Known as the irredeemable Ant-Man, Eric O’Grady often uses his armored suit for selfish gain or to stroke his ego all while maintaining a Super Hero façade. He has no qualms about shrinking down or growing in size to avoid conflict and accountability. He also uses his perceived heroism to chat up women, typically lying and cheating to get what he wants. It takes a while, but he eventually changes his egocentric ways and redeems himself.
Accidental Ant-Man
The amoral Eric O’Grady grows up in Lancaster, Vermont, with his best friend Chris McCarthy. They both become low-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, assigned to perform data entry aboard the Helicarrier. Their poker buddy, S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Mitch Carson, assigned them to guard “Hank Pym” (actually a Skrull imposter)’s new “GI Ant-Man” armor; paranoid about receiving a serious task, O’Grady panicked when “Pym” entered the room and knocked the scientist out. Seeing the suit, McCarthy tried it on and accidentally activated it, shrinking out of sight. O’Grady, using his friend’s disappearance to try to get closer to Chris’ girlfriend and fellow agent Veronica King, told her Chris was cheating on her. Days later, while the Helicarrier was besieged by an army of Hydra-brainwashed superhumans, Chris figured out how to re-enlarge and found Eric, only to be slain by a Hydra minion moments later. As the damaged Helicarrier plummeted to the ground, Eric removed the suit from Chris’ body, donned it and shrunk down, surviving the crash. Veronica subsequently accompanied Eric to Lancaster for Chris’ funeral, where they became closer and nearly made love atop Chris’ grave.
Upon his return to duty aboard S.H.I.E.L.D.’s new Helicarrier, Eric frivolously uses the suit to spy on the women’s locker rooms and hold ant races in the vents. He successfully romances Veronica (and unknowingly impregnates her), but Mitch, who had been assigned to find the suit, confronts him; Eric, disguised by the suit, escapes their first battle, but Mitch realizes during their next poker game that Eric was the thief. As Eric flees, he accidentally destroys half of Mitch’s face with his jet thrusters. Escaping the Helicarrier, he continues to use the suit selfishly, rescuing civilians and fighting crime solely to impress women.
During a date with a woman he’d saved from a mugger, the badly-scarred Mitch tracks him down, but Eric escapes and takes shelter in Carol Danvers’ purse. Surprised to learn she was the Super Hero Ms. Marvel (later Captain Marvel), he stows away with her to an Avengers battle against Harvey Elder, AKA Mole Man’s monsters, where he steals a sack of jewels from elderly cat burglar the Black Fox, who was looting the area. He also stops to save a girl trapped in the rubble, impressing the reconstruction engineers of Damage Control who offer him a job; he accepts, claiming to be “Derek Sullivan,” alias the “Slaying Mantis.”
Cybernetic Ant-Man Armor
O'Grady's GI Ant-Man armor, originally designed by a Skrull impersonating Hank Pym, can shrink or enlarge via Pym Particles; this ability is controlled by a button on the helmet's side. He can shrink to “ant-height" of a tenth of an inch, and enlarge to a maximum height of 100', although he cannot maintain such a height for very long. He apparently cannot shrink or enlarge other objects or people.
He maintains his normal human strength at ant-height, and has superhuman strength at giant sizes, though the larger he gets, the more of his strength and stamina is devoted to holding his massive body upright. He can lift about 10 tons at 25' and over 50 tons at 100', and is capable of lifting over 100 tons at a height of 100'.
While O’Grady’s cybernetic helmet controls how small or tall he can become, it also allows him to communicate with ants. The suit incorporates two retractable articulated rocket thrusters; O'Grady can use the thrusters as impromptu weapons. The suit also includes a set of wrist-blasters that build up a charge from the energies of his size-changing to produce powerful stun beams. The suit is armored, especially against corrosion, and contains a life-support system capable of maintaining life functions for at least 24 hours in a hostile environment. O'Grady is an extremely skilled liar and manipulator, and an adequate computer technician.
Allies Turned Enemies
O’Grady is a low-ranking agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. who steals his best friend, Chris McCarthy’s girl Veronica along with his GI Ant-Man suit to escape an exploding Helicarrier. In keeping it, his fellow agent Mitch Carson discerns his true identity and attempts to track him down. He eventually escapes Mitch and S.H.I.E.L.D.
