M028--Ant-Man by Green-Mamba on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Ant-Man
Real Name: Hank Pym
First Appearance: Tales to Astonish #27 (January 1962)

One of the premier scientific minds of the world, Hank Pym and his wife Janet had been working at SHIELD for years prior to Nick Fury taking over and starting the Avenger initiative. Pym was a veteran of Project: PEGASUS, which is where he first realized the beginnings of what would become his life's work--the miraculous "Pym Particle," a subatomic particle that, when tapped into, could change the space between molecules, from shrinking objects to growing them. To this end he and his wife had worked at SHIELD perfecting what was known internally as the "Ant-Man" suit, a pressurized suit akin to a space or diving suit that could allow a person to safely shrink using the Pym Particle process. Hank Pym himself was the foremost expert of using this suit to perform extended "dives" into the shrunken world to see how to best utilize this new perspective.

When Nick Fury took over SHIELD he contacted Pym about utilizing the Ant-Man suit as a defensive weapon as a part of his Avenger initiative. Fearing that Fury would take his department away from him and put the Pym Particle process into the hands of less than savory individuals, Pym reluctantly agreed to join the first initiative, becoming a founding member of the new Avengers team. That said, the Ant-Man suit, was not really built to be a weapon, and Pym did his best to stay out of the action--violence unnerved him to begin with. To help get Fury off of his back Pym got harder to work on one of his applications for the Pym Particles he had been working on prior to the Avengers initiative--he thought Nick Fury's new SHIELD might be impressed by his research into quantum computing and its application in the development in artificial intelligence.

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My interpretation has the usage of Pym Particles on organic matter to be highly, highly dangerous and the shrunken world to be a very hostile environment for anything significantly shrunken, so the suit is a necessity. I kind of imagine he works together with a team at SHIELD to monitor him for his "ant-walks," or "dives," like an astronaut. I see him as more an explorer than a superhero.

So that's what really drove my design here--it's heavily based on space suits--it's big, bulky, and looks hard to move around in. I also wanted it to be recognizably "Ant-Man" without just repeating what the MCU had done, so I deliberately saved the original Ant-Man circle emblem design on his chest and belt, and even sort of got some blue-ish gloves and "shorts." I had originally tried a more bubble helm type look with the traditional Ant-Man headgear underneath but it proved to be too difficult to see and didn't read very well, so I stuck with a more MCU esque helmet, albeit scaled up to space helmet level. The backpack was a late addition to the design--I wondered if perhaps he would need extra oxygen shrunken down to take with him so his lungs could get the appropriate level of oxygen to function. I may have thought about the actual physics behind shrinking too much.

I imagine him and his wife as being older, middle aged compared to the other Avengers perhaps. Older than they are depicted in the comics but not retirement age like in the MCU.

I think I might just do one of these Marvel characters a week, two was getting too hectic and wasn't affording me time to work on other things.