Sunday Splash Page #436

"The Whole World in Her Hands," in Ant-Man and the Wasp #5, by Mark Waid (writer), Javier Garron (artist), Israel Silva (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)

Didn't plan on this being a Mark Waid weekend, but nonetheless. A mini-series from 2018 pairing the 2nd Ant-Man (Scott Lang), with the 3rd Wasp (Nadia van Dyne.) Almost said "2nd Wasp," but there was that stretch after Secret Invasion where Hank Pym called himself the Wasp. Lang was out in space helping the Guardians of the Galaxy with something and needs a ride back to Earth, or he'll miss his daughter's birthday party. Nadia grudgingly agrees to help, via some process where she builds a device to catch Scott if he rides the beam projected by the Nova Corps transmission system as a tiny guy. Scott has to jump into the beam precisely when she says, or he could get lost in the Microverse.

Does Scott forget to pick up the plant he's bringing Cassie as a gift, then end up jumping into the beam a split-second too late, missing the receiver entirely? This is post Ant-Man movie Scott Lang, of course he does! Nadia gives chase, and so begins an adventure in the Microverse.

Waid's clearly having fun with how weird physics get at sub-atomic scales, though he's understandably selective about what gets explained. Nadia makes a point that she and Scott are breathing, despite being smaller than an oxygen atom, can see despite being smaller than a photon of light. And while she says this, she scoops up a handful of what looks like earth, but Garron depicts the parts shifting into a bunch of fluttery, glowing green, they might be bugs, or they might be like flower petals, or the sub-atomic equivalent of one of those. Point being, things work differently here, and Nadia, being the theorist, wants to be cautious. Scott - who says in response to Nadia's questions that he did think about those things, then made himself a sandwich because he didn't know the answers - wants to get home, and not let anyone get hurt along the way.

That's how things play out over the mini-series. Nadia mostly tries to remain serious and calm and understand the science of the different things that go wrong with she and Scott during their travels. Like when there are suddenly several of her, because they've become living quantum particles, existing in several states simultaneously. Scott mostly doesn't understand what she's saying, but does his best to help by forming connections with people - first, what passes for insects in the Microverse, then with a maligned experimental scientist in a Microverse society - and by grounding Nadia when her emotions start to hit too hard. 

That's the undercurrent, past Nadia's hostility towards the man who "stole" her father's work. Nadia is trying desperately to impress a father she never got to meet, who never knew she existed. Scott, for all this version's many faults, is a guy who tries really hard to be a good dad. To be there for his daughter, and not make her feel like his love is contingent on her accomplishments. And so, in his slightly panicky way, he knows how to keep Nadia calm when things get too much or she starts to doubt herself.

Garron is able to keep Scott and Nadia looking basically normal, while the things around them look very strange. The Microverse scientist - who Waid writes a lot like one of the scientists you'd see in Marvel's '50s era sci-fi/horror comics - is a bizarre conglomeration of tentacles, holes, teeth, and green things that might be eyes. The way they're arranged makes no sense to my eye, but that's kind of the point. Things works differently down there. In the first issue, they encounter a type of creature that looks a bit like sheets hanging from a single hook, that shift between colors. How they speak, how they move, what they would subsist on and how they get it is not immediately apparent. How the predator pursuing them steals the "red" from them, causing them to become a pile of grey dust stuff, is also unclear. But as Scott points out when Nadia advises staying out of it, those beings are alive, and they're in pain. So Ant-Man and the Wasp get involved.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

I found this by accident on Netflix last week. I figured it would make it there eventually, but I didn't know when. Scott (Paul Rudd) is nearing the end of his house arrest for helping Captain America in violation of the Sokovia Accords in Captain America: Civil War. He and his friends from the last movie are trying to keep their security business afloat. Then Scott has a dream that involves Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) and reaches out to Hank and Hope (Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lilly), who are on the run as accomplices to Scott's crime (since they gave him the suit).