O’Grady joins Norman Osborn, AKA Green Goblin’s Thunderbolts. He works alongside his teammates, Natasha Romanoff, AKA Black Widow, Ghost, Cleavon Twain, AKA Headsman, and Paladin following Osborn’s directives. Frank Simpson, AKA Scourge (later Nuke) and Mister X are added to the ranks but end up in a fight with Headsman, while Ant-Man, Ghost and Paladin hope they all kill each other. While everyone survives the battle, the team goes on to end the Agents of Atlas but fails and loses Headsman. Ant-Man ultimately leaves the team to join the Secret Avengers.
Tenuous Teammates
After escaping S.H.I.E.L.D.’s pursuit, O’Grady joins Damage Control using an alias.
During the Civil War between Super Heroes, O’Grady joins Osborn’s Thunderbolts team with Black Widow, Ghost, Headsman, and Paladin. While serving on the team, O’Grady helps Danny Rand, AKA Iron Fist, and Luke Cage escape Osborn’s schemes and prevents Gungnir, the Spear of Heaven from getting into Osborn’s hands during a Thunderbolts siege in Asgard.
Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, then recognizes O’Grady’s acts in Asgard as a good sign of his character, and adds him to the ranks of his Secret Avengers.
Shameless Story
For a short time, everything went well for Eric—he fell in love with fellow Damage Control employee Abigail Dunton, AKA Visioneer, battled Calvin Zabo, AKA Mister Hyde, and Dragon Man, and even befriended the Fox after the elderly thief helped him get the full value of the stolen jewels from a fence. Upon learning Abigail had a young son she had been hiding from him, Eric broke off his relationship with her.
When Bruce Banner, AKA Hulk, returned from the planet Sakaar to invade Manhattan Eric, in a rare act of selflessness, tried to stop the him, attacking the green goliath from inside the Hulk’s own digestive tract. Unsuccessful, Eric fled but was crushed between the Hulk and Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man, and awoke weeks later in a hospital, under arrest by Mitch. Taking Eric to a secret interrogation room, Mitch used the Ant-Man suit to beat and torture O’Grady; however, before Mitch could disfigure Eric with the thrusters, Iron Man, who had been searching for the missing prisoner, burst into the room and blasted Mitch. Eric lied to Iron Man, claiming that Mitch had murdered Chris and wanted to steal the suit. Eric backed up his “innocence” when the Black Fox came to save him, claiming to be wired to a nuclear bomb; Eric called his bluff, and the Fox was arrested. Stark believed Eric and restored him to active S.H.I.E.L.D. duty. He tried to make amends with the Fox by slipping him the Helicarrier’s schematics in his cell, but refused to have anything to do with Veronica’s baby, fearing the child would grow up as amoral as himself. Stark, unable to find any agents capable of operating the Ant-Man suit, gave it back to Eric and assigned him to train with the Initiative at Camp Hammond. Before he left, Eric visited Abigail, telling her his real name and promising that he’d work to make himself a better person.
Eric’s stay at Camp Hammond got off to an inauspicious start when he blamed his own past misdeeds on the deceased Scott Lang, his predecessor as Ant-Man, to impress the Taskmaster—unaware that Lang’s daughter, Initiative trainee Cassie Lang, AKA Stature, was within earshot. She grew to giant-size and attacked him, prompting him to grow to that size himself for the first time. When he underhandedly hit her with a bus, “Pym” joined the fight, prompting Taskmaster to end it by hitting their giant-sized Achilles tendons. Later, the deranged clone of Michael van Patrick, now called K.I.A., attacked O’Grady and his class; Eric escaped unscathed, and hid out with Taskmaster while K.I.A. rampaged through the base.
Later, when Earth was invaded by Skrulls, O’Grady shrank down and hid at Camp Hammond when the rest of the Initiative mobilized to battle the shape-shifting aliens; he inadvertently learned of their plans when the Skrull Queen Veranke made the base her headquarters. The black ops Shadow Initiative team discovered him as he snuck around the base, and he joined them in attempting to assassinate Veranke. They failed, but O’Grady escaped, having learned of the Skrulls’ plan to destroy the Earth with the Initiative bases’ warp gates. He stowed away with a Skrull assault team and met up with a group of Initiative heroes on Mount Rushmore. They split up and struck at the warp gates; O’Grady accompanied Delroy Garrett, AKA 3-D Man, to Texas, where they shut down a gate and battled Skrulls alongside the Rangers. After the Skrulls were defeated, O’Grady snuck aboard a Helicarrier and altered his personnel records, making him seem much more formidable than he actually was.
