your worst day as a mutant will be your best as an x-man.

Avengers West Coast Vol 2 #74

Avengers Vol 3 #51

Uncanny Avengers Vol 1 #7

Just something fascinating about the way these two break up always has to do with Wanda saying she thinks of Simon as a friend and potentially even a brother figure first, and always a romantic interest second.

Wonder Man headshot drawn for me by the wonderful @danmcdaid at Acme Glasgow comic con 😁 Dan also has an Instagram!

We are men and mutants of action, after all!

X-FORCE vol 6 #49 (2024): "TARGET: BEAST PART 2" written by Benjamin Percy and drawn by Robert Gill

I need your help. Desperately.

X-FORCE vol 6 #49 (2024): "TARGET: BEAST PART 2" written by Benjamin Percy and drawn by Robert Gill

Can Simon physically experience pain?

Hi anon.

Simon is virtually indestructible, invulnerable, impervious to most things, so generally, no. I could list off numerous examples, but I'll stick to only three; he takes a bomb to the chest in Avengers Two and is just fine afterwards, is unaffected by bullets in Uncanny Avengers, and handles millions of amperes of electricity in Marvel Two-in-One #51 and is again, fine.

However, he is seemingly affected by negatively charged ions, at least in Wonder Man v3.

Eric's scythe is sometimes anionic too, so he's occasionally hurt by that. He also is hurt by people who hit really fucking hard, like Vision or Ultron.

He's also pretty beaten up by Hulk in Avengers #686

But as a general rule, I would say unless you have similar or greater strength than him, or have something really specific designed to hurt and/or kill him, he's not someone who experiences pain often.

That sounds, um, terrifying.

X-FORCE vol 6 #49 (2024): "TARGET: BEAST PART 2" written by Benjamin Percy and drawn by Robert Gill

Don't you recognise me, my friend?

X-FORCE vol 6 #49 (2024): "TARGET: BEAST PART 2" written by Benjamin Percy and drawn by Robert Gill

i feel so much better already, being here with you.

X-FORCE vol 6 #49 (2024): "TARGET: BEAST PART 2" written by Benjamin Percy and drawn by Robert Gill

i feel so much better already, being here with you.

X-FORCE vol 6 #49 (2024): "TARGET: BEAST PART 2" written by Benjamin Percy and drawn by Robert Gill

Has Simon ever met dark beast?

No, they've never met and I don't think Simon has ever really acknowledged the existence of Dark Beast, which makes sense; Simon was dead while that arc was going on and it had completed before he came back, and Simon's never really been close to the X-Men enough to participate in those later arcs with Dark Beast. To Simon, it's a bit out of focus and probably hard for him to conceptualise because he wasn't there. It's not that he wouldn't be sympathetic but coming back from the dead and your best friend being like "yeah I was replaced by an evil alternate universe version of myself for a while and he had locked me in a stone wall and not a lot of people really noticed but I'm back now" is probably a difficult thing to think about for long.

This lack of closeness to the X-men is, I imagine, probably a relief to Dark Beast; Simon is very hard to kill for the most part, and even when you do manage he inevitably always manages to come back, and he knows Hank well enough to probably be able to tell if he's being weird. Because of his fame and his general indestructibility, he's not someone you can easily kill off and have nobody notice. Simon also isn't someone he could get to side with him, at least not for long; Simon's manipulatable, but also incredibly moral, at least in the modern day. There are certain things he will not do and he holds Hank up to a certain standard and I don't think will have too much problem throwing him around if he starts torturing people as Dark Beast is liable to do. And that's the other thing; despite not being the sharpest tool in the shed, Simon isn't someone you can really overpower unless your name rhymes with Four or Bulk. Just stupid enough for Dark Beast to feel less of, but just powerful enough to always be a threat.

I wrote a little bit more about how I think their dynamic would play out on my main blog, if that interests you.

Can wonder man cry? Like physically?

Simon isn't often portrayed as much of a crier, so as far as on-panel evidence goes I'm not sure. He's more of a stares morosely into the distance type, as opposed to Vision who's a more elegant crier, almost feminine in a classic Hollywood kind of way. I'm going to lean towards logically no, because his "eyes" are generally described as pure ionic energy, so he doesn't really have any actual tear ducts. That said, we have seen Simon spitting up a pinkish-turns-red blood in Avengers V1 #686, so it's kind of whatever. I think Simon can probably simulate tears without really even thinking about it, but they're not true tears, but rather small bits of ionic energy he's dispersing because he is subconsciously simulating all of the effects of a human.

The discussion of wonderbeast’s physical dimensions is making me think of that old tumblr post about a mattress topper reviewed by “variously shaped gays”. There was a third guy (occasional night visitor) who was even shorter and heavier so I can’t help but picture Wolverine as their third now

Simon and Logan have fought most of the time in their interactions, and obviously Hank and Logan's relationship has taken a distinctly sour turn so it's a curious thing to think about. The poor mattress topper may not survive the hate sex I imagine from this trio. But who knows, maybe they'd behave themselves because Simon doesn't want blood on his sheets.

from children's crusade and infinity crusade.

What’s the timeline on Simon’s pacifism?

Simon becomes a pacifist in the Uncanny Avengers run. In issue 5, his first appearance in the run, he states that he doesn't fight anymore, even when his brother, Eric, is ruining a press conference by trying to kill the new Avengers (mind you, the Havok M word speech was being delivered, so he might have saved us). This continues throughout the run, culminating in this semi-famous page from #9.

