Hank Pym: The Worst Avenger Ever (duh)

Honestly, I almost didn’t even want to do this one because it’s really kind of obvious and therefore not as much fun as Forge or Batman, but I’m a “need to complete the series” kind of guy.

I thought about if maybe this could be Doctor Druid because he broke up the team and led to Steve Rogers needing half the Fantastic Four to field a squad. I thought about Quicksilver since he’s betrayed the team plenty of times and really caused House of M and the de-powering of all this mutants. Even Iron Man killed a few second stringers during The Crossing.

But no, at the end of the day, whether it’s Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Goliath, Yellowjacket or The Wasp, Hank Pym will always be the worst Avenger ever.

As with my previous two forays into this line of thinking, I must remind when I say “worst ever” I’m not referring to a bad character, I’m saying that in the world of fiction in which these stories take place, this person has had the least success and most failure as a member of their given team. Hank Pym is not a bad character; I rather enjoy him. Honestly though, being pretty bad at being a super hero is a big part of why Hank Pym occupies a unique place in the Marvel Universe and guys from Steve Englehart to Kurt Busiek to Mark Millar to Dan Slott to Christos Gage have been able to get mileage out of him with some good stories.

As a square-jawed Silver Age hero who didn’t even really have his own Marvel style “feet of clay” foible aside from yelling at his girlfriend a lot, Ant-Man was ok, but never really took off (hence why he switched identities so often, I figure). He started to flourish—to a degree—when writers like Roy Thomas started to explore the idea of Hank Pym being a scientist who didn’t really like being a super hero but did it to appease The Wasp. Subsequent folks like Roger Stern and Jim Shooter continued to up the ante as far as Pym not only chafing at his role as an Avenger, but being pretty bad at it; some have argued the character became damaged goods, but I think he just became more and more interesting, and gave the creators of today like Slott and Gage that much more to work with crafting his quests for redemption and frequent failures along the way.

Too many super heroes are perfect or at least win in the end despite hard luck along the way; Hank Pym frequently loses, and he’s a character with more depth for it.

However, he’s still the worst Avenger ever by far, and rather than drone on at length, I’m just gonna bullet point this one…

-First and foremost, of course, Hank created Ultron—check out recent episodes of the awesome Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes! cartoon to see this story re-imagined—possibly the Avengers’ greatest foe and at the very least a genocidal killer robot who has slaughtered thousands. Intending to create a harmless robot to help him around the lab—and apparently never having read or seen any sci-fi books or movies involving artificial intelligence ever despite being a total nerd—Pym uploaded his own brain patterns into an indestructible shell, ignoring the fact that he was deeply screwed up to the point where his best friends were ants. Ultron turned on his creator—of course—and would spend the next several decades trying to kill his dad and his friends, attempting to romance his “mother” The Wasp, creating other robots to try and kill his “parents” and their friends, razing countries, trying to conquer the galaxy, and so on and so forth.

-Not quite as drastic, during another experiment—Hank Pym should never be allowed near a lab—our hero inhaled chemicals that made him go schizophrenic and become the obnoxious Yellowjacket, claiming he had killed Goliath and demanding The Wasp marry him. Jan knew the score and went along with the wedding, since she wanted one—which is pretty terrible—and then Hank reverted to normal, living in matrimonial bliss with a woman he apparently did really want to marry and who knew he’d only be her husband if he was suffering from a brain disorder.

-Another time, Ultron brainwashed Hank and he attacked the Avengers as Ant-Man. Actually, Ultron brainwashed him a lot.

-Trying to show off on a mission, Hank attacks a defeated foe from behind, making the Avengers look like total jerks in front of the world. Court-martialed by Captain America, Hank attempts to redeem himself by building a killer robot to attack the Avengers—essentially his go-to Plan B—with the idea that he’d save the day. He strikes his wife when she discovered what he’s up to, but then can’t defeat the robot he made, endangering all his teammates once more in the process, and requiring Wasp to rescue him; they booted him off the team and into jail, she divorced him.

-Hank and Jan would eventually reconcile years later, but when their relationship hit the skids again, he had a fling with a pretty young co-ed who turned out to be a Skrull and made him one of the first heroes to be kidnapped and replaced during the road to Secret Invasion—classic Pym!

-Proving that he had indeed done a pretty great job studying the guy he’d be posing as, the Skrull who acted as Yellowjacket helped create—what else—a killer robot version of Thor who killed the real Hank’s old buddy Bill Foster. He also knocks up Tigra and then implants Wasp with a Skrull weapon that takes her life during the final battle of the war with the aliens. The true Hank returns to Earth to learn that a guy who was supposed to be him—basically an alien Ultron—got his best friend and ex-wife killed all because he was thinking with his little Goliath.

