some more Lois Lane. Maybe one day.)

The dual teases of the mysterious Age of Ultron #10UC and Infinity at Marvel have put me in mind of the Malibu Ultraverse, of all things. It’s not just that “Ultraverse Comics” would fit the U.C. acronym – It won’t be, of course, it’s far more likely to be Avengers‘ “Universal Construct” name for Galactus, especially considering the “Hunger” image – but that the Marvel post-Black September relaunch for the Ultraverse started with “Infinity” issues.

The question of whatever actually happened to the Ultraverse characters is one that will likely never be publicly answered; Marvel officials point to unknown, undefined contractual issues as to not only why the characters will never be used again but also why they can’t say why that is, while the creators of the characters have expressed confusion as to what that might be beyond creator royalties due for each appearance. That, of course, has led to the urban myth that Marvel’s disinclination to pay said royalty is the contractual reason why the Ultraverse has stayed dormant for more than a decade despite Crossgen revivals and two attempts to bring back the Epic imprint.

With Marvel apparently getting back into the character-licensing business with Angela’s re-appearance at the end of Age of Ultron, this theory might finally be put to the test. After all, if the publisher would use Angela – a character that Neil Gaiman owns outright, unless he’s quietly given her to Marvel – wouldn’t that signal a willingness to use fan favorite characters, even if there was an additional fee involved?

Considering the X-Men: Battle of The Atom announcement made this weekend, it’s always good to see another character from Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways return to comics after  Niko and Chase’s appearance in Avengers Arena and Victor Mancha’s return in Age of Ultron: Ultron, and who didn’t like Molly Hayes? Cute, adorable Molly… Hayes…

On one hand, Art Adams does tend to go for the buxom, hyper-sexualized women. On the other, seriously, we couldn’t have an adult Molly Hayes who wasn’t wasp-waisted and overly-generous in the breast department? Really?

(Also, will we ever see a full-on Runaways revival now that the team has been deconstructed like this? I fear my hopes of finding out where Kathryn Immonen was going with her sadly-aborted run on the book are set to be dashed at this rate…)

This is the cover art for this week’s prog of 2000AD, by the wonderful D’Israeli:

Look at the linework! The texture! The composition! And then, look at how the cover went from editorial brief to completion in this detailed blog post (with video) from the always-worth-reading 2000AD Covers Uncovered blog.

And speaking of excellent comics – as we just were, with the Daredevil post – it’s worth pointing out that 2000AD is yet again just great stuff from start to finish these days, and well worth checking out. If you’re in the US, it’s available digitally.

Over at the Beat, Steve Morris asks an unexpected question: Are people bored by the consistently excellent quality of Waid and Samnee’s Daredevil?

Daredevil hasn’t had as much attention this year as it did during it’s first, but that’s for a fairly clear reason – it’s utterly rock-solid. Reviewers get bored of saying “yep, still great” every month, which is why books like Fatale and Daredevil tend to experience a little critical fatigue the longer they go on. I’d argue that Daredevil does suffer a little from being so dependable – with readers already aware of what kind of experience they’re in for when they pick up an issue, there’s little sense of recklessness at stake here. With a comic which rolls from being good-to-great, there are more errors and slips in the work, and that can make for a more entertaining read than something which never puts a foot wrong.

He decides, finally, that “[r]ather than getting bored at seeing high quality on a regular basis, this is a book we should continue to champion, even 25 issues in.” I’m not sure if anyone actually is bored by the book; I think that it’s just that people are writing about it less because we’re almost two years into a consistently solid run and so the novelty value has moved on to different, newer material. Not that two years is the benchmark; I feel that we’ve already stopped talking about Hawkeye and Young Avengers, two other top-level books over at Marvel right now, and they’re both less than a year old. Maybe people would rather complain than cheer about their reading, depressingly.

Padraig O Mealoid continues his trawl through the history of Marvelman/Miracleman’s ownership and publishing history, in the process potentially throwing up questions that I can only hope future chapters answer:

How Eclipse came to own rights that were once owned by Garry Leach, Alan Davis, and Dez Skinn is comparatively simple. Alan Davis no longer wished to be involved with the character in any way, so he simply gave his share in its entirety to Garry Leach, rather than give it back to the people who had originally shared it with him. Leach in turn, along with Dez Skinn, became unhappy with the way that Eclipse were dealing with them, and in particular felt that the choice of Chuck Beckum as artist was a bad one, so both of them sold their rights to Eclipse for $8,000 in February 1986.