Let's call it what it is. Whoever is trying to enforce the Sokovia Accord stuff just wants Pym's stuff. They're probably a remnant of HYDRA, or AIM. Have we seen AIM in the Marvel movies? We need science guys with weird weapons and beekeeper suits.

Anyway, those two are trying to put together a machine to go search the quantum realms for Janet, but get double-crossed by the black marketeer (Walton Goggins) they've been buying stuff from, and then a mysterious ghost lady (Hannah John-Kamen) shows up. Scott gets roped in, while trying to avoid the feds learning he broke house arrest.

The film makes a mention of storing quantum energy early, which once you've heard that, and you see the problems Ghost is having, the solution is readily apparent. It's just a matter of waiting until the film gets around to that point.

It's still weird for me to see Walton Goggins with a fairly large role in these big budget movies, or Tarantino's stuff, because I still think of him as that dipshit Shane Vendrell he played on The Shield. I would never have expected that guy to have this big of a career. Go figure. I did feel like, somewhere during the chase sequence near the end, he should have accepted he was simply out of his league and called it a day. I guess he figured he could just keep close and then swoop in once everyone else took each other out.

It depresses me the agent responsible for keeping tabs on Scott is a pitiful schlub, and is supposed to be Jimmy Woo. Man, Agents of Atlas was so cool, and Jimmy Woo was very cool in it, and this version of him is very much not. It's not Randall Park's fault; they clearly decided Woo needs to be a probably very lonely dumbass, and Park did his best. Still, when that dawned on me, it bummed me out.

Then again, Comic Hank Pym is a neurotic mess, while Movie Hank Pym is trying to give Odin and Tony Stark a run for his money in being a dick, so some things are off-model. I like that Pym was entirely OK with risking Scott being sent back to prison or killed for his own ends in the first movie, but now he's pissed that Scott made a decision which has (greatly) inconvenienced him. Oh, boohoo, shoe's not so comfy on the other foot, is it Hank? You had Hope right there, ready and willing to take care of Cross, and decided to extort Scott into helping you, regardless of the fact it would have made is little girl sad if he gets killed cleaning up your mess.

Granted, "conceited dick" is much more in Michael Douglas' wheelhouse than "guy constantly on the verge of a breakdown", but it makes it hard to want him to succeed in whatever is otherwise a perfectly good mission to rescue his wife. Because Pym has clearly been and continues to be an arrogant ass towards everyone.

The shtick with Luis (Michael Pena) did not irritate me as much as it did in the first movie. Maybe because they didn't lean as heavily on him telling long-winded and meandering stories this time. So he was a lot funnier to me this time. I don't know if the movie overall was funnier; I didn't really laugh out loud at this one or the first one. The gags where Scott's stuck with a suit that only partially works weren't great. I guess they needed something to compensate for him knowing what he was doing compared to the first movie, so he'd still look like kind of a putz.

I did enjoy some of the fight scenes, the back and forth of Wasp shrinking to avoid attacks, only to have Ghost phase through her counterattack. Although you would think shrinking and growing repeatedly in such a short time like that would be a real strain on your system. Oh well, Hope's young, I'm sure she can handle it. The car chase through San Francisco wasn't too shabby. The parts with Scott and Cassie were cute, especially the one where she wants to be his crime-fighting partner, and he says she'd be great at it, but he'd be a terrible dad to let her do it.

What I Bought 10/21/2018

Alex asked me to tag along to a gig on Sunday, and so I took some time to grab a couple of last week's books while I was in town. It probably says something about me that Alex thought I'd be there by noon, and was calling me at 12:10 when I hadn't arrived yet, even though he wasn't planning to leave until 1:30. I don't bat an eye when my dad is 10 minutes late for something, or Alex for that matter.

Unstoppable Wasp #1, by Jeremy Whitley (writer), Gurihiru (artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - It's a cute cover, I really don't have anything more substantive to say.

