Writer Jim Shooter: Pym wasn't meant to be a wife beater

[frigidmagi]

His Blog

Back in 1981 I was writing the Avengers. Hank Pym aka Yellowjacket was married to Janet Van Dyne aka The Wasp and things had not been going well for him for a long time.

Before I embarked on the storyline that led to the end of Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne’s marriage, I reread every single appearance of both characters. His history was largely a litany of failure, always changing guises and switching back and forth from research to hero-ing because he wasn’t succeeding at either. He was never the Avenger who saved the day at the end and usually the first knocked out or captured. His most notable “achievement” in the lab was creating Ultron. Meanwhile, his rich, beautiful wife succeeded in everything she tried. She was also always flitting around his shoulders, flirting, saying things to prop up his ego.

As I was developing the storyline, I discussed the potential pathology of their relationship with a psychologist who happened to be sitting next to me on a five-hour flight. The story made sense, he thought. I went ahead with it. During the time the story was running, I got a great deal of hate mail. It worried me enough to ask Stan what he thought. He said he got the same kind of mail in the ‘60’s regarding Peter Parker’s various romantic travails. He asked me how Avengers sales were doing. They were in fact, increasing by 10,000 copies per issue. Stan said that people obviously cared passionately about what was happening to Hank and Janet, as if they were real people. That’s the key. And he said, “Don’t worry about the mail.”

In that story (issue 213, I think), there is a scene in which Hank is supposed to have accidentally struck Jan while throwing his hands up in despair and frustration—making a sort of “get away from me” gesture while not looking at her. Bob Hall, who had been taught by John Buscema to always go for the most extreme action, turned that into a right cross! There was no time to have it redrawn, which, to this day has caused the tragic story of Hank Pym to be known as the “wife-beater” story.

When that issue came out, Bill Sienkiewicz came to me upset that I hadn’t asked him to draw it! He saw the intent right through Hall’s mistake, and was moved enough by the story to wish he’d had the chance to do it properly.

By the way, I was too busy to finish the story, so Roger Stern took over two-thirds of the way through. I thought he did a great job. He’s an excellent writer who doesn’t get enough credit.

[Lys]

I have no idea who Hank Pym is... or rather I do, but the Hank Pym I know is from a Spider-Man/Prototype crossover fanfic so there's a few differences. The point is, I'm unaware of Yellow Jacket or the "wife beater story", but the thing about the intent of a particular story or scene changing partway through production because someone took things in a different direction happens every so often in any and all collective creative endeavours. I've heard it a ton of times, how a thing was supposed to be one way, then someone changed it and it was way too late to change it back, so it stayed. It's happened in movies, TV shows, comic books, role-playing games, videogames. Sometimes such changes are executive meddling, sometimes someone on the staff makes an indepedent decision with a lot of repercussions for the overall meaning and message of the finished product. On occasion these changes are for the better, but often they're not due to a lack of communication between the various parties engaged in production. It's just a thing that happens.

[Josh]

It's made the character utterly irredeemable for a lot of people, which was not Shooter's intention. Hank Pym is/was a marketable character and the screwup damaged the property.

It sucks because Shooter's concept of Pym's damaged ego was a good one and if people weren't hung up on strict canon and could just say 'That was a story oops' they could handle the way the character has been developed over the years.

I'm not a fan of the character, wife-beater or no, but I can definitely understand the frustration from the marketing/creative standpoint.

[Lys]

Yeah, those kinds of screw-ups tend to do that. I know the Exalted game line had a pretty god-damned awful cover a decade ago and it's yet to live it down. Yet it only happened because someone had the bright idea of hiring a Korean artist who spoke little English while having nobody on staff who spoke Korean. They could not communicate what they wanted to him, so he did whatever he felt like and delivered it the day before the book was to be sent to the printers, so the staff winced, groaned, and sent it off because there was nothing else to do. Then there was also Infernals about five years ago where the book was written by two teams who didn't talk to each other, so the book's content ranges from brilliantly awesome (the magic powers) to nauseatingly bad (all of Chapter 1). There's a bunch of similar stories from the other White Wolf gamelines but I'm not as familiar with them.

In general the combination of freelancers and poor editorial oversight will cause problems pretty much anywhere. In fact, poor editorial oversight period can be a big problem. Sometimes the editor's the only difference between a line floating and sinking. The thing is that it takes time and money to have people go over stuff and makes sure nobody does something stupid, and that's very hard to do when you're running on tight schedules and tighter margins. Like I said, this shit happens all the time. This case just seems like a particularly bad one, where one comic book panel drawn different changed everything.

Though, I do find it weird that comic book fans tend to have this attitude of everything is canon. Sometimes a story's a shitty story and you just pretend it didn't happen and move on. Just like how everyone agrees that it's a pity they never made any movie sequels to Highlander, but the TV show was decent.

[Batman]

Do we? This is an honest question, I don't think I interact with other comic book fans often enough to have a sample base to form a reasonably well informed opinion, but far as I can tell at least superhero comics fans (at least those I interact with) are fully aware that canon is not only not written in stone, it's at best written in soft clay and most often in warm butter. Retcons are a routine part of life for the superhero comics fan and at least from my admittedly limited experience we usually bicker about which parts of what until now was canon should be excised rather than refusing to excise any of it.

[Josh]

Two things with Pym. One is that they wrote around it happening afterward, and two is that it was such a big, traumatic event that nobody wants to let it go.

It'd be like waving a wand and saying Gwen Stacy never happened for Spiderman. You could do it, you could write stories about it, but it was such a defining moment for the character that people want it to be there.

[Batman]

I dunno. I'd argue the same is true for Hal turning Parallax not due to outside influence but for completely human and completely understandable reasons, or Barry dying for keeps (complete with 20 years of DC telling 'Flash' readers that no, he won't be back, at all, ever), and yet fans other than myself seem to have accepted those being undone rather calmly.

[Lys]

Two things with Pym. One is that they wrote around it happening afterward, and two is that it was such a big, traumatic event that nobody wants to let it go.

It'd be like waving a wand and saying Gwen Stacy never happened for Spiderman. You could do it, you could write stories about it, but it was such a defining moment for the character that people want it to be there.

I've noticed that in comics even when they do retcons they try to keep it in universe. When Joe Quesada decided that Spiderman wasn't going to be married to Mary Jane any more, he didn't just wave his hand and say, "Starting with the new storyline that begins on Issue X, Peter Parker is no longer married and never has been." Instead he went to the through the trouble of writing an entire storyline dedicated to retconning his marriage out of existence in universe, so that it still happened but nobody remembers. There's been a bunch of other things they changed via multi-universe or time-travel shenanigans rather than just outright saying, "That never happened."

[frigidmagi]

I'll note that fans do not always accept recons calmly or lightly. Since One More Day I have refused to buy another Spiderman comic. The same is true for a number of people.

[Josh]

The problem with retconning away Pym hitting Janet is that regardless of whether or not you take the act itself away, it comes up as 'this is a guy who can beat his wife', and it's hard to redeem that fundamental character trait.