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QUOTE: I disagree.  Prior to that, Pym had been written as someone with an inferiority complex and a very unstable sense of self.  I don't think it logically follows from that he would become a spousal batterer or collaborate with a criminal.

 

Hank didn't collaborate with Egghead knowingly.  He thought he was helping Egghead's neice. After that Egghead said he would kill her if Pym did not help him. 

Other than that I agree it was a bad story.  But I believe it was saved by Roger Stern and Steve Englehart.  Unfortuneatly it became fodder for every two bit hack who wrote a story with Hank Pym in it.

I'd take Quesada over Shooter any day. 1, because you can't go back, you've gotta go forward; 2, from what I see and read Quesada seems okay to me and is doing fine; and 3 it's the opposite view of most on this board (that'a a joke). Shooter did some good things and some bad things, but that was then and this is now, and what was appropriate then may not be appropriate now.

Secret Wars I and II - rubbish and I knew it even as I bought them all. More fool me.

On Pym.....

Someone already mentioned the point that he was completely tricked into working with Egghead. It is fairly common ground over the years where Bad Guy X tells Hero Y "i am holding innocent person Z hostage and will kill them if you don't perform this task for me" (the first thing that comes to mind is Superman, Marv, and WW in Miller's Dark Knight Strikes Back, but I could probably find 20 other occurances if I looked) and Hero Y looks like he turned bad.

JB...your comment "and prior to that he was written as a regular guy" leads me to think you don's support any sort of charachter growth for these charachters at all. It would seem from that comment that you would take the opinion that the personality and style of a charachter, once created, is immutable and intractable forever. Obviously, that is not the case, since I have personally read work of yours where you expand the charachter beyond their original limitations and have them actually grow, the first one that comes to mind is your handling of the Human Torch. Yours is my favorite rendition of that particular charachter BECAUSE he wasn't just some hot headed kid out there looking for thrills. He had CHANGED into a mature and responsible young man. Not all of that growth was done by you, but I think it was your work that really established that as the "norm" for him. Is it that you think that growth and betterment are apropriate, where faltering and deecline are not? If so, I can understand your point, I just disagree. It is unfortunate but true that people everyday suffer from breakdowns of greater or lesser severity. It is not outside the realm of reason that a guy with already established "bad wiring" (agree or disagree on if he SHOULD have been written that way, but he WAS) and was under that kind of pressure, or perceved preddure, could snap and take a swing at his wife in a moment of weakness. It wasn't like they showed it as a long running pattern of behavior, it was a momentary lapse into weakness. He did have, as pointed out above "an inferiority complex and a very unstable sense of self". That doesn't mean that he HAD to decend further, but it certainly was not out of left field. As horrible as it was, it is understandable. It happens every day. Odds are that at the moment you are reading this, someone within a few miles of you is someone who does or has hit his wife. I wish it wasn't true, but it is. ANd most of those people started off as decent, hardworking, GOOD men at some point, but somewhere lost their way. And unlike super heroes, they probably DON'T have a profession that includes regularly solving problems by hitting someone really hard until they give up. 

RE: Straying too far from the source....

JB noted in another thread that one of the conceptions of the "essence" of the original X-Men book was the factor that it was in fact about kids in a school. It had grown far and away from that aspect. And for the better, since obviously the X-Men book was incredibly popular as it explored other avenues of it's existance that were unrelated to the school portion. The first hundred issues of the book after the relaunch with the new team is widely regarded in the industry and the community of the fans as some of the best (as well as most successful) work ever done in the field. It isn't that the school aspect was bad, it just didn't fit well with the direction of the book, and did not mesh at all with the majority of the charachters that fuled the book. I think the whole point as showing charachters as students is the pay off at the end when you see them graduate into MORE than just students. Anyone who started reading the X-Men at any point after GSXM 1 (the piont when it actually became a popular book) would really have a tough time swallowing seeing Logan, Kurt, Sean, or Scott or Warren sitting in a math class in between missions. There was a time when it was proper to see the original team that way, but as it was directly pointed out in the book, the new team was NOT made up of kids. They were adults and needed to act like, and be treated like, adults. In order for the school aspect to work, they needed to have students, not full time professional adventurers. I am certainly not going to try to say that Chris was WRONG by not forcing the adults to act like children. For one, it would be stupid, and two, his way obviously worked. 