So, wait. Does this mean that Eclipse did have the controlling interest in Miracleman? Does that mean that Todd McFarlane really did have the right to publish the character way back when – Unless I’m missing something, I see no reversion rights should Eclipse cease to exist, nor anything else to suggest that Miracleman rights wouldn’t be included with the rest of the company’s IP, although I have little doubt that future chapters won’t cover that – and if so, does this mean that the original lawsuits that apparently ended with McFarlane surrendering his claim to the character were prompted by a misunderstanding?

(Also, considering that Chuck Beckum – Later to find fame as Chuck Austen – was in part the reason why Dez Skinn and Garry Leach gave up their rights to the character, I can’t help but feel as if this is just more grist for the portion of the Internet for whom Mr. Austen will always be some kind of creative source of ill-intent.)

I’m still mulling over DC’s pulling out of the monthly Q&A column with Bob Harras and Bobbie Chase over at CBR. On the one hand, it’s pretty much the definition of a PR own goal to open yourself up to fan questions and then, four months later, quit because some of those questions were things that you didn’t want to talk about. On the other, as Heidi Macdonald wrote yesterday, only in comics would we expect upper editorial executives to subject themselves to monthly questions from their readership. To go further, only in Big Two comics would we expect that, because of the way Marvel interacts with readers and the press; we don’t see the decision makers from Dark Horse, IDW or Image undergo regularly scheduled interrogations, and I’m not sure anyone really expects them to, either.

What happened with the short-lived B&B column highlights the difference in… slickness, perhaps, between DC and Marvel, I think; Marvel is just better at managing the audience, their expectations, and making it look seamless. Axel Alonso’s weekly Axel-in-Charge column is pretty much the same thing as the B&B column – A combination of responding to softball questions with vague and meaningless responses and promoting upcoming product -  but the tone is different, somehow, and that’s the all-important thing: Alonso seems relaxed and engaged with the audience, even when he’s just saying “No plans for [whatever is being asked for]” or “Wait and see!” over and over again, whereas Harras and Chase seemed to be trying to hard, and selling too hard. I’m curious to see how Alonso – or Tom Brevoort, for that matter, who’s pretty much a model for how to communicate with fans online and has been for some time – would’ve responded to the Jerry Ordway question that seems to be at the center of DC’s decision to pull the column; I’m convinced it would’ve been something that would have felt sympathetic and appropriate, at least.

What the takeaway from this is, I’m unsure as yet. Maybe that DC needs to find different ways to engage its audience (or different people, perhaps)? Perhaps that Marvel outreach – Something that can be traced back to Stan back at the start of the company, via the Bullpen Bulletins and letter columns – has skewed our expectations of what to expect from comic executives?

Jim Starlin immediately wins over the fans of Stormwatch before he stepped on to revamp the title:

[Dan Didio] sent me the first 12 issues of “Stormwatch.” Once I read them, we talked on the phone and we both agreed that “Stormwatch” hadn’t really worked out too well at the conversion to the New 52 [Laughs]. A number of the books worked out really well, but “Stormwatch” was clearly not one of them.

Yes, talking trash about the series you’ve just taken over and rebooted in three pages is always a winner for longterm fans. I suspect that Starlin can get away with this – well, to an extent – because (a) he’s Jim Starlin and that name still carries some weight (and will likely carry more as Thanos becomes better known), and (b) not that many people were reading Stormwatch anyway. I wonder how a lesser-known creator would fare, with similar attitudes in an interview, though. When it comes to creators taking over familiar properties, how respectful should they be, publicly, to what’s gone before?

When in doubt, there’s always Alan Moore to entertain with his theories about pop culture’s decline:

I would say, that if you’re talking about a line of progress, if it can be called progress, that runs from Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, to Donald Cammell’s Performance, to Harry Potter, I don’t think you can really see that as anything but a decline. I will also point out that if you’ve got, I believe twenty percent of young people polled said that they would be embarrassed if their mates caught them reading. That would seem to me to be a decline, and also I would say that if you’ve got the Avengers movie as one of the most eagerly attended recent movies, and if most of those attendees were adults, which I believe they were, then if you’ve got a huge number of contemporary adults going to watch a film containing characters and storylines that were meant for the entertainment of eleven year old boys fifty years ago, then I’ve got to say, there’s something badly wrong there, isn’t there? This is not actually cultural progress.

