Ant-Man/Giant-Man: The Man in the Ant Hill

This was a pleasant surprise. Ant-Man, or Giant-Man (a role he grew into, later taking the name Goliath), has never been one of my favourite superheroes and I wasn’t expecting much from this collection of his first appearances in Marvel’s Tales to Astonish. (Most of the early Marvel superheroes didn’t start out with their own comics, so Iron-Man, as he then was, could be found in Tales of Suspense, Thor in Journey into Mystery, Doctor Strange in Strange Tales, etc.) But I had a great time tracking the very silly evolution of the character, and his sidekick “the wonderful Wasp.”

What I mean by silly is the way a hand keeps getting waved at any questions that might be raised as we go along. Explanations are trotted out, but they’re so flimsy you just have to shake your head. Scientist Hank Pym invents a potion, later made into a pill, that allows him to almost instantly shrink to the size of an ant. I mean instantly in that he seems to just disappear. You don’t see him get smaller. I wondered how that worked. But then I wondered about a lot of things. Luckily, the explanations keep coming. How does his costume change sizes along with his physical transformations? An editor’s note: “Clothes composed of unstable molecules are able to stretch and contract as the wearer’s own body does!” How does Ant-Man send and receive messages to all the ants everywhere all over the city? He has antennae on his helmet that can transmit, receive, and “decode” the electronic impulses that all ants use to communicate. And by “communicate” I mean they can even send live video! How does he travel instantly to any place he has to be? He has a catapult that fires him wherever he wants to go, and when he gets there his ant buddies form a cushion to give him a soft landing. How does he fight bad guys when he’s the size of an ant? He keeps the same strength he had as a full-size human even when he shrinks. But then when he learns how to make himself bigger, for some reason he maxes out at 12 feet and after that he gets weaker. I’ve no idea why that happens, but here’s the explanation they give: “It’s like a sculptor rolling the clay figure of a man between his hands until it grows longer and longer! But the longer it grows the weaker it becomes, until it finally snaps!” Uh-huh.

You get the feeling in all of this that they just needed a set of rules for Ant-Man/Giant-Man to operate by, and that they weren’t too concerned that readers would stop to ask too many questions. So when the whole idea of popping a pill to grow or shrink got a bit too awkward they simply had Hank come up with a modification to his helmet that allows him to change size by controlling his “mental energy” in “mentally activated cybernetic impulses.” In other words, he just has to think about getting bigger or smaller! And not only that, he can make the Wasp bigger or smaller with the same helmet (though otherwise he has to still rely on the pills).

This final point underlines what is perhaps the most jarring thing about these comics. Coming out during the height of the Cold War (1962-64), the bad guys are often looped into the Red menace. The commies even apparently killed Hank Pym’s first wife, a story quickly told in flashback. None of that dates the action as much though as the gender roles in the relationship between Hank and Janet van Dyne (who becomes the Wasp in part to avenge her father). Hank is protective of Janet, which is something she rejects in a pseudo-feminist way. “He treats me like a scatterbrained little girl,” she protests to herself, “and I want him to think of me as a full-fledged woman . . . a woman in love!” After all, “He may go for all that adventure jazz, but I go for big, wonderful, dreamy him!” This is awful stuff, and it’s everywhere. Even when Ant-Man and the Wasp discuss matters of international importance with a room full of officials her thought bubble off to the side only reveals “Mmmm, if there’s one thing I like, it’s being in a room full of men!”

There is a lot of this, and it’s representative of a real weak spot in Marvel’s imagining of female characters at the time, which I guess goes back to Stan Lee. Lee’s stories are wonderfully inventive and a lot of fun, but he had trouble with women and imagining real relationships. For all her feistiness, Janet is a throwback to a stereotypical female model. Even after becoming a superhero she revels in a role as fashion icon, and the Wasp with her “dainty wings” and “tiny, delicate antennae” is a modern-day Tinkerbell. The fact that Hank can control her size changes by his helmet, and that she can’t grow big but only smaller, reinforces this. He’s also the brains as well the brawn, and when he gives her an air-compressor weapon that he’s invented so she’ll have a bit more firepower it’s like he’s giving a toy to a child.

So that’s the downside here. What I loved is the way the reduced scale, at least of the early stories, gave us simpler stories that were all the more effective for not being about fighting wildly powerful archvillains. Sure there are some aliens and transdimensional interlopers here, but the guys I enjoyed more are the bitter losers with a grudge against the world, like Egghead (who even retires to a flophouse after first being bested by Ant-Man), the Human Top, Trago (“the man with the magic trumpet”), and the Porcupine. I was curious whatever happened to these guys, and wasn’t too surprised that (at least in these earlier iterations) both Egghead and the Porcupine died in action in later years, while the Human Top turned into Whirlwind. They’re B-listers, after all, but no less fun for all that.

Along with this goon squad we get a lot of low-tech action that’s also the perfect foil for today’s bloated cosmic, multiverse nonsense. On two different occasions first Ant-Man and then the Wasp tie the bad guy’s shoelaces together to make him trip! At another point Ant-Man unstrings a pearl necklace and rolls the pearls across the floor to send the Protector for a tumble. Then, when the Protector sucks Ant-Man up into a vacuum bag, our hero cuts his way free and uses a fan to blow the dust from the bag into the Protector’s face, blinding him and making him sneeze (“My eyes!! I can’t see!! Ah – Ah – Chooo!!!”). That’s good enough to allow the police to capture him and take him away.

Trying to catch Ant-Man leads the not-so-supervillains to some similarly modest stratagems. I just mentioned the vacuum cleaner. Fly paper? Sure. And here’s something really nasty: take away his growth pills and toss him in a half-full bathtub! How is he going to get out of that? Or, most devious of all, how about hunting him down with . . . an anteater! Now that’s playing dirty pool! And even that’s one