Full History
Cassie Lang grew up in a broken home. Her father Scott married Peggy and they had a good thing for awhile, but he felt the need to steal to keep them afloat, especially after having a daughter. At some point Lang's crimes caught up to him, Peggy ran off and Scott's sister Ruth watched Cassie while he served his time.
At 9 years old, Cassie was delighted when her father got out of jail. Not wanting to go back, Scott decided to go straight and even got a job interview with Stark International that lead to employment under Tony Stark himself! He practically became part of the family with Cass even referring to him as "Unca Tony."
Father and daughter made up for the time they'd lost, playing in the park and playing baseball. After smashing a homer one day, Cassie clutched her heart. The doctor informed Scott that she suffered from an inward-growing aorta that blocked blood flow. Worse yet? It appeared to be inoperable.
To raise money for Cassie's growing medical costs, Lang broke into a mansion that belonged to Hank Pym and stole the Ant-Man suit therein, hoping that it would help him infiltrate Cross Technological Enterprises to save the kidnapped Dr. Erica Sondheim. Darren Cross needed her to operate on his heart, but Scott knew that she had developed methods that could save Cassie.
After extricating themselves from Cross, Dr. Sondheim operated on Miss Lang and everything went exactly as planned! Having seen how he got the suit, why and how he used it, Hank Pym – then going by Yellow Jacket – gave the Ant-Man identity to Lang, officially starting his career as a super hero!
Initially living with her dad in Long Island, Cassie moved to L.A. with him when he decided to get a change of scenery and start his own security consulting firm. Electrolang, Inc. While Lang tried keeping his identity from his daughter she spent her days developing unusual recipes and hanging out with her friends.
Several years down the line, the Fantastic Four brought Ant-Man in when Reed Richards had been presumed dead. Cassie came along with him to live at Fantastic Four HQ. On her first visit to Four Freedoms Plaza, she not only saw a rampaging Namor, but also helped uncover the fact that Zarrko, the Tomorrow Man had been living there undetected! Afterwards, Cassie revealed that she knew her dad had been Ant-Man for a while.
While living with the FF she met Kristoff Vernard, heir to Dr. Victor von Doom and then a member of the team who she became friends with. However, Kristoff felt stronger feelings for her than she seemed to have for him. When Cassie's friend Donald Halberg visited her, she got suspicious when he didn't want to talk about the injuries to his back. She yelled at Kristoff when he wanted to "compel" the boy to explain. While trying to figure out how to help the boy, she and Kristoff were interrupted by the sudden appearance of Kang!
When the Fantastic Four seemed to die fighting Onslaught, Scott found himself out of a job for a time, but soon got another gig working for the Heroes For Hire. At that time, the original Human Torch Jim Hammond lead the team for Oracle, Inc. While exploring the building, Cassie stumbled upon an inert Super-Adaptoid. The robot absorbed Cassie's mind into itself, but she fought to free herself. She wound up taking the entity down even when the H4H and Thunderbolts couldn't!
Like the Fantastic Four, the Avengers eventually returned from the pocket dimension Franklin Richards made for them when they fell to Onslaught. While Scott never officially joined the team, he helped out on occasion. At some point, Cassie's mom Peggy finally showed an interest in sharing custody. The judge gave Peggy full custody because of his concern over Lang's hero career.
With that, Cassie went off to live with her mother and Blake Burdick, her step-father policeman. She still spent weekends with Scott at Avengers Mansion and intimated that she did not like Blake and wished she could live with her dad instead.
As she got older, Cassie took more of an interest in insects, earning the nickname "Insect Girl" from her less-than-supportive classmates. She was at that very school when a child murderer named Charles Cooley kidnapped her. When Lang got word, he showed up with his insect friends. Ant-Man's fellow Avenger Jack of Hearts also followed and stopped Scott from killing Charles in front of Cassie. Jack did take Cooley up into space, though, so that they would both perish when Hearts' powers made him explode.