The school was ONE aspect of the team's history that still had life it it, but was not in synch with what the book was NOW about. The whole concept of the X-Men was greatly enriched by having the second book there to play to that aspect. And they tackled it from a very different angle this time. The New Mutants was not about teaching a bunch of kids and making them into a team of superheroes, it was about taking a bunch of kids and focusing on them taking care of themselves, while the happened to be drawn into playing super heroes from time to time. Of course, that book eventually grew away from the school concept as well. But guess what? It is something that then keep going back to. Look at the last few years of X-Men and see that they went back to the school idea, but from another angle. Obviously, the concept had some merit, and obviously not exploring that merit in the main book was a good choice, and obviously, the spin off book sold well, and in itself was not the cause of the later oversaturation of the market. So it seems like it was a good idea.

I am a really big Spider-Man fan, but I haven't followed him regularly in years, for the same reason that I stopped following DC's big two. There is just too much to keep track of. But in concept, the LAST think I want to read about is a teenage Peter Parker. A Peter Parker who happens to be a teenager was fine I suppose, but to be honest, I hated those old issues in some ways. Sure, they were magnificent in a lot of ways, but if you argue that the whole "point" of the charachter is that teenage boys are supposed to relate to the "every man" aspect, you couldn't be farther from the truth. I couldn't relate to him at 15.I guess back in the 1960s or early 1970s teenage boys could relate, but if you think that the average 15yr old would today, you are dead wrong. Even when I was a teenager in the 80s, I was GLAD that Peter had grown up and out of that part of his life. For me, it was always about looking UP to these charachters. Now I look at them and realize that the 20 yr old Peter that I looked up to when I was 10 is only a 25 yr old Peter that I just can't really look up to any more now that I am past 30. If the "point" of the charachter is to be stuck at, and therefore defined by, his age, then it is no better then having a charachter that is written to "just" be black, or gay, or Muslim or any other narrow facet. For me, charachter growth is everything, not pinning down particular aspects. That may be why I loke Spider Girl so much. It is reexploring the concepts of the young Peter from a new direction, through his daughter, but it is not a matter of pinning Peter down as the exact same thing fighting a diferent bad guy that was in a story I read 25 years ago.

For the good of the order (or at least for the record)...

I enjoyed Secret Wars.  I was 12 years old.  I had just started collecting comics, but it was the G. I. Joe commercials that got me hooked!

I did not like Secret Wars II.  I bought the first issue, but after reading it, I was out!  Did like the cover, did not like the interior pencil/inker combination.

However, I was/am a fan of Al Milgrom.  I very much enjoyed his Avengers run, both east and west coasts, but I also recognize that Roger Stern made the Avengers great, for me, while Al Milgrom was very enjoyable and not distracting.  Steve Englehart did the same for West Coast Avengers, though not as great as Stern did at the same time.

I also realize that I enjoyed Al Milgrom much more when paired with my all-time favorite inker, Joe Sinnott!  Al was much less enjoyable when someone else, say Mike Machlan, was inking him.  Sinnott did the same for Don Perlin over in the Defenders.  I loved DeMatteis' run with Perlin, but more so with Sinnott.  He was also my favorite Kirby inker!

I also would be very curious to see what Shooter could/would do with Marvel now.  I doubt it could be worse, but then again, I am NOT an X-Fan, so I only have a much disappointed Marvel Heroes perspective to offer...

I may have been able to buy the whole "Hank Pym goes crazy" thing if it had been written well.  As it was, I was scratching my head trying to figure out who had inhabited Hank's body.  (I think it was Shooter.) It was just an incredibly stupid storyline.

I absolutely think Bob McCleod made the New Mutants great.  Claremont didn't seem to know where to take it after Bob left.  First few issues are great!

I don't think "growth", aging, birth, death, marriage or anything else or the lack thereof is necessarily a bad thing in comics or any other medium.  It just has to be done well. 

Its like he was suppose to go crazy and snap in like three issues. It was sloppily done.  If Roger Stern and Steve Englehart had not saved it, it would not be looked at fondly today.

IMO, the real problem with Hank Pym was that we kept seeing the same problem stroyline again and again.

My biggest problem with the the very enjoyable Busiek & Perez run of The Avengers was that much of the stories seemed like re-runs.  I ahve re-read them and realize that there are a lot of new ideas there, but it seemed like re-runs at the time, mostly because of Pym.

I also just read JB's AWC: Vision Quest TPB.  I loved his run on that title, as I am sure many of you did as well, but I did not like the Tigra re-run.  We just dealt with her problems and solved them in Englehart's run.  JB had so much going on there, I wonder about his intentions for this sub-plot.

Maybe I should ask him...