Some would ask why an opera from the turn of the 20th century, a movie from the late 1960s and a kids’ book from the early 21st century form any kind of line at all – It’s not as if the three shared the same level of success at the time, or even recognition, and they’re each different media with different aims and different audiences – but to ask that would be to miss the point, which is that Alan Moore gives great quotes in Grumpy Old Man mode. How can you fail to love a man who points to the success of Marvel’s The Avengers as a symptom of the breakdown of culture?

Marvel may own Marvelman now (Well, some version of the character, at least), but it turns out the publisher could’ve made everyone’s lives a lot easier and bought the U.S. rights to publish Alan Moore’s run on the character way back when:

Shooter said, ‘We can’t do Marvelman,’ and I said, ‘But you ARE Marvel!’ He said, ‘Yeah, but the trouble is if his name is Marvelman, he represents the entire company. It would be like if this character was called DC Man, he’d represent DC. We couldn’t have a figurehead character who’s involved in a bizarre sexual triangle with the wife who’d rather sleep with the Greek God superhero than the forty-year-old pudgy secret identity and all this other stuff. Besides, he’s British, so how could he represent us?’ So he didn’t want it either.

Given the current status of Captain America as Marvel’s heart and moral conscience, could Marvelman represent the entire publisher these days? Turns out, the character’s name was also the reason DC didn’t purchase the rights when it had the chance the other day, according to Dick Giordano:

DC Comics publishing something called Marvelman; are you crazy? Do you know the problems we have with Captain Marvel, and you think we’re going to do Marvelman?! I couldn’t touch it. I love it but we couldn’t possibly do it.

The comics industries we could have had…! Just imagine.

Something from the Dark Horse solicits that I want to bring to your attention:

THE BEST OF MILLIGAN & MCCARTHY HCPeter Milligan (W) and Brendan McCarthy (W/A)

On sale Sept 11
FC, 264 pages
$24.99
HC, 7 3/4″ x 11″

One of comics’ most fruitful collaborations gets its due in this deluxe collection of hard-to-find gems from Peter Milligan (Hellblazer, X-Statix) and Brendan McCarthy (Judge Dredd, The Zaucer of Zilk There is still nothing else like Freakwave, Paradax!, Skin, and Rogan Gosh, and this volume is the ideal starting place for new readers! Collecting twenty years’ worth of the pair’s finest work from Vanguard Illustrated, Strange Days, 2000 AD, and Vertigo.

• Rare classics of action and satire!

• Brand-new restoration and commentary!

It is almost impossible for me to overstate how excited I am for this book, and how excited I think all of you out there should be, as well. These were seminal comics for me in my youth, and remain some of the most exciting, inventive and just plain creative comics that I’ve ever read, filled with playfulness about the medium, both visually and linguistically. I don’t know if this collection contains all of their collaborations – or all of the available work, at least, I know some are lost to the ages, like Summer of Love – but I hope that Sooner or Later, the pair’s experimental 2000AD strip from the 1980s, is included. As far as I know, that’s never been reprinted to date, but remains one of my favorite strips by the two of them.

Either way, this is something that fans of the medium – and certainly fans of either Milligan or McCarthy’s more recent work – should look out for. These are great, great comics.

Winter Soldier #19 may be the final issue of the series, but that might be because we’re headed towards a Marvel NOW! relaunch. Here’s Tom Brevoort’s response to someone asking why Marvel would cancel the book a year in advance of the movie with his name in the title is released:

Still, if you think we’re finished with the Winter Soldier, as both a character and a title, you’ve got another think coming in the months ahead.

We know that Marvel NOW! Phase 2 is due, and it would only make sense that we’re due a high(er)-profile Bucky book ahead of his big-screen spotlight. I wonder if there’s a way to get away with actually titling the new book Captain America: The Winter Soldier…?

It’s the dream of every message board poster – To be called out by name (or message board name, at least) by a creator during an interview, as Scott Lobdell did in a recent CBR conversation:

I’ve been reading a bunch of your message boards (Hey, MissLane38! I never said I hated fans. I don’t!) and it’s been fun watching everyone guess the exact nature of the reveals we’ll be learning in “Superboy” #19. Alas, they are all wrong!

That’s you told, “MissLane38,” right? That’s what you get for saying that Scott Lobdell hates fans! Except… That’s not what she actually said. This is what she actually said:

What does this have to do with Lobdell? Choosing Lois because she might have some of the same Neo-Sapien DNA as her niece Susie was just speculation, so pointing out she’s not biologically related to Lois is not a criticism of Lobdell. We don’t know that’s the story he has planned or it was his idea. And if Lobdell hates fans who are aware of continuity, then that’s really sad and pathetic of him.