Though Cassie did not think so at the time, she got lucky when her mom sued for full custody and won. Because of that, she wasn't at the mansion when Scarlet Witch lost her hold on reality after remembering the loss of her twins Tommy and Billy and used her powers to destroy the team, killing Scott Lang in a blast from a conjured Jack of Hearts.
In the wake of her father's death, 14-year-old Cassie made many trips to Tony Stark's closest building, skipping school to do so. She wanted to talk to "Unca Tony" about what happened to her dad, but he never showed up. Her mom and step-father did, though. After a particularly nasty fight with her parents, Cassie decided to run away, but then found a new focus when she saw Patriot, Hulkling, Iron Lad and Asgardian playing hero on TV.
Trying to track down the so-called Young Avengers, Cassie met Kate Bishop after the young heroes saved her sister's wedding from armed gunmen. Together the two young women went to the abandoned Avengers Mansion so Lang could get her dad's old suits and helmets, intending to become the new Ant-Man. When Patriot tried stopping her, Cassie's rage took hold and she soon discovered that she could grow to super-size!
After Captain America and Iron Man helped her in the wake of her power surge, Cassie admitted that she'd been stealing Pym Particles from her dad for years at the same time that she donned one of his old costumes. However, Iron Man wouldn't let Cassie have the helmet because he felt like Scott's death was his fault because he formed the team. He didn't want to bury her too.
The Avengers officially refused to back the Young Avengers, but Cassie, Kate, Eli (Patriot), Teddy (Hulkling), Billy (Asgardian-turned-Wiccan) and Iron Lad still remained together. Shortly after they all fought Kang, Iron Lad's future identity. Along the way, she actually knocked Kang back through his portal and then kissed Iron Lad.
After fully taking out Kang and sending Iron Lad back to his time, the Avengers offered to train the kids, but only with their parents' permission. No one wanted to let their folks in on their secret identities, but eventually all got back together as the Young Avengers. Around this time, Cassie decided on the codename Stature and everyone got new costumes from Kate! They were also joined by a new version of Vision based on Iron Lad's brainwave pasterns and 30th century armor, which lead to a relationship between him and Cassie.
From there things got really crazy for Cassie and her team. They fought Mr. Hyde because Patriot had been buying drugs from him to get powers and then Jessica Jones and Captain America took it upon themselves to tell each kid's parents about their burgeoning hero career. Jones spoke with Peggy who knew deep down, but she wanted to keep the whole thing a secret from Blake. Oh and they broke Billy's possibly twin brother Tommy out of juvie and he took on the name Speed.
The team finally won the respect of the Avengers after helping to put down a new conflict between the Kree and Skrulls in New York City. The good times didn't last long, though, as a horrible incident involving young heroes in Stamford, Connecticut lead to a huge catastrophe and a split amongst the heroes in regards to registering their true identities with the government.
Stature and her compatriots sided with Captain America and his anti-registration side, which made them targets for S.H.I.E.L.D. They even got captured, but Cap and Falcon (Sam Wilson) had gone undercover as agents and managed to bring them into one of Nick Fury's secret bases.
While on monitor duty, the Young Avengers saw an incident with the Runaways and attempted to bring them into the fold. Not traditionally joiners, the Cali kids refused, but both squads found themselves working together against a brainwashed Noh-Varr. Cassie and some of the others avoided capture and launched a rescue mission that also freed Noh-Varr.
However, after witnessing Goliath's death at the hands of the Thor clone later dubbed Ragnarok, Cassie left the resistance. Unlike her fellow Young Avengers she signed the Super Human Registration Act and joined the Avengers Initiative, a system for training and disseminating heroes around the country. While with the group she fought Ms. Marvel while under Puppet Master's control, fought the new Ant-Man (Eric O'Grady) for disparaging her dad's name and even teamed up with an outlaw Vision to fight off an A.I.M. attack.
Around this same time, Cassie questioned everything she'd ever done as a hero when, after another big fight with Blake, she knocked out The Growing Man and the villain fell on her step-dad resulting in crushed vertebrae and a punctured lung and spleen. Feeling catastrophic guilt, Lang began shrinking smaller and smaller until Kate Bishop, Patriot and Wiccan showed up and helper her realize that she needed to stop feeling sorry for herself and worrying about what others thought, including her mom and step-father.
