"Dare to Dream, Scott", in Ant-Man #3, by Nick Spencer (writer), Ramon Rosanas (artist), Jordan Boyd (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer)
I know, it's not a splash page, but this is the only issue of the series I'd kept, and it only had one splash page, and I found that one pretty lame, so I went with this page instead.
Spencer and Rosanas moved Scott Lang to Miami to establish his own security firm, which he then staffed with super-villains. Unfortunately, Spencer decided to take his cues from the recent movie and play up Scott as a complete loser that none of the other heroes respect or believe they can count on at all. He even went so far as to reveal Hank Pym let Scott keep the costume because he felt sure there was no way he would be overshadowed by a successor if that successor was Scott. Because, ha ha, Scott is such a loser!
Keep in mind that Matt Fraction had just finished a stint on Fantastic Four where Scott played the team brain in Reed's absence and defeated a cosmically-powered Dr. Doom by unlocking the full capabilities of Pym Particles. Yep, sure sounds like an unreliable loser to me.
There's also the part where Spencer opted to depower Cassie Lang, Scott's daughter and one-time Avenger because. . . reasons. I dunno. He didn't try and de-age her to match movie Cassie, so I'm not sure why it was necessary to take her powers away.
Being Marvel, the book was canceled after 5 issues because of Secret Wars, then restarted 5 months later with the same creative team and a slightly different title. I tried the first issue of that, decided I couldn't deal with the portrayal of Scott, and dropped it. I thought the fact Scott had assembled an odd crew of villains as his team had potential, but I had no confidence in Spencer to do anything interesting with it. Plus, I found Rosanas' art kind of dull and not terribly expressive, and the coloring didn't help. Everything felt too understated and low-energy.
2 comments:
I remember this book! I hadn't been reading about Scott in anything else at the time, so he being presented as a complete loser didn't really annoy me. All I really remember was a former villain in a giant bear costume who kept overheating because it was so hot out.
Yeah, the Grizzly. He was the first dude Scott recruited, after Grizz came looking to beat up Ant-Man, only he was attacking the wrong one.
I like the post-fight conversation, where they try to figure out which Ant-Man it was, and Scott figures out it was Eric O'Grady by asking if the Ant-Man Grizz fought seemed smart, to which Grizzly replies, "Not at all."
I was not sorry when Rick Remender killed O'Grady off in Secret Avengers. One of the few highlights from that book.
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