There isn't too much of a timeline, to be honest. Remender chose it as a way of, I assume, wrapping up the Revenger arc from Bendis and setting him on a new path by giving him something to do that distinguishes him from the likes of Thor, Hulk, Colossus, etc.

In the Avengers Unlimited: Infinity Comic #55-#57, Simon does almost break his pacifism briefly to fight some demon, but ultimately manages. They have this line about him being on a team called Force Works, which I find weird, because he literally died the first issue and I don't think they even told him the name of the team when he died, but whatever.

Why does wonder man weight so much? Is it his body builder physique or ion magic

Part of it is just that a lot of the marvel handbook weights are just "men heavy, women light". Clint Barton, for example, is listed as 230 pounds; Tigra is 180. I do think though it has to do with his ions; in Marvels Snapshots: Avengers, a woman describes walking into Simon as walking into a brick wall.

I was going to attempt to link articles about the density of ionic solids but lets be honest, if we apply too much science to Simon, he's gonna be made of salt or some shit. We'll just say that not only was Simon made to be more physically muscular due to the ions, the power they infused him with made him much denser than a normal human.

And re: physique; sometimes Simon is drawn with a bodybuilder form and looks absolutely giant, and sometimes he's broad but also noticbly more slender than say, Ares, Herc or Thor. Personally I go towards the second; he's big, definitely, but you can also tell he's not quite as giant as Hercules or Colossus are. I imagine those guys look like weightlifters, while Simon has more of like... a hockey player vibe, or something.

Has Hank’s height canonically changed in his history? He seems short when he’s with the avengers but tall when he’s with the x men. I don’t know if when he went catboy mode or whatever mutations after he got taller. The first time either.

His height is listed as like, 5’10 or 11 on the wiki which isn’t that tall for superhero men (and taking into account his early slouch could kind of explain why he seems so short in some places) but he still seems to tower over people in X Force

What it is that the first Marvel handbook listed his height as 5'11, and every subsequent Marvel handbook has listed his height as the same (or at least, the three that I checked did).

This is despite the fact that he's very clearly drawn as being much taller than Scott, for example, in recent times. If Hank was to stand up fully in this Avengers v5 38 cover, he'd be huge.

At first, Hank is more of a regular man with certain beastial qualities, as opposed to later Hank's who focus on the Beast element more. There's plenty of other examples of artists making Hank absolutely giant as he's mutated. Hank is one of those characters artists take a lot of artistic liberty with, which I'm cool with, but the writers of the offical Marvel Handbooks haven't seemed to keep up. Which is a shame because I think it would be fun if Hank and Piotr just absolutely towered everyone, but slightly on the short side for a superhero Hank is also kind of fun, I suppose.

But yeah, basically a lot of artists like to have fun with how they draw Hank, particularly in recent years when he became more feline, which has meant he looks absolutely giant next to Scott despite Scott being over 6 ft tall.

It's odd, because his weight has changed (350lbs in 1983, 402 in 2004), but not his height. I don't really have an answer for this, but it is odd. Hopefully the next one will make him taller, if they're going to draw him bigger than Scott and Hawkeye and what have you.

In ‘99 Simon suggested he saw one of thelonius monk’s last performances (I believe he stopped playing in 76) while he was “a kid” sneaking into a bar (so I assume a teenager/younger than drinking age, which in NY was 18 at the time, but it could have been a matter of not being classy enough for the joint).

Assuming he was ~16-17, that would make him just under 40 at the time (chronologically, idk if there’s any statement on how long he was dead either time and obviously he doesn’t age). Hank and Wanda were both nebulously under 30 (but older than 24) then afaik, hence Hank’s chickenplucker line (I just read Avengers v3 14)

That's a good point, the sliding timescale does play into this. In Uncanny Avengers #10, Eric makes a reference to sitcoms he and Simon would watch together as kids, specifically Cheers. This would roughly place Simon in his 40s now, too, although his incubation period probably means he's more in his 30s. It's a weird one, because Simon is definitely from an older era, but he's been dead so often on and off again that his actual age is a bit strange. Personally I prefer to keep Simon as someone perpetually from the 50s who just stayed dead a long time but I understand that isn't the route comics take these days and it makes Eric sort of awkward to deal with so I guess yeah, he did watch Cheers as a child.

Simon's sort of someone who simultaneously had to grow up too young and also someone who never really matured. As in, he had all those responsibilities taking over his father's company, but also had no social life and never developed interpersonal relationships or experience. It's an interesting juxtaposition, and his sense of being out of time really does go with this.

And re: Simon's incubation period, when he first comes back from the dead it's basically treated as continous. He has been dead for 13 years in and out of canon. In more modern times, I don't see this lasting anything longer than 7 years, given the Cheers reference, but it does need to be long enough for there to be some sense of whiplash and to allow for all the changes to occur in his absence in a way that feels natural. It is a real shame though because it's one of my favourite aspects of his character that gets lost; the difference between '64 and '77 is way bigger than like, '93 to 2000 or whatever. Not that there's no difference, but you know what I mean. Society progressed so much between his death and revival, and it plays very interestingly to his dynamics with the other Avengers and especially Steve, who reads as untrusting to Simon in those days following his return.