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.
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