Well, I didn't read the brief ongoing the new Wasp had a year or two ago, but it's reasonably easy to follow along. Nadia has her own group of young lady scientists, and they invent cool stuff part of the time, and help her fight crime part of the time. Crime, in this case being AIM, back to being evil after that stint where Sunspot was their boss, and doing something to prepare for Hank Pym. Pym being Nadia's father, who she thinks is dead. And who I thought was dead. Isn't Ultron still just Ultron, but he thinks he's part Pym? Or maybe he is part Pym. It was Hank's brain patterns he was based on, so I guess he's technically always been part Hank, the poor genocidal robot bastard.

The book feels pretty cheerful, despite all that looming stuff about Nadia's dad that I guess the Avengers haven't told her. She and her friends seem to be having fun, cracking wise and whatnot. The Guruhiru team's artwork is very bright and expressive. They draw Nadia as having freckles, which, I'm trying to think of superhero characters with freckles. Jimmy Olsen, I guess, if you count "Mr. Action". I feel like Siryn does, depending on the artist. The little drone hovercraft her friends remotely pilot look cool, and fit the wasp motif.

All that said, something didn't click. There's a whole thread where there are going to be a bunch of investors coming by to see if their lab is worth buying into, and Nadia's been slacking on the super-science. I can see how it's important for her character (and a connection to her dad, who probably should have stuck to super-science and stayed away from superheroics). Plus it connects to the friendship between her and Janet (who is helping her with the business side of things), but I feel like it's going to distract from the subplots among her friends, or trying to stop AIM, or Nadia dealing with whatever she's going to learn about her father. The things I'm more interested in seeing play out. So I'm on the fence about buying issue 2 now.

Stellar #5, by Joseph Keatinge (writer), Bret Blevins (artist), Rus Wooton (letterer) - What you see on the cover is pretty much what you get for the first half of the issue. Which is nice. Truth in advertising, and sometimes you just want robot smashing.

So the older and younger versions of Stellar are gone, taken somewhere by Zenith. She's left wandering for some time, asking people if they've seen them, getting no response until someone recognizes the photo and gives her a lead. And it leads back to. . . Zenith, who has made himself a seemingly happy family with them, if the photos on the wall are anything to go by.

That was a little strange. I still haven't figured out the mother and daughter both looking like Stellar. One of them, sure, but both? Zenith sparing her starts to make a little more sense. Why hadn't he killed her like he did all the other members of their team? Well, he had some sort of interest in her. And he feels he's moved on, made a family, has grandkids now (although he's also taken the time to get himself some death bots at some point). Whereas Stellar, hasn't. Even before she was spending all her time trying to track them down, it seems like she wasn't doing much. Almost no friends, crappy little apartment. Is she afraid of wrecking this world, that she'll taint it if she tries to immerse herself in it? So she stays on the fringes, watches, but doesn't really live in it much.

It's neat two watch how Blevins draws Zenith differently over the course of time. We first see him, he's this techno-organic monstrosity. Like he says, reborn for war. When he found her last issue, he's wearing a stylish hat and coat. The power is still there if he wants it, but he's not trying to impress or terrify anyone. By the time Stellar finds him at the end of this issue, he's dressed like a grandpa. Spectacles and sweater vests. Probably about to settle down and watch his programs with a cup of tea (coffee keeps him up nights). He's been the one we keep hearing was so scary, so terrifying, reveled in being this super-power, killing who he wished. But maybe that was who he had to be and he's not that any more. Or maybe he is, he just hides it better. Stellar is still wearing the same kind of raggedy trenchcoats she was wearing when this series began. She's stuck in place.

One thing I'm waiting for is whether we'll see Stellar really cut loose before the end here. The first issue, we kept seeing her as a glowing yellow human silhouette. She hasn't done that since, even when she's ostensibly fighting for her life against Zenith, or lashing out in a fury. I'm curious to see if it comes out here at the end, and what the end result would be. Probably a lot of death and destruction.