During the 1980s, I started, but never finished the story of Henry Pym's fall from and return to grace in the pages of THE AVENGERS. I finally started revisiting that story and catching up with what I had missed when I stopped following THE AVENGERS in the mid-1980s.
It seems like during a period from the late 1970s and early 1980s, DC and Marvel were cribbing some ideas from each other in terms of story ideas for Barry Allen (the Flash) and Henry Pym (Ant Man, Giant Man, Goliath, Yellowjacket). Barry and Henry seemed to have many story and character beats in common.
1. Both were the resident scientists on their respective teams, the Justice League and the Avengers.
2. Both were married men (among the very few on their teams at the time).
3. Both were Silver Age stalwarts who had been members of their respective teams from the beginning.
4. Both began to see their relationships with their wives change in dramatic ways: Barry suffered Iris being murdered by the Reverse Flash, while Hank became a domestic abuser who struck Janet.
5. Both committed acts that brought them under scrutiny by their fellow superheroes and saw them temporarily booted from their teams: Barry resigned from the Justice League while he was on trial for the death of the Reverse Flash, and Hank was booted from the Avengers due to his personal and legal problems (the latter of which were masterminded by his archenemy Egghead). It would be many years before Barry rejoined the Justice League (not until well after his return from a two-decade "death") and Hank rejoined the Avengers (he was working with them again before the 80s were over, but many more years would pass before he became a full-time, costumed member of the team again).
6. Both saw the trajectories of their previously stable stories drastically and permanently altered by story developments in the late 1970s and early 1980s, whose echoes are still heard today more than forty years later.
Do you think the writers of Barry's and Hank's stories at DC and Marvel during the late 1970s and 1980s were taking cues from each other and trying to up the ante with both of these characters?
Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)