Redeemed

After getting injured during the Hulk’s attack on Manhattan, Eric O’Grady (aka Ant-Man) wakes up in a hospital room and discovers that he has been arrested by SHIELD.[1][2] Front and center is the man who was obsessed with his capture, Mitch Carson.[3] Carson tells O’Grady that the war with the Hulk is over and that he had been in a coma for a month. They would have found him sooner if Eric wasn’t operating under an assumed alias.[4] Now that they have him, Carson orders Eric injected with a tranquilizer to shut him up until they transfer him.

When Eric wakes up, he finds himself in a utility room deep in the bowels of the SHIELD helicarrier. Carson has brought him there to do an off-the-books interrogation with him where nobody will find them.[5] O’Grady thinks that this is an intimidation tactic and that Mitch is too by-the-book to do anything illegal. Carson reveals that this is merely a façade he maintains.

To explain how brutal he is, Mitch decides to tell Eric how not by-the-book he really is. It started when he was 15 years old when he got tired of his father abusing his sister and beat him to death with a baseball bat. Mitch then beat himself up to make it look like the killing was out of self-defense. Three years later, when his sister was dating an abusive boyfriend, Mitch beat him to death as well. After that, he killed a burglar he caught in the act. He then went looking for trouble but that alone wasn’t enough to satiate his growing desire to kill. He decided to live by the adage of finding a way to do what you love as a job. Mitch was driven to achieve this goal and got into law enforcement and the best officer on the force. This led to him being recruited into SHIELD. Being legally allowed to kill made his urge to kill even greater.

After hearing all of this, O’Grady pleads with Mitch not to kill him, reminding him how they used to be friends. This angers Mitch who says whatever friendship they had ended when O’Grady burned half his face.[6] Due to the nature of Eric’s injuries, Mitch has to be delicate with him, but that’s not a problem. He begins hitting specific nerves that cause excruciating pain. However, O’Grady blacks out after a few blows.

When Eric is woken up again, Mitch Carson has put on his Ant-Man suit. He decides to be a little more creative with his torture and shrinks down in size and leaps into O’Grady’s mouth. As Eric suffers an internal beating, his friend Black Fox has tracked him down. Scaling the side of the SHIELD helicarrier, he intends to rescue his old friend.

Back inside, Carson leaps out of Eric’s body after sustaining a series of internal injures. He tells Eric that he will die painfully from internal bleeding. He then prepares to burn half of Eric’s face as well. Unfortunately, before Mitch can do the deed, Iron Man (Tony Stark) comes bursting in the room with a team of SHIELD agents to stop him. Carson refuses to stand down, forcing Stark to use force to take him down.

Once untied, Eric makes up a story that is partially based on the truth. How he and his friend Chris were stationed to guard the Ant-Man suit when Wolverine was taken into custody to reverse his Hydra brianwashing. However, he claims that Mitch wanted to steal the suit for himself and killed Chris during Hydra’s later attack on the helicarrier. Eric then claims to have taken the suit in order to expose Carson who then framed him for the theft. This forced him on the run from SHIELD as he tried to find the proof he needed to clear his name.[7]

That’s when the Black Fox arrives to rescue him and realizes he arrived too late. When Eric asks how he found him, the Fox admits that he put tracking devices in his Ant-Man suit when O’Grady wasn’t looking. Annoyed that he was double-crossed like that, he convinces Iron Man that the Black Fox is a threat and has him arrested. In the aftermath of everything, Stark tells O’Grady that he can’t be sure if he trusts Eric’s story and promises a full investigation. However, he has decided that Eric has at least earned having his old life back in the meantime.

After weeks of recovery, Eric O’Grady finds himself back working at his old monitor station at SHIELD. Although he is bored out of his skull, he laughs to himself for being able to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.

Recurring Characters

Ant-Man, SHIELD (Iron Man, Mitch Carson), Black Fox

Continuity Notes

1. The Hulk attacked the Earth primarily in World War Hulk #1-5 and its various crossover issues. O’Grady in particular was involved in that conflict and injured last issue.

2. O’Grady has been on the run ever since he stole the Ant-Man suit from SHIELD. See Irredeemable Ant-Man #1-6.

3. Carson has been obsessed with capturing Ant-Man after Eric accidentally burned half his face in issue #6.

4. After escaping SHIELD, Eric O’Grady bought a fake identity and took a job working with Damage Control under the name Derek Sullivan and the superhero identity Slaying Mantis. See Irredeemable Ant-Man #8.

5. Here, O’Grady wonders if Nick Fury and Dum Dum Dugan are watching him from behind a holographic wall. Fury actually isn’t the Director of SHIELD at the time of this story. He went AWOL after it was revealed that he staged an illegal coup in Latveria, as revealed in Secret Invasion #1-5. SHIELD later started using LMD’s (starting in Marvel Team-Up (vol. 3) #13). O’Grady has been AWOL during all and probably explains why he doesn’t know.

6. As we saw in Irredeemable Ant-Man #6, while trying to flee Carson, O’Grady accidentally burned Mitch’s face with jet-pack exhaust. Also mentioned here is their mutual friend Chris McCarthy. McCarthy was killed when the SHIELD helicarrier was attacked by Hydra back in issue #3.

7. Wolverine’s brainwashing and Hydra’s attack on the SHIELD helicarrier were chronicled in Wolverine (vol. 3) #20-25 and 27. We saw these incidents from Eric’s perspective in Irredeemable Ant-Man #1-2.

Topical References

• When talking about his joy of killing, Mitch Carson references both James Bond and Charles Bronson. James Bond is the titular character of various stories written by Ian Fleming starting with 1953’s Casino Royale. The character was a British spy with a license to kill and has appeared in countless novels as well as film adaptations over since then. Charles Bronson, meanwhile, was an actor best known for his roles in the Death Wish franchise of films based on a 1972 novel by Brian Garfield. In the films, Bronson plays Paul Kersey, an architect who becomes a vigilante after his wife is murdered and his daughter is raped. You could argue that these are topical references as you can replace either reference with contemporary examples and the inference would still be the same.