Actually, that Ant-Man hasn't been confirmed anywhere to be O'Grady. In fact, I think Fraction mentioned at a convention that it wasn't O'Grady, but now he's saying "it might be, it might not be."
I see. Still, no end of superhero comics hand ended with the hero seemingly being killed and then the next issue all is revealed, so I'm reserving judgements.
O'Grady's OK but I'd rather see Scott Lang fill the role again. It looks like he's sticking around post Children's Crusade.
It does? Where? That comic comes out so slowly I often forget about it.
The subject came up once before, but I don't like the idea of Cassie Lang biting it. She's been a "young character" for quite a while from Fantastic Four to Young Avengers and I rarely see it as a good idea to ice off young blood for old blood. That's literally all DC Comics does, and it is a major turn off. It is a backward legacy.
It does look like AVX could be used to reverse M-Day, and if Scott Lang's resurrection was permanent, that would mean a damn lot of DISASSEMBLED from 2004 would have been erased, right down to Vision coming back (despite somehow having a soul in the afterlife in CHAOS WAR: DEAD AVENGERS). It is often an offhanded admission of failure when every element from a "THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING!" story or direction is reversed brick by brick and word by word; DC has done it a few times, under the DiDio era.
I voiced concern about Scott Lang living because then we would technically have about 5 characters in the books with the exact same power and the exact same power source; Hank Pym/Giant-Man, Eric O'Grady/Ant-Man, Scott Lang/Ant-Man, Cassie Lang/Stature, and technically Rita DeMara/Yellowjacket, who was revived during CHAOS WAR. This isn't counting the inevitability that Janet Van Dyne/Wasp will be revived the SECOND she is about to turn up in a movie (such as if "ANT-MAN" EVER gets into production, or if she gets a go in "THE AVENGERS 2" or something). DC once got a lot from a family of speedsters, but this is growing/shrinking; it isn't THAT useful, really. Growing to 60 feet tall merely means becoming exactly half as strong as The Hulk, and shrinking to ant-size is good for stealth and not much else. Pym gets the most play with it, since he was the originator and is a scientist. The others, though, are just cribbing off his notes. O'Grady, DeMara, and Cassie in particular aren't scientists at all.
Duplicating characters mindlessly has never, ever worked for long. INCREDIBLE HULK expanded the cast so that every member of Banner's supporting cast was a Hulk, and he got TWO SONS to boot, and the franchise was selling like dirt before the latest relaunch. Wolverine is selling at the lowest point in history after sprouting two kids. It will remain to be seen how long ASM can support two spin-off titles, even if they are good; the same could be said of Captain America and to a lessor degree, Fantastic Four. My point is that now isn't the time to make a Team Ant-Man, because they've never been popular enough to withstand that. What, every team in Marvel gains a PYM INCORPORATED size-changer, just like they may soon all get a BANNER INCORPORATED Hulk character? That's lame.
Cassie Lang has a legacy to live up to, and O'Grady has a redemption path. DeMara at least has the Yellowjacket name nobody wants right now. So I suppose four could be okay so long as no two characters have the same name. You can't really have two characters with the same codename; it gets confusing. Just ask the Conner Hawk Green Arrow. Kate Bishop may be CALLED Hawkeye, but nobody treats her seriously in that role. I imagine I am making more of DeMara than I should since I doubt anyone will use her again, but you still can't really have two people calling themselves Ant-Man at the same time.
I'll admit it may work, at least in terms of character although not in terms of power level, if Marvel really did treat it like a "family" of characters. Pym would be the sage and the mentor figure, with Scott Lang being probably the second in command version, the one closest to the originator due to experience. Lang would have a daughter who by now is a heroine and Avenger in her own right to have to mentor and show the ropes to, and accept (especially since once upon a time, growing was a strain on her heart). O'Grady would be the black sheep who nobody likes and who doesn't like being there, but who both sides may need. Rita DeMara would be the oddball since she hails from another dimension/timeline and even used to be an enemy, but she's also back from the dead so she has her own perspective. I imagine an old school writer like Mark Waid or Kurt Busiek could actually make that work. However, I am absolutely confident that nobody at Marvel is entertaining this idea and is so have a clue how to execute it properly. So right now I am figuring Cassie will be dead, Rita will never turn up again except in some MARVEL HANDBOOK update, Scott will mourn for approximately 2-3 issues of material before some writer has him act like he used to in 1989 and O'Grady may live because a-holes are easy and fun to write. But that's just me being cynical.
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