Note that “if”? That kind of changes things from a declarative statement, don’t you think? In other words: Scott, she didn’t say that you hated fans, or that you said you did. On the plus side, this means that the two of you are in agreement – Hey, it’s just like an old-school comic book where heroes fight due to a misunderstanding before teaming up to deal with the real bad guy… except, you know, with more public shaming based on misreadings.

With Age of Ultron hitting the midway point this week, it’s maybe a good time to look at the series so far and consider the structure of the story. Maybe it’s just me, but there was a feeling that – due to the events at the end of the issue that I won’t spoil – this issue was in many ways the actual start of the story, and that everything prior to this had been prologue, and that’s oddly fascinating to me.

Certainly, the first five issues seemed to have little happening in the overall story, being more concerned with scene-setting and world-building, something that seemed curiously inconsequential considering the seemingly impermanent state of the world in question. By making such a dramatic swerve at the halfway point – The future issues will take place in different locales (temporal, if not physical), with a different mission statement and, we can but hope, more of a level or urgency – it’s hard not to wonder what the point of spending so long establishing the ruined Ultron world was.

Also, considering how well the tie-ins have done the same job – Avengers Assemble #14AU sets the scene far more effectively than the first four issues of the main book, for me, giving us an emotional “in” that the Bendis/Hitch team had failed to do in my opinion – it’s a question that feels more worth answering, and more confusing, than otherwise. The storytelling choices of Age of Ultron have been very deliberate: Not showing how the takeover happened, the pacing, the fragmented build of the story to date. But why were they made?

What happens in the second half of the series is crucial, of course; whether it mirrors, or builds on, the storytelling choice of the first half or not. When the “different artists at the midway point” structure of the series was first announced, I worried that it would mean that the second half would feel like an entirely different book. Now, I find myself torn on that – On the one hand, that would feel like the first half was even more of a waste of time, but on the other… I think I’d want a different book, based on the evidence of the first five issues. Is that just me?

Here’s Sam Humphries, talking with our very own Albert Ching about Hank Pym’s role in Avengers AI:

Hank Pym is a fantastic character to write. It’s a little difficult for me to talk exactly about Hank, because a lot of it comes out of the end of Age of Ultron, and the Age of Ultron epilogue that Mark Waid is writing. Both of which I’ve read, and both of which are great. The Age of Ultron has got an incredible crescendo, and that leads right into what we’re doing.

Waid’s epilogue is great, because Waid loves Hank Pym so much. Waid really, really has this deep, genuine affection for Hank Pym the same way that he does Daredevil and Superman. Waid has this ability to tap deep into these classic characters in a way that nobody else does. Talking about the end of Age of Ultron, and the epilogue, and the beginning of Avengers A.I. with Bendis and Waid was fantastic for me. It was amazing. I wish both of those guys could re-define my characters before every book I do, because they’re razor-sharp at this.

All of which is a long way of saying that I can’t really say what my take on Hank is, other than I think this is a take that is firmly rooted in Hank’s history. It in no way ignores what came before, but I think it’s also a bit of Hank coming into his own.

How many times has Hank Pym come into his own?

I ask that seriously; the character seems to be one that just never works for fans, and undergoes constant revision. It’s always been the case, all the way back to his first appearances fifty years ago. He was Ant-Man, then Giant-Man, then Goliath. Back then, the character didn’t evolve, but his costumed identities did. Goliath, Yellowjacket…

Hank has no central personality traits that the creators who handle him can seem to agree on, and that’s plagued him throughout his existence – It’s also, I’d argue, why his hitting Jan has become the defining fact of his character despite numerous attempts to rehabilitate him; at least it’s something unique that people remember about him outside of “he messes with his size a lot and created Ultron.” But even since then: We’ve seen him suicidal and then come to terms with his position in life, then come to terms with it again and reclaim former identities to express that, and then again and again. Is he the (somewhat jerky, infallible) Scientist Supreme, still, or a (sensitive, emotionally aware) teacher at Avengers Academy?

I’ve said it elsewhere, but I suspect that the Hank Pym we’ll see post-Age of Ultron will himself be an artificial intelligence of some sort, giving him yet another reboot and attempt of definition. Either way, it’ll be interesting to see if the makeover he’ll get in Age of Ultron and Avengers AI is something that will actually stick, or whether we’ll see yet another redefinition of Hank Pym a couple of years down the line, as Marvel Studios prepares to release its Ant-Man movie.