Saturday, July 25, 2015
Ant-Man: A Short Lesson - P. A. Nolte
1/ Taskmaster, bursting through some double doors, running into a hall, frantically pressing the trigger in his hand.
Ant-Man (Caption): My first few months in costume, I kept coming across this guy named Taskmaster.
Ant-Man (Caption): He's a muscle mimic with eidetic memory.
Taskmaster: C'mon, dammit! Lousy--
2/ Ant-Man appears in front of him, using his variable size to flip Taskmaster with ease.
Ant-Man (Caption): "Anything you can do, I can do better."
Taskmaster: Whoop!
3/ Taskmaster performs a perfect 3-point landing, sword drawn, still holding the trigger.
Ant-Man (Caption): Pretty cool gimmick, really. Too bad he's on the wrong side...
Taskmaster: Gonna take a lot more than that to slow me down, bug.
4/ Taskmaster thrusts his sword towards Ant-Man, but Lang has shrunk and run up the blade and Taskmaster's arm, only to jump off of the villain's shoulder.
Ant-Man (Caption): I've seen him catch and hurl Cap's shield right back at him and dodge arrows like he knew where they were going to be before Hawkeye even had a chance to nock them.
Ant-Man (Caption): But it doesn't matter how much footage of me he watches--
Taskmaster: HA-- huh?
5/ Ant-Man is back to full size and grabbed Taskmaster by the back of his hood.
Ant-Man (Caption): Nobody steals Scott Lang's moves.
Taskmaster: Aw...
6/ SFX: WHAM!
7/ Ant-Man stands over the crumpled form of Taskmaster, flipped and incapacitated. The trigger in Taskmaster's hand is depressed. Must have happened mid-flip. A loud, angry alarm sounds.
Ant-Man (Caption): Nobody.
SFX: DEET DEET DEET
Ant-Man: Uh-oh.
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I was mighty tempted to roll out Taskmaster this week, but couldn't find a way to bring him in. I'm glad to see that you managed to do me one better.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea you have here, but part of me wishes you took a bit more advantage of Scott's abilities for the why of Taskmaster not being able to copy Scott's style (perhaps a "hard to steal what you can't see" line or something). Also, I'm not sure how easily it would be to convey all the actions you lay out in panel 4 in a single panel.
That said, I like the idea of the side business of the pressed trigger, adding in a subplot all along that bubbles to the surface at an inopportune moment.
Taskmaster's the closest thing Scott really has to an archenemy, so he was a natural choice. It must be infuriating that he can do whatever Iron Fist or Spider-Man can, no problem, but since he'll never be able to change size at will, he's gonna get trounced every time he and Scott meet.
DeleteI probably should have worded the fourth panel differently. Still, the idea is there, and it gives the artist a few options, so I'm not going to stress about it too much.