Shortly afterward, newly appointed Initiative head Norman Osborn, impressed by O’Grady’s falsified files, assigned him to the Thunderbolts, which Osborn had designated as his personal black ops squad. For their first mission, they were to convince the newly elected United States president of Osborn’s good intentions; to accomplish this, Eric planted a gamma emitter on Leonard Samson (who had evidence of Osborn’s crimes), making him go berserk. Soon afterward, when the Green Goblin—actually disguised fellow Thunderbolt Headsman—attacked Air Force One, knocking out the plane’s passengers, O’Grady injected the president with a stimulant so he could witness Osborn fighting the ersatz Goblin.
The Thunderbolts’ next mission pitted them against the mercenary Wade Wilson, AKA Deadpool, who also had incriminating evidence against Osborn; although O’Grady briefly incapacitated Wilson by shrinking into the mercenary’s uniform, prompting the irrational Deadpool to shoot himself in an effort to hit his attacker, the mission ended in failure. Soon afterward, the Thunderbolts extracted the stranded Shadow Initiative from Madripoor; O’Grady personally saved his old comrades from the vampiric villain Bloodscream by expanding to full size while inside Bloodscream.
Unnerved by his new teammate, the sociopathic assassin Mr. X, Eric tried to bond with Paladin, but found the mercenary was only on the team for financial gain. O’Grady and the team next apprehended renegade former Thunderbolts Melissa Gold, AKA Songbird, Black Widow, but Paladin, Headsman, and Ghost refused when ordered to execute Gold; when Mister X and new team leader Scourge attacked them, O’Grady shrank and hid, watching the Ghost erase Scourge and Mr. X’s memories of their teammates’ treachery and allowing the women to escape.
Later, in an attempt to recruit Luke Cage into the Thunderbolts, O’Grady infiltrated Cage’s body via a plate of waffles, but Cage’s digestive system proved too much for Ant-Man, and he was knocked out, only being excreted from Cage’s body once Cage had rescued his friend Iron Fist from Osborn’s clutches. During a lull between missions, O’Grady bonded with Paladin over their shared love of The Rockford Files; when Mister X subsequently went AWOL, they both agreed to stand aside and let the assassin and Scourge kill each other, although both combatants survived the incident.
Osborn next sent the Thunderbolts to Louisiana to terminate the inner circle of the ancient Atlas Foundation; O’Grady, fed up with Osborn and most of his teammates, attempted to escape in the confusion, but the sorrowful song of Atlas’ siren, Venus, incapacitated him with painful memories of Veronica. Instead of escaping, Eric befriended Headsman, only for Scourge (who had been brainwashed by Atlas agent Uranian) to inadvertently murder Twain while trying to shoot a hologram of Norman Osborn.
During Osborn’s assault on Asgard, he sent the Thunderbolts to the mystic city to steal the powerful Spear of Heaven from its armory. O’Grady unlocked the armory, but before they could deliver their booty to Osborn, the Avengers led by John Walker, AKA U.S.Agent, attacked them. O’Grady tried to shrink down and escape again, but Scourge hurled him into action against Stature, who remembered their last encounter and quickly beat him.
Unwilling to let Osborn have such a powerful weapon, O’Grady shrunk down and destroyed his teammate Max Markham, AKA Grizzly’s eardrums, allowing Paladin to escape with the Spear. Inspired by Eric’s courage, Captain America later gave him a chance at redemption with his new covert team of Secret Avengers; with the team, O’Grady battled several menaces, including the sinister Shadow Council and high-tech pirate Captain Barracuda.
O’Grady fell back into his old ways and used his position on the Secret Avengers to hit on women. When Black Fox delivered information about A.I.M., O’Grady finds out later that it was a ploy to open a doorway for a thief to steal from Pym. O’Grady does the right thing helped Pym retrieve the item. It was during this time Abigail discovered O’Grady was being unfaithful.
During one mission against the Descendants, a group led by the Father, O’Grady attempted to save a child and his mother but only successfully escaped with the child. O’Grady then faced the Descendants alone, giving the child time to flee and was killed in the process.
