Character Distillation: Henry Pym

(Grr, missed a day of blogging again. This time, it's completely my fault, as I had time but completely forgot about it.)

So there are some cases where a character's basic nature is harder to figure out than others. Henry Pym is one of those cases. Why? Because the character is inconsistently depicted. Keeping that in mind, it's still possible to figure out the character's core, and here's my conclusion as to what it is:

1. Henry Pym is a genius, and has made many scientific advancements, most particularly Pym particles and Ultron. (Way to go, Dr. Pym!)
2. Nobody really cares about the character, so each writer does something completely different with him-and it's usually not nice.

Sure, you can say all kinds of stuff about his mental instabilities and whatnot, but the authors do whatever the heck they want with him, and it's just about never nice. Case in point: When the character actually gets to do some good stuff in recent comics, it's because he's been replaced by a Skrull. (Er, scroll down a bit further. The first post, with a Skrull Pym, has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's the second comic on that page with a Skrull Pym that concerns this post. Also note that with the fact that the Skrull replacing Pym may be a female Skrull, and the fact that a Skrull delicacy that unveiled Skrull Pym was strawberries mixed with pickles, my sister concluded that Tigra had somehow impregnated Skrull Pym. Admittedly, my sister is crazy, but that's pretty funny.)

Anyway, they'll always get away with doing this kind of crud to Henry Pym, because he's never been more than a supporting character that no one really knows what to do with. (Heck, even Lee and Kirby didn't know what to do with him, and they created him.) He goes from shrinking powers to growing powers within a single issue of his first appearance, he has periods of mental instability, he's a wife-beater, his marriage is fixed, his marriage is ruined, he's replaced by a Skrull, and oh yeah, he built an insane robot that wants to slaughter humanity like so many cockroaches.

Just kill the poor guy already, and move on to something more interesting. It's not like it'll make things worse for him.