"I'm inclined to agree with Paulo.  At the time, that one panel slap might not have been seen as wife beating.  It was only after the fact that it was realized this was very bad."

No, it was intended. I don't have access to the issue but if someone could post the panels where Jan's blackeye is revealed to the rest of the Avengers I would appreciate it. It clearly indicates that this was an incident of domestic abuse. The other Avengers are so shocked and ashamed for Hank that they are left speechless.

I agree with you both that it is a storyline that should never have made it past the editors desk, though.

QUOTE: I agree with you both that it is a storyline that should never have made it past the editors desk, though.

Yes, I think we can all agree that it's a lousy way to treat a character.

Yeah. When he first showed up as Yellow Jacket he acted like a huge jerk and in the course of it told the Avengers that he had KILLED Hank Pym. (From a certain point of view).

Wasp was the only one who figured out it was him.

She agreed to marry him. The Avengers all went nuts trying to figure out why she didn't seem upset about Hank getting killed and worse being willing to marry his murderer.

Eventually she reveals that yellow Jacket is Hank with amnesia who is acting so strangely because he accidently inhaled some toxic fumes. She apparently played along with him for fear that the shock of recovering his memory too quickly would be harmful.

It was one hell of a weird story.

Well a lot of the team wanted to sock his lights out, tear his mask off, and put him on trial but Jan wouldn't let them so they just stared on slack jawed, fighting their nausea and disorientation.

(Sort of like I did while watching the end of Spider-Man 3.)

It was kind of a suspension of disbelief lubricated story where the naturally occuring friction of the situation was kind of glossed over to keep the plot gears turning and keep the reader off balance.

It was like one of those freaky teaser Superman covers where having lost a bet with Batman he HAS to eat Pete Ross's brain with a spoon and throw Lana Lang into a live volcano because if he doesn't he'll be the laughing stock of Gotham city! You just roll with it and hope it either works out to make sense in the end or turns out to be a dream sequence or something.

Luckily it turned out that Yellow Jacket was a temporary amnesia psychosis state brought on by fumes and no one got tied to a rail road track. Plus I think Marvel needed to show Yellow Jacket handing out a beating on some of the Avengers so people would be impressed with his shocking debut before they revealed he was really just Hank Pym trippin' and a wedding plot in progress.

Sadly this, the Ultron Debacle, and the Oh God I can never shrink again, and "Here Hawkeye...you be Goliath for a while" stuff  all sort of combines with "Hank Pym manipulative, wife beating, robot jobbing idiot" and the later "Hank Pym..sort of child kidnapper" and "Hank Pym in jail" to paint a picture of a real screwed up  barely functional ultra-bipolar pretending to be a superhero sometimes( I guess during the maniacal state) and flaking out and hating himself the rest of the time. Apparently some people, having smelled the irresistable stink of that particular turd,  keep digging it up from where better writers have buried it.

That's some strange stuff.  I've got to read these stories now if for nothing else than out of morbid curiosity.

(And just the end?)

Well Paulo the End of SM3 was so WRONG and insanely mishandled that it blew the rest of the movie's flaws away. Spoiler:Talking to the lesser bad guy for ten minutes while he wines about not really being a bad guy and forgiving him for killing Uncle Ben by accident...sort of...while your recently reformed best friend (who saved your life and your estranged terrorized girlfriend's at the cost of his own, after you fed him his own grenade and convinced him that his daddy never loved him AFTER whipping his ass in his own house because he wouldn't quit screwing with you) is dying in your really fightened girlriend's arms ....that HAS to gorssly violate some kind of heroic ...code of...etiquette or something. It just has to.