“Look Out for the Little Guy!” is the title of Scott Lang’s memoirs. The title was originally featured in the film Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania before being brought into the real world with the “help” of real comedy writer Rob Kutner.
Largely humorous but limited in scope, the book recount’s Lang’s experiences as an ex-con, father, and Avenger (the latter of which gets too much page space). While Kutner captures Lang’s rhythm and tone well in a book that could very well be a beast seller within the MCU, as real people who have already experienced may of Ant-Man’s exploits through the various films he has appeared in, the reader may find themselves a touch bored during the middle chapters where Scott recounts the airport fight from Captain America: Civil War and the time heist from Endgame. While Kutner includes an admirably high volume of jokes throughout the entire book, they don’t add enough to the movie recaps to make them particularly compelling.
A surprising aspect of this work is how progressive Scott Lang is allowed to appear. We get glimpses into how Lang sees the world in a way that is ultimately pretty sanitized but still very un-Disney like. He expresses his thoughts on things like incarceration, gender inequality, and corporate greed. It helps make Lang feel more like a full person and is the kind of content you expect to see in a memoir. For example, he comments on how female ants, like human women, do a lot of thankless work. It never gets heavy though, like the Ant-Man films, and there are plenty of jokes to keep the book moving.
There’s a chapter late in the book that is presented as an interview with Hank Pym that doesn’t quite work. The rationale for its inclusion makes sense as Scott seemingly spends a lot of time in Hank’s lab. In the lab doing what exactly is unclear, so fleshing out his relationship with Hank makes sense. What ensues however is a lot of Scott bouncing ideas off Hank, and Hank needing to explain why his idea may or may not work. This is amusing from a distance but Hank’s explanations can encourage the reader to think a bit too hard about the nonsense science of Pym particles. This results in a cognitive dissonance that really takes you out of the book.
One of Scott’s ideas involves ways to make working from home easier. While working from home was, of course, a concept before the coronavirus pandemic, it has become somewhat inseparable from the ongoing cultural moment in which the various reasons for and against WFH are in daily headlines. This seemingly innocuous mention of working from home in the chapter that already has an internal logic that doesn’t work makes for a bizarre reading experience. I don’t think this chapter is implying Covid exists in the MCU, but it does make you ask the question in a chapter that has you asking a lot of questions without answers.
A particularly endearing aspect of this work is the included stills from Ant-Man’s various MCU appearances. Because this is Scott Lang’s memoir they’re presented as pictures of real things that actually happened to him. This requires some creative thinking and the captions go out of their way to explain, for example, how “Ant-sel Adams” got a particular shot is very endearing.
Scott Lang being the most normal and human of the Avengers makes this book make sense within the MCU. The fact that it actually exists in our reality is amusing, but ultimately unnecessary.
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