-One last one: Ultron created The Vision, eventual hero and Avenger, meaning Hank at least indirectly did something good, right? Wrong. The Vision romanced and married The Scarlet Witch, they had fake magic babies, he got deprogrammed and lost his emotions, she slowly went nuts and caused the events of Avengers Disassembled, leading to the deaths of Scott Lang and Hawkeye as well as the disbanding of the team—all kinda sorta on Hank Pym’s head, y’know?

Lately, Hank has been doing a lot better as the founder of Avengers Academy—one of the best books on the market—but really it’s just a matter of time before something goes horribly wrong. Why?

Because Hank Pym is the worst Avenger ever—and I hope he never changes.

Batman: The Worst Justice Leaguer Ever

So the Justice League is front and center of all the big news coming out of DC the last couple days, with Geoff Johns and Jim Lee teaming up to make it the flagship book of a re-launched line. Part of the line-up has been revealed and it’s looking pretty exciting—if lacking in Martians—but there are still many spots to be filled.

I’m a total sucker for when iconic teams like the League or the Avengers have their recruiting drives as I’m totally a fantasy football player at heart who loves to mix and match my dream rosters. Don’t get me wrong; I get just as frustrated as the next nerd when the team formation part of a new series drags on or feels forced, but you better believe I’ll always be back for the next round regardless because I’m a junkie that way.

All that said, since the group seems to still be in the process of getting finalized and Kiel already wrote his open letter to Geoff and Jim, I feel it’s my responsibility to do my due diligence and speak to the characters themselves with a little warning based on careful research:

Guys—and Wonder Woman—you should totally not let Batman on the Justice League.

Ok, ok, all you angry fans out there just settle down a minute and hear what I have to say. I’m not saying Batman is not an awesome character and I’m not saying from your and my point of view a Justice League book with him in it isn’t better for his presence; I’m simply warning the heroes of the DC Universe that from a purely in-story standpoint, Batman is a fucking menace to his allies.

I don’t state this lightly, but as far as I can tell, Batman is the worst Justice Leaguer of all-time.

Now as with Forge a few weeks back I’m not saying Batman is lame or that he sucks—even I, the guy who thinks Star Wars was only so-so, know better than that—simply that if we’re going by performance review, nobody is a bigger liability to the Justice League than the Dark Knight. Allow me to state my case…

As far as the Silver Age goes, Batman gets a pass. Really nobody was a bad Justice Leaguer during most of the Silver Age because it was near impossible to be. One of the hallmarks of classic Gardner Fox era JLA stories was that each character, despite being unique in terms of name and appearance, could all battle the same obstacles on a fairly even playing field. Every bad guy had Kryptonite or yellow paint handy to neutralize Superman and Green Lantern as easily as The Atom or Hawkman and Green Arrow had plenty of heat-seeking or mind-scrambling arrows to put him on par with The Martian Manhunter when he needed to be. The totally human Batman standing side-by-side with Olympian demigoddesses and the Fastest Man Alive wasn’t a problem at all.

The first real knock against Batman came at the end of the 60’s in Justice League of America #77 and it wasn’t really his fault directly, but I still hold him responsible. Posing as “ordinary guy” John Doe, The Joker poisons the mind of JLA mascot Snapper Carr against his super friends, giving him an inferiority complex that leads him to give away the location of the Secret Sanctuary. The League thwarts the villain and moves into a fancy satellite up in outer space, but poor Snapper resigns his honorary membership in shame, later going on to suffer the indignity of joining the Blasters—NOTE: I have never actually read the Blasters comic and given that Peter David wrote it, it’s probably awesome—and getting his hands chopped off before finding eventual redemption as Hourman’s buddy and the mentor to Young Justice with an awesome t-shirt collection. Still, why were the teenage years of the League’s mascot ruined? Because Batman pissed off The Joker.

Batman’s first overt action against the Justice League didn’t come until he was getting into one of his moody periods in 1983. Bats gets pissy about the League not helping him be all crazy and vigilante-like when he wants to storm the war-torn Eastern European country of Markovia and rescue his buddy Lucius Fox from a villain, so he storms off in a huff and forms his own team, the Outsiders, to go break international law. To add insult to injury, he gets two dudes who turned the League down, Black Lightning and Metamorpho, to join his group of cool kids, then probably gives Firestorm a swirly and pops out back to smoke a cigarette. With that irresponsible lout Batman having thumbed his nose at it, suddenly the Justice League isn’t the hip place to be any more and they go from beating down Darkseid to getting their asses handed to them by one-offs like Paragon (a Kurt Busiek creation who is one of the most underutilized awesome villains ever). A year after the Bat Bailout, the League gets beat down in a war with the Martians and almost all the established members take off, paving the way for Vibe, Vixen, Gypsy and Steel.

Yes, that’s right: Justice League Detroit is Batman’s fault.

