I See Posts Before My Eyes

wwprice1 asked: What do you think is the difference between Hank slapping Jan and Peter slapping Mary Jane during the Clone Saga? In Hank's case, it gets drudged back up consistently, while in Peter's case, it was only mentioned once or twice immediately after it happened and never after that point. The cases are pretty similar--Hank was suffering a nervous breakdown and Peter probably had some kind of psychotic break from learning he was(n't) the clone. Is it just because Spidey is more popular?

But according to Jim Shooter (who wrote it), it WASN’T supposed to have been explicitly about striking Jan

brevoortformspring:

I think it’s a matter of context.

Hank’s story is explicitly about him striking Jan. There are other components to it, but it’s that act that finishes him as an Avenger, more than any staged attack on the team. Whereas Spidey striking MJ was incidental—it was something that happened on the fly in the context of a larger situation, and the story wasn’t really about that at all.

More crucially, Spider-Man at that point had been in dozens of strong, memorable stories. Whereas Hank, for all his long tenure as a super hero, really hadn’t. So that story became his defining moment in a way that it didn’t and couldn’t for Spider-Man. And that’s why it stuck to him—it was the first thing anybody brought up when his name got mentioned in any context.

In that story (issue 213, I think), there is a scene in which Hank is supposed to have accidentally struck Jan while throwing his hands up in despair and frustration—making a sort of “get away from me” gesture while not looking at her.  Bob Hall, who had been taught by John Buscema to always go for the most extreme action, turned that into a right cross!  There was no time to have it redrawn, which, to this day has caused the tragic story of Hank Pym to be known as the “wife-beater” story.

Jim Shooter, “Hank Pym was not a wife-beater”

So all this tsuris Hank has been put through was as a result of an overly-dramatized moment. Surely still something he should (and I’m sure, would) feel bad about, but an accident, and not a deliberate act, clouded by a breakdown or not.  Two very different moments, with (I think) equally reasonable repercussions, both short and long-term.

It’s a vicious cycle - Someone tries to vindicate Hank, or more precisely, write him so he takes his place as one of the preeminent scientists of the MU.  Dan Slott did this the most recently, and the most expertly, even folding in his past breakups with sanity.

Then someone comes along and insists The Slap Hear Round The World get addressed, and he’s knocked right back to the mid-card again.