During the Skrull Invasion, Stature and her fellow Initiative teammates helped the Young Avengers fight Super Skrulls in Times Square. Though she got knocked around pretty hard, Cassie woke up with her old teammates and the Secret Warriors in another one of Fury's secret bases. Stature fought valiantly in the finale battle of the Secret Invasion, even getting the chance to knock around the Skrull Hank Pym who had been lying to during her entire time with The Initiative. In the end, she also witnessed The Wasp's apparent death and Norman Osborn's assassination of the Skrull queen, which put him in a position of great power.
With the Initiative decommissioned by the former Green Goblin, Cassie and her robot boyfriend Vision joined up with a new version of the Mighty Avengers lead by Hank Pym, then going by the name Wasp in honor of the fallen Janet Van Dyne. Together they faced Modred, Chthon and the knowledge that Scarlet Witch had returned though that turned out to be a trick played by Loki.
Cassie still met with her Young Avengers teammates at the ruined Avengers Mansion and they did not take kindly to a group of younger villains taking their name and using it publicly. Though the teen heroes tried giving the baddies a chance to earn the name Young Avengers, things got even trickier when Osborn showed up with his Avengers and a huge fight broke out, that our kid heroes won!
When Hank Pym wanted his team to steal something from the Fantastic Four, Cassie had trouble getting behind the idea, still considering them family. She did give Amadeus Cho the thumb's up when it came to him wearing Scott Lang's old helmet, though. Later, when she figured out something was wrong with Scarlet Witch, Loki cast a spell on her so that she couldn't say anything bad about the Asgardian menace.
Wanting to get to the bottom of her mystical menace, Cassie and Vision called the Young Avengers together and Wiccan called the Scarlet Witch to them. Before they could fully investigate the Scarlet Witch problem, the Mighty Avengers had to call in the reserves and help their teammates battle The Unspoken. During the battle, Clint Barton had Stature shrink down and the one-time Hawkeye shot her at the enemy!
The Mighty Avengers continued fighting the good fight until Norman Osborn fully lost it and commanded his super-powered forces to attack Asgardia, then floating over Broxton, Oklahoma. During the Siege, the Mighty Avengers specifically worked together to stop Osborn's Thunderbolts – including Ant-Man (Eric O'Grady) – from getting Odin's Spear to their boss. The fight allowed Cassie to take even more of her anger out on O'Grady for tarnishing her dad's good crime-fighting name.
With Osborn ousted as the head of H.A.M.M.E.R., Steve Rogers took over and immediately had the Super Hero Registration Act abolished so that no more heroes had to break the law just to save people. Rogers even asked Stature and the other Young Avengers to continue as official Avengers.
However, when Wiccan displayed previously unknown power levels, Captain America, Captain Marvel and Iron Man grew concerned, especially if his theory that he and Tommy were magically created versions of Scarlet Witch's twins. Cassie wanted Wiccan to run off and find Wanda in hopes that seeing her sons alive might lead her to resurrect her dad, Scott Lang.
Eventually the team agreed to join forces with Magneto to find his daughter. Along the way, Vision posited to Cassie that she might have to pay the cost for bringing her father back from the dead. During a huge battle in Latveria – where Dr. Doom was about to marry a Wanda Maximoff with no memories of being Scarlet Witch – Iron Lad returned much to Cassie's delight.
She was less thrilled however, when the time-traveler took the team and Wanda back to the day of Scott Lang's death. However, she did get to see her dad again and then Wanda regained her memories and powers in time to save them all from Jack of Hearts' explosion and return Scott Lang to the present. He appeared to fall once again in a battle with Dr. Doom after the dictator absorbed Scarlet Witch's great power. Enraged, Stature grew huge and slugged Doom. In retaliation he blasted her with an energy burst that killed the young woman. Her dad, however, survived and mourned his daughter's passing.
