Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and eighty-seventh installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.
Here's part 1 of this week's so-far all Ant-Man-related legends!
NOTE: The CSBG Twitter page hit 10,050 followers, so I did a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed earlier this week. We'll keep the bit going, though. Every 1,000 followers of the CSBG Twitter page, I'll do a bonus Comic Book Legends Revealed that week.
COMIC LEGEND:
John Byrne was going to have Hank Pym and Wasp get married during his West Coast Avegenrs run
STATUS:
True
It was a big deal in 1988 when John Byrne returned to Marvel after a short stint at DC where he had a great deal of success rebooting the Superman titles.
His first big book upon coming back to Marvel was writing and drawing the West Coast Avengers.
For the most part, the book's roster was set before Byrne took over the title. He was essentially assigned a team of Hawkeye, Wonder Man, Hank Pym, Wasp, Tigra, Scarlet Witch and Vision, with USAgent also added into the mix (just not right away).
What he wanted to DO with that team, though, was up to him.
In West Coast Avengers #45, he hinted that Wasp and Hank Pym were getting over their failed marriage...
He has Wasp allude to as much to Wonder Man in West Coast Avengers #47...
And Jan and Hank remain a couple for the rest of Byrne's run (which ended up only being roughly a year or so).
However, originally, Byrne wanted to have them be a LOT more committed to each other! His initial pitch for the book was that Hank and Janet would have actually gotten secretly RE-MARRIED off-panel before he took over the book. It would have been revealed at some point. The idea was that Byrne figured fans would have less of a reaction if the marriage was just revealed to them as having already occurred.
Marvel, though, apparently told him no and instead Byrne had them just slowly get back together and left it in the background. When Roy and Dann Thomas took over the series from Byrne, they fairly quickly broke Janet and Hank up.
If they HAD gotten married again, you have to wonder how much that would have affected any number of stories over the last 25+ years.
Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed - Was there almost an Ant-Man movie in the 1980s? And what odd role did Honey, I Shrunk the Kids play in the whole situation?
Check back later for the final part of this week's Comic Book Legends Revealed!