Origin

Scott Lang had one job when he broke into that house.

Well, technically he had already had a job — a good one, as a security engineer for a big company. That job had ended when Scott discovered that his employer was overcharging customers and decided to do something about it, which resulted in a prison sentence, which resulted in him losing the job, which resulted in his daughter Cassie growing up without her dad present for a few years, which was the thing that kept Scott awake at night more than anything else.

So when he broke into the house in San Francisco, the plan was simple: find something valuable, sell it, get enough money together to pay child support, rebuild his life, see Cassie on weekends.

The house belonged to a retired scientist named Hank Pym.

Hank Pym had been watching Scott Lang for some time. He was not, it turned out, surprised to find Scott in his home. He was also not particularly alarmed, though he did find a certain amount of exasperation in having to let this play out.

What Scott found in the basement was a suit. Not the kind of suit you hang in a closet and wear to job interviews. This one was dark and segmented, with a helmet that had two tiny antennae on top. It looked unusual. It looked like nothing Scott had ever seen. He took it home — because he had come to steal something and this was the most interesting thing available — and tried it on.

The button on the wrist was an accident.

And then Scott Lang was the size of an ant, and the bathroom floor was a canyon, and a carpenter ant the size of a golden retriever was looking at him with enormous multifaceted eyes, and the whole world had changed in about three seconds.

He got back to normal size by figuring out the controls. He called this a success, which was generous.

Hank Pym appeared at his door the next day, looking like a man who had been patient about something for quite a while and was willing to be patient for a bit longer.

"I know what you did," Hank said, "and I know who you are. I'd like you to consider a different kind of job."

Hank Pym was the original Ant-Man. He had created the suit and the extraordinary technology behind it — Pym Particles, particles of an extra-dimensional nature that could alter the distance between atoms, shrinking or growing anything they were applied to while preserving all the mass and density. He had retired. He needed someone else to wear the suit for a specific mission. He had concluded, after careful observation, that Scott Lang's combination of technical skill, moral stubbornness, and sheer love for his daughter made him the right person.

Scott's trainer was Hope van Dyne — Hank's daughter, who was competent at the suit in a way that made Scott feel like he had three left hands for the first several days. She was precise, demanding, and expressed skepticism about Scott with an efficiency that left no room for misunderstanding. She also kept teaching him, which was, he decided, more important than the skepticism.

He bonded with the ants.

This surprised him. The cybernetic helmet allowed him to communicate with ants through pheromone signals and electromagnetic pulses — sending them goals, receiving their responses, coordinating thousands of them at once. He expected this to be mechanical, operational, the way you might communicate with a piece of equipment. It wasn't. The ants responded to him. They had their own personalities, their own approaches to problems, their own preferences. One carpenter ant — he named her Ant-thony, with the letters at the front — became his regular aerial transport, which meant a carpenter ant the size of a large dog was flying him through the air, and this became, improbably, one of his favorite things.

He went from a man who had made some serious errors in judgment to a man with a second chance and a suit that bent the laws of physics.

The smallest hero can make the biggest difference.

Scott Lang would prove this repeatedly, to everyone's gradually increasing astonishment, starting with himself.