Yeah, okay, I’ll talk about Ant-Man.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the millennial, Apatowian/Always Sunny influence on modern comics, where these days we don’t just want a hero who’s flawed, we want a hero who is actively botching up their own life.  Perhaps my fellow comic-nerd man-children and I are meant to relate to affable underdogs like Chris Pratt and Paul Rudd, haplessly goofing around while shirking responsibility and avoiding consequences for their actions, only to achieve, every once in a while, the occasional victory, a quiet moment of grace before starting the cycle all over again.  So Nick Spencer brings a lot of that same vibe from Superior Foes of Spider-Man to this series, where Ant-Man is a screw-up trying to con his way back to being a respectable superhero, so you can’t help but root for him.  Alongside his daughter and ex-wife, he even has a supporting cast of would-be supervillains,  Grizzly and Machinesmith, giving his fellow ex-cons the chance to redeem themselves by hiring them on to his fledgling security business.

What some of you may not know is that his daughter, Cassie, was the one who indirectly inspired Scott Lang to begin a life of crime as Ant-Man, in order to procure the funds to help treat her heart condition.  Since then, Cassie realized that her exposure to her father’s size-changing Pym particles also allowed her similar abilities to grow and shrink at will, and she jointed the Young Avengers as Stature.  Through trans-temporal hijinks, both Scott and Cassie have recently died and returned from the dead – which you’d think would be a fun topic for father/daughter bonding!  But okay, I can understand wanting to make this comic series “accessible” for “new readers” (sigh!).  The first issue actually got things off to a very promising start, in which Cassie was going on to her dad about how Hunger Games is “a ripoff of a vastly superior foreign film,” Battle Royale, prompting Scott to think, “And this is why my kid is cooler than yours.”  That’s beautiful, that is.  Sure, a case could be made that a teenage fan of foreign movies isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it was something.  In contrast, based solely on the trailer, my biggest glaring concern for the Ant-Man movie is this stupid little wretch right here.  Because that is not a supporting character.  That is not a “child actor.”  That is a Raggedy Ann doll that says “I wuv you Daddy!” when you pull its string.  I mean, can you imagine a Marvel movie where the struggling dad has a willful teen daughter to play off of, all texting on the latest product-placement smartphone and wearing T-shirts featuring that band you love, instead of this little idiot who may as well have “KIDNAP ME” stamped on her forehead?

But I digress.  In this issue, Augustine Cross — a great example of a villain one loves to hate — kidnaps a doctor to save his father, obscure Ant-Man villain Darren Cross.  His heart, you see, can’t take the strain of changing size, so what else can Augustine do but kidnap Cassie, extract her Pym-particle-infused heart, and surgically implant it in Darren Cross’s body!  (Don’t worry, he’s not a monster — he’s also got plenty of homeless people on-hand to swap her one of their hearts instead!)  Cassie’s body starts to reject the transplant, but Ant-Man saves her life by going inside her bloodstream and fighting off her white blood cells until she recovers, which is just good classic comic fun.  But I think this story mostly serves to sweep Cassie’s size-changing powers under the rug and have her more closely resemble her move equivalent.  To be fair, I can absolutely understand having the title character of the series be the only one with size-changing powers… but as illustrated above, I don’t think movie Cassie is a standard for which we should strive.  As Ant-Man’s fatherhood is one of his defining character traits among the other Marvel superheroes, I can only hope his daughter remains a part of Scott’s supporting cast in one form or another, and, ideally, a character in her own right.