Synopsis / Summary / Plot
This issues features Stature with a lot of help from Hawkeye (Kate Bishop), Patriot and Wiccan.
We see Cassie Lang curled up in a foetal position looking catatonic while we hear Kate tell Eli Bradley and Billy Kaplan that Cassie called her this morning crying. She rushed round and found her in this state and shrinking, and we now see she's shrunk so much that they need a microscope to see her and is still getting smaller. Eli suggests contacting Henry Pym (discoverer of the Pym Particles which enable he and Cassie to grow and shrink) but Kate thinks they'll get arrested as Non-Registered superheroes and blamed for injuring an Initiative recruit.
Wiccan says he could magically shrink 1 of them down to talk to Cassie and find out what's going on. Eli suggests Kate for the job as her best friend, but she says Cassie wouldn't respond to her earlier. So she counter-proposes Eli do it because they have something in common - both bearing the burden of a legacy (from Cassie's father Scott Lang/Ant-Man and from Eli's grandfather Isaiah Bradley, the black Captain America). Eli's unhappy but reluctantly agrees.
Wiccan casts 1 of his mantra spells and Eli shrinks. Kate picks him up and puts him on the microscope platform. But Eli keeps shrinking so Wiccan casts a spell to stop him, but he's smaller than Cassie's head. Eli tries pretending to be the girl's conscience but that doesn't work so he tries bribing her with a '24' marathon on Netflix. And Cassie speaks to him to say she thinks she killed someone.
Cue a flashback to that morning. It's the anniversary of her parents' wedding but they split up because of Scott's early life of petty crime. Afterwards he turned over a new leaf and became a superhero but was killed (in Avengers Disassembled). And Cassie loved him all the way along. Now Peggy Lang has remarried to beat cop Blake Burdick, and Cassie resists his every attempt to be her new father. This morning Cassie had enough and grew large when he tried to order her about.
The other 3 Young Avengers are listening to Cassie recounting all this and fear she's going to reveal she killed her stepdad. But she says she didn't, even though she wanted to. Eli compares her problem to his, living in the shadow of her father Scott even as he has to measure up to his grandfather's legend. He says they have to do their own thing, but Cassie thinks her 'thing' is to fail. And she shrinks down to his size before continuing her narration.
That morning she left the house to clear her head. She remembered when Scott turned his life around and became Ant-Man and joined the Avengers. She lived with him for a while and even shared adventures. But her memories were interrupted by cars being flung about by a Growing Man stimuloid. She remembered the 1 Kang sent after the YA (in YA#3) and she grew to match its height and punched it, expecting it to shatter into multiple small versions. But instead it reacted in the way that earned the stimuloids their name - it grew even bigger. Avoiding hitting it again she spotted some sort of port on its back. Ripping up a street light she jammed the live cables into the GM's back and it fell ... towards a woman who Officer Burdick pushed out of the way and got the whole of the giant on top of him.
The cop was taken to Columbia University Medical Centre and Cassie and her mom waited anxiously there for news. They already knew he was in a bad way and might never walk again if he lived. 2 other cops joined them and expressed their anger at 1 of Tony Stark's Initiative trainees getting a good cop injured. They consoled Peggy who feared she's going to lose another husband. And Cassie left in tears.
In the present Cassie continues to blame herself for what happened. Eli says it wasn't her fault, it was an accident, and she has to move on. But she doesn't believe that's what Captain America or Eli's grandfather would do. She thinks this is the kind of thing Blake and her mom wanted to spare her from. And she shrinks even smaller on the microscope stand.
Billy and Kate think they *have* to ask Hank Pym for help now even if it does get them arrested. But Eli decides to try tough love. He says it's true - Cassie messed up because she isn't cut out to be a hero. He adds that his granddad fought for the US in WWII but they put him in jail with his mind ruined by the process that they'd used to make him a superhero. Patriot says compared to him they've had it easy, and he remembers something Bucky told him (after the end of our #1) about the original WWII Patriot, Jeff Mace. Apparently Mace quoted the beginning of Rudyard Kipling's poem "If" to indicate we've got to trust our own judgement - we may fail but we've got to deal with it, like Cap, Isaiah, Jeff and Cassie's dad dealt with stuff. If she's a real hero she'll go comfort her mother in her time of need.
Cassie suddenly grows to normal size and picks little Eli off the microscope, telling him she's through apologising for who she is. Eli hurriedly agrees with her and gets Wiccan to magic him back to his real size too. She phones her mom at Blake's bedside and does apologise for being difficult to live with lately. She says she'll try to do better, but she won't apologise for taking up her father's legacy as Stature. She says she'll come back to the hospital and she might bring some friends, her other family (looking at the other Young Avengers).