Cassie's death left her teammates wondering how to move forward and her dad focused solely on getting revenge on Dr. Doom. However, he did find some solace working with the young members of the Fantastic Four's Future Foundation. Lang's days of mourning came to an end during the Axis event wherein individuals like Dr. Doom found themselves switched from villains to heroes. During that brief time of thinking about those other than himself, Victor tasked a team with capturing some of Scarlet Witch's power and used it to restore Cassie's life!
With that, life returned to something resembling normalcy for Cassie. Now powerless, she lived with her mom Peggy most of the time, her dad had visitation rights and she went back to school. However, Peggy upset the balance when she moved with Cassie to Miami, barely letting Scott know. Still, he moved down there too and began his own security business so he could help support his daughter.
Things were going smoothly until Crossfire showed up and kidnapped Cassie after her drum solo performance at the talent show. Augustine Cross of Cross Technologies, sent the assassin to get her and had also kidnapped Dr. Sondheim again to bring back his father Darren. Augustine wanted Sondheim to take Cassie's heart and put it in his father's so that it could grow and shrink as needed to deal with Darren's mutations.
To save her own son and also Cassie – both of whom Cross threatened to kill – Dr. Sondheim performed the operation on Cross and then transplanted another heart back into Ms. Lang. Ant-Man showed up to fight Cross long enough for the good doctor to complete the surgery. After the Cross' escaped, Scott shrank down and went into his daughter's blood stream to stop her own white blood cells from attacking her new heart.
Cassie recovered and even started playing basketball, but grew to resent her dad who had effectively dropped out of her life because he felt that his presence only brought danger to her. Even without powers, Cassie responded with some heroics when a new villain called The Voice turned a charity basketball game into a battle royale. Spotting Ant-Man at the event, she told him to stay out of her life after she realized that he actually had been watching over her, but at insect size.
Around this time, Cassie got a much-needed surprise visit from Kate Bishop! When Kate ran off for "business," though, Cass followed only to find her pal staking out a meeting of Secret Empire goons. She didn't do too well in that fight or the one she'd gotten in at school earlier and truly missed her powers. So, when she heard about the Power Broker's Hench X app, promising to turn normal people into super villains, she jumped at the chance, intending to use her newfound powers to shut him down.
During her meeting with Power Broker, Cassie learned that she didn't have a heart attack as she was told, but learned the truth about the Cross transplant. Power Broker then admitted that he knew she didn't want to become a villain, but offered a trade: he'd give her powers if she broke into Cross Technologies and stole tech that Cross had stolen from Power Broker.
Cassie agreed to the terms and received a new dose of Pym Particles along with a new costume and codename: Stinger! She made it into the building, but soon found herself staring down Darren Cross, Augustine and Crossfire. She held her own against them, but then Ant-Man jumped in and got himself captured so Cassie had to appeal to the rag-tag band of super powered misfits Scott had brought together to save her, but to save him instead.
The plan worked and Stinger managed to free Ant-Man, leading to an all-out battles with the Cross' that lead to Augustine getting seriously injured, creating more bad blood between them and the Langs. Father and daughter couldn't celebrate their victory for long, though, as the cops showed up and arrested Scott!
Worse yet, Cassie's step-dad Blake lead the cops who responded to the call. Scott took the fall saying that he kidnapped her and forced her into these escapades, clearing her name in the process. While her dad did time, Cassie captured Power Broker. She also spilled the beans on what really happened to her mom. Peggy dragged her daughter to the court room to confess, but arrived just in time for Darren Cross to show up in his recently stolen Yellowjacket armor and attack the proceedings.
Cass had her Stinger gear on her and changed to help defend her dad. The two began the healing process during the fight, which Stinger effectively ended by dosing Cross with some of the drugs the prison had given Lang to suppress his size-changing abilities. By the end of the trial even Peggy took the stand and said that she needed to just accept her daughter for the hero she truly is and wants to be.
With things patched up with her dad and a return to her hero career, Cassie Lang will surely continue making a name for herself in the years to come.
