SPOILER WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for Infinity Countdown Prime #1 by Gerry Duggan, Mike Deodato Jr., Frank Martin and Cory Petit, on sale now.


Things for Hank Pym have never been all that great. From his contentious turn as a domestic abuser back in the '80s to his often self-destructive grabs for glory and respect from his fellow Avengers, it really seems like Hank just can't win. And, well, that trend has kept up pretty constantly, even now.

Infinity War Countdown Prime #1 adds yet another chapter in the tragic comedy that is the once and future Ant-Man's life. But to really understand what that means, and where things might be going, you've got to take a look back at just where the last three years have taken him.

In the Name of the Father

The modern (read: post-2015) life and times of Hank Pym can be charted back to Rage of Ultron, an original graphic novel by Rick Remender, Jerome Opena and Pepe Laraz which took a new look at the relationship between Hank and one of his most famous (and famously complicated) creations: Ultron.

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Ultron, having reached a fever pitch in his token nihilism about humanity and his otherwise unsalvageable relationship with Hank, winds up using his father's compassion for him to literally merge them into one physical entity, half man and half machine. The Avengers consider this Hank's death, despite the fact he is still, essentially, half of Ultron's consciousness.

Things only proceeded to get more complicated when the Hank-and-Ultron fusion returned to reunite with his (its?) ex-wife Jan in Uncanny Avengers by Gerry Duggan and Ryan Stegman. Here, he claimed to have beaten out the Ultron part of his consciousness and, despite all outward appearances, had become Hank once more.

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Of course, things are never that simple, and the entire situation is eventually revealed to be a ruse perpetrated by the Ultron portion of Hank's mind to lure his team into a trap. The resulting fight ends with the Uncanny Avengers team forced to fuse the metal in Hank Ultron's body into the metal of a spaceship and send the ship rocketing in the sun.

Despite all pulp action connotations, the moment manages to be genuinely gut wrenching, leaning into the unstable and manipulative angle that's formed a cornerstone of the Ultron Pym character since its inception. You can never really tell just which side you're dealing with when he's on the page, and making the wrong choice about what to believe or disbelieve could quite literally cost people their lives.

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Things understandably went pretty quiet in the world of Ultron Pym after that, considering as far as anyone was concerned he had very recently been totally destroyed, incinerated in the sun -- but that all changed with the dawn of Secret Empire.

Inexplicably, following the springing of Hydra Cap's multi-layered trap to overthrow the US government, it was revealed that not only had Ultron Pym survived his one-way trip into the sun, he'd returned to Earth some time ago.

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He had established a veritable country for himself up in the furthest reaches of the frozen north and populated it with a literal army of Ultron clones. The army, however, seemed entirely uninterested in actually invading, instead Ultron Pym found a piece of shattered Cosmic Cube and used it to draw the waring Avengers factions in for a...well, tea party.

It was awkward, but peaceful in the long run and at the end of the day, just about everyone went about their business afterward as if there wasn't an overwhelming population of killer robots let by a megalomaniac hanging over them like a guillotine waiting to fall.

...And, strangely enough, nothing bad ever happened. In the wake of Secret Empire both Ultron Pym and his nation of clones were, apparently completely forgotten.

The Return, Part 2

This is where Infinity Countdown Prime comes in. While it doesn't pick up from where we last saw Ultron Pym, it does kick off a new role for him. Apparently, he's been traveling the cosmos on the hunt for the Infinity Stones, which seems to be quite en vogue in the Marvel Universe right now. We join him just as he hits the jackpot, cornering and murdering Magus, the evil twin of Adam Warlock, and claiming the Soul Stone for himself.

Here, something rather interesting happens -- when Ultron Pym takes the stone in his hand, there's a huge flash and a shift of some kind. He's knocked askew for a second, but then rights himself as if nothing happened -- but then, we see, tiny and contained within the stone, Hank Pym. But this is not the half-robotic monstrosity that we've been dealing with for the last three or so years. This is the normal, completely human version of the character.

Now, some background on just what the Soul Stone can do, at last traditionally. Unlike the rest of its Infinity Stone cousins, the Soul Stone has actually been shown to have something of a sentient will in and of itself. It is capable of extracting living souls and pulling them into itself, forcing them to live in a "soul world" from which they can't escape. By the looks of things, it seems like his contact with the Soul Stone actually pulled out Ultron Pym's soul, just like that. But thanks to his extremely unusual circumstances, the only "soul" available for extraction was Hank's -- the man, rather than the machine.

To make things even more complicated, Soul Hank isn't alone in the stone. He's trapped inside with an aged version of Gamora who claims to have been locked away as well. Oh, and his body is still up and moving around, still wearing part of his face, and still wielding the stone.

So, what any of this means is pretty wildly up for debate as things stand now -- but whatever happens, it looks like there are some more big moves for Ultron Pym on the immediate horizon...and maybe even a silver lining for the nightmare he's been trapped in for so long.

If -- and it's a pretty big "if" right now -- the chips fall the right way, we could be looking at an honest return of Hank Pym the hero, rather than Hank Pym the monster in the very near future.