Hank Pym - The Yellowjacket

On the Comics Curmudgeon site one day, another frequent poster there noticed my yellojkt signature and was honored to be in the presence of the one and only Hank Pym. I had never heard of Hank Pym and went googling to find that Hank was among other things a Marvel superhero named Yellowjacket. He also goes by Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Goliath or even sans alter ego. Scott Tipton has an enormously entertaining and obsessively detailed history of Yellowjacket and his other identities here. Heck, Yellowjacket even has his own Wikipedia entry.

I read a lot of comics when I was a kid. My parents would stop at a convenience store and I would beg for a superhero comic, but they would only let me get the Scrooge McDuck type Disney comics. Finally, when I was in first grade, I went to the Seven-Eleven and bought a Superman (issue #242 if my web source is correct). I went to a vacant lot and read it three times before I snuck it into the house. I was hooked.

The problem was that I became a fan of DC comics which included great heroes like Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and more, but that in the early seventies all the comics buzz was at Marvel which had Spiderman, The (Uncanny) X-Men, The Fantastic Four, Hulk, and the Avengers.

I saw the Avengers as a cheap rip-off of the much more prestigious Justice Leage of America over at DC. Hawkeye was a poor man's Green Arrow. Tony Stark was Bruce Wayne with a bad ticker. Scarlett Witch was nowhere near as sexy as Black Canary. And so on.

Yellowjacket was an Avenger. One whose career ended in disgrace in a long convoluted soap-opera-ish story arc that is the trademark of Marvel comics. My comic company snobbery had blinded me to the existence of my future namesake. I had long adopted the yellojkt persona well before I knew there was a superhero of the same name.

After I graduated from college, my mom gave me the "Clean out the closet" ultimatum and my comic collection got liquidated. They were in terrible shape since an eight year old knows nothing about acid free backer paper and clear covers. None of them were particularly collectible anyway.

I haven't bought a comic book since I tried to cash in on the "new" Superman craze several years ago. The "Marvelization" of comics is complete. All the superheroes have incredibly complicated storylines that are impossible to follow if you aren't showing up at your local comics store every Wednesday for the new releases.

I still read them when I am killing time at the mall in Waldenbooks Borders Express. Their selection of comic books is thin and disorganized. Meanwhile, my teenage son and his peers are crowding the manga aisle to read translations of black and white Japanese comics from back to front. If I were a comic publisher I would fear the losing of a generation to anime and manga. I am one of the last of a generation that read comics from when they could read.

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