Comic review: Ant Man #1- Emasculated comic book reader meet emasculated comic book ‘hero’

Writer: Nick Spencer
Artist: Ramon Rosanos
Publisher: Marvel (Disney) Entertainment
Released: 7th January 2015


Ant-Man #1 is an utterly depressing read, from beginning to end.

Our very contemporary super hero is powerless, emasculated, weak and pathetic. Everything about him screams loser. He is an unemployed part-time father, a desperate nobody who lives to see his young daughter, when his ex-wife allows it, of course. There is nothing aspirational about his life. If a young kid read this book the last thing he would want to happen in his life would be to grow up and be anything like Ant Man. Nobody would want to be Ant Man, not even Ant Man himself.

That’s what puzzles me. Who is this book aimed at? Not kids, that’s for sure. Perhaps it’s going for the middle aged male who is bossed around by his ex-wife and told that he’s not allowed to see his kids anymore, but still has to pay for them, obviously?

But why would this victimised and downtrodden section of our broken western society want to read a comic book that reminds them of just how much they are being screwed over? Does a depressed middle aged man really want to spend his ‘escapist’ free time reading comic books where so-called ‘heroes’ have lives that are just as imprisoned as their own?

Scott (Ant-Man) Lang begs for employment, gets arrested because he’s a sucker for empty consumerism, gets divorced from his perfect wife, has to care for his sick daughter, fails at his career as superhero, begs for employment again, gets nagged at by his cropped haired feminist ex-wife, gets mocked by teenage superheroes, ends up stalking Tony Stark as he makes out with a hot young girl, gets a pity job and ends up living in a box, the only thing that a pathetic loser like Ant Man can afford to live in.

Seriously, I’ve never read anything more depressing in my entire life, and it’s all done in a jokey, carefree tone with Ant Man himself acting as the most pathetic narrator imaginable.

It’s a celebration of powerlessness, of being a man completely and utterly without balls, without pride, without dignity, without anything other than the sense of duty that he has to do what his ex-wife tells him to do and to look after his sick daughter, but only when she allows him the privilege of doing so.

I guess you could say that Ant Man is the comic book personification of the feminised liberal man of 2015. He’s a loser, knows that he’s a loser, and he’s happy to remain a loser.

This is not a superhero, it’s Marvel comics looking at its readers, and reflecting that image of their readers into their comic books. Writer Nick Spencer obviously thinks that his readers will identify with Ant Man, and that tells me that he sees his readers as middle aged, emasculated, unemployed, part time Dad’s with visitation hours and desperation dominating their utterly depressing lives. Hey, it’s the liberal dream I guess. So, in the final equation, this book wasn’t completely useless. It was illustrative, and told me everything I needed to know about how Marvel Comics views it’s remaining readership base.


Rating: 2/10 (flat art, depressing story and character)