The Detroit era Justice League had its unique charm and Gerry Conway took some bold risks that resulted in solid stories, but the DC Universe was no doubt a pretty terrifying place when the supposed first line of defense against evil had a break dancing kid in parachute pants front and center plus Aquaman as the inspirational leader (sorry Kiel).

But that’s ok, because being a generous and benevolent sort, none other than Batman returned in Justice League of America #250, recognizing a deficiency in training and experience on his former team and vowing to help them become more formidable and giving the world the heroes it needed.

He left about six issues later with no real explanation and then half the team got murdered by Professor Ivo.

Apparently not feeling any remorse for breaking his promise to guide a new generation of impressionable youngsters to anything other than grisly death or survivor’s guilt, Batman was back in the fold a few months later as a founding member of what would become Justice League International. He was pretty grouchy and spent most of his tenure insulting everybody around him, but that was the general tone, so you can’t really blame him. You probably could blame him for giving Guy Gardner, one of the team’s biggest guns, brain damage by punching him in the face and rendering him virtually useless for a good period, but—nah, y’know what, I’m totally gonna blame him for that. Classic scene or not, that’s just irresponsible, sir!

After incapacitating poor Guy, Batman came and went as he pleased when it came to the JLI for a year or so before abandoning the group altogether. He’d stay away for a good half decade once more this time while the team he helped start stopped and started a bunch of times, getting several members killed or maimed along the way. In the midst of it, Bane broke Bruce Wayne’s back for a bit, perhaps not out of ambition as we all suspected, but maybe as karma for the Silver Sorceress or Ice? Ok, maybe not.

Until the last few years, Batman—the Bruce Wayne variety—has been more or less a fixture on the Justice League since JLA kicked off in 1997. He’s had some truly kick ass moments, from defeating the White Martians near singlehandedly to helping kill Darkseid in the future to knocking out Prometheus. He has also nearly gotten his teammates and sometimes the entire superhuman community wiped out on more than one occasion due to his paranoia and shoddy security.

First off you had Mark Waid’s excellent Tower of Babel storyline that ran in JLA #43-46. Ra’s al Ghul distracts Batman by snatching his parents’ corpses and dangles them above a Lazarus Pit then has his daughter grab some contingency plans he had lying around to horribly defeat and torture each member of the Justice League just in case they turn evil. Ra’s and his goons proceed to light Martian Manhunter on fire, use fear toxin to make Aquaman terrified of water, freeze Plastic Man and then smash him with a hammer, blind Green Lantern, trap Wonder Woman in a never-ending virtual reality battle sequence, shot Flash in the neck with a bullet that makes him experience seizures that takes up seconds but feel like they last months, and finally, poison Superman with Red Kryptonite.

Batman designed all this stuff by cozying up to his teammates and learning their secrets through the sinister means of friendship. Sure, I’ve done the same thing to most of my pals—TJ, your weakness involves wine coolers and laser tag—but they’re not super heroes and I’d probably only write stuff on them while they’re drunk or whatever, not shatter them into tiny pieces with a mallet. Hopefully Wally West has never invited Bruce Wayne to a barbeque with his family ever.

So about five years after the Ra’s al Ghul unpleasantness and Batman had been allowed back into the League—I’m pretty sure without apologizing—he decides it would be a swell idea to build a super spy satellite called Brother MK1 to keep tabs on all metahuman heroes and villains, once again, just in case. Granted this was a response to Bats learning he had been mind wiped by his League buddies back in the Silver Age after he saw them erase Doctor Light’s memories—after reading this article, can you blame them?—but still, at one point does a dude learn that his doomsday protocols are all destined for horrific failure?

Case in point: Brother MK1 gains sentience via Alexander Luthor, hooks up with Maxwell Lord and Checkmate, renames itself Brother Eye, creates an army of OMACs, gets poor former Leaguer Rocket Red killed, nearly razes Themysceira and commits all sorts of other atrocities before Batman finally cleans up his mess by leading a team of heroes into outer space and then abandoning the young Blue Beetle out there after he saves the day. Oh, did I mention that Batman was one of several DC heroes to dismiss prior Blue Beetle—and his former JLI teammate—Ted Kord when he got suspicious about Checkmate, leading to him getting shot in the head by Lord? Yeah, so did Superman, but he was at least polite about it.

So that’s Bruce Wayne’s track record as a member of the Justice League; abandons the team when he feels like it, gets others killed or injured, cooks up contingency plans to kill or injure those he hasn’t already, and is pretty much always a jerk. He’ll save your ass against White Martians, but he will also likely poison you without meaning to at some point.

For the record, Dick Grayson has not gotten anybody killed or enacted a single scorched earth scenario since he’s been the League’s Batman. Neither has Wally West or Kyle Rayner—have I mentioned lately they should be on the team?

So fellow readers, while we all love Batman, for the sake of the other characters we care about, I do hope you understand why the worst Justice Leaguer ever should be kept as far away from that team as possible—I mean, except for the fact that the book is way more awesome when he’s inadvertently nearly getting his pals killed.

Forge: The Worst X-Man Ever

The title of this post implies far more disdain for the character Forge than I actually have.

Did it annoy me when he constantly said “Plasma coil charged” as my buddy Jordan and I played X-Men: Mutant Academy 2 in college? A bit. Despite Chris Claremont’s best efforts do I remain more or less unconvinced that his mutant power of being able to build cool stuff is of any use in actual combat situations? For the most part. Do I feel that fringed cowboy boots and a ponytail clash with the standard blue and gold X-Men uniform? Y’know what, jury’s out on that one.

But ultimately, I don’t have strong feelings towards Forge, and those I do have tend towards thinking he’s not a bad character with some good stories to his credit—he was awesome in Lifedeath and was actually quite a stud in my beloved Muir Island Saga—and untapped potential for somebody with a good idea.

However, simply observing objectively, he is the worst X-Man of all-time in terms of damage done to the team. Forge makes Dark Phoenix look like a drunk girl who knocked over a drink and then passed out as far as being a plague upon his own allies.

Let’s examine (and to be nice I’m even going to jump right over the part where his entire platoon died in Vietnam and his response was to go nuts, order a bombing of the area, and use a Cheyenne spell to unwittingly unleash The Adversary—I’m glossing over that):

After Tony Stark stopped making weapons for S.H.I.E.L.D. because he was a on a peace kick, Forge subbed in and designed some goodies including a power neutralizing thing meant to be used on Dire Wraiths but that Henry Peter Gyrich co-opted to de-power mutants with. To his credit, Forge wasn’t pleased with this decision—y’know, being a mutant and all—but his good intentions didn’t help Storm when she got zapped by the device trying to protect Rogue and lost her powers as a result. Forge actually attempted to romance the now former X-Man and did a decent job of it until she realized it was kinda his fault she lost her powers. Whoops.

Forge did a decent job making amends in the war with the Wraiths and even got Storm her powers back, but then that pesky Adversary, the Native American god of evil he had freed awhile back—said I wasn’t going to mention it, but just realized it’s kind of crucial—showed up to try and destroy the world. Fortunately Forge had a solution: He could reverse the spell and banish The Adversary, he just needed nine people to sacrifice their lives, and wouldn’t you know it, there were eight X-Men and Madelyne Pryor.

So yeah, Forge totally killed the X-Men. They got better, but it bears repeating: Of all the enemies the X-Men have faced over the years, only one has ever killed all of them and it was Forge.

Being the forgiving types, after they came back from the dead, the X-Men let Forge join the team, but since he wasn’t much good in a fight other than to get them killed or take away their powers, they smartly relegated him to “Mansion Support Staff”—the way you let the scrawny kid be the mascot—where he promptly blew his one responsibility and allowed Professor X and Moira MacTaggert to be captured by Magneto, who just wrenched the room they were in into space while our buddy was out for a stroll.

Years later, long after leaving the X-Men and getting dumped by Storm then Mystique then Mystique again, Forge popped back up as a mentor to some of Xavier’s younger students, like Surge, and the go-to tech guy for the team; it was honestly a great and useful role for him. Of course the poor bastard still couldn’t catch a break and was attacked by Nimrod, who revealed an alternate reality Forge had created him; the New X-Men saved our guy, but in the process he sent Nimrod back in time to menace the X-Men in the first place, creating one of their deadliest foes essentially twice (I think; it was a rad story, but truth be told I got confused at parts).

Somewhat understandably, Forge seemed to want to be left alone after this, probably realizing he was as much a danger to the X-Men as they were to him, but Bishop needed his time machine, so he gave him a concussion and took off with it. After this, our boy went a bit batty and locked himself in his house (literally).

Most recently, a completely unhinged Forge—at least partially round the bend because Storm married The Black Panther—came up with a plan to save the world from an other-dimensional invasion by sending the X-Men on a suicide mission; when they turned down that offer, he nearly blew up the planet by opening a portal, but fortunately Beast shot a big laser through it and ended the invasion threat. There was a big explosion afterward and Forge may or may not have died in what would have been possibly the ultimate mercy killing for both him and the X-Men.

In short: took away Storm’s powers, brought a ridiculously powerful bad guy to Earth, killed the X-Men, got Professor X kidnapped, created another ridiculously powerful bad guy, allowed Bishop to pursue Cable and the potential mutant messiah through time by not paying attention, tried to kill the X-Men again, then nearly destroyed the world before getting killed in an explosion.

Did I mention he killed the X-Men?

Forge: A snappy dresser, but seriously, the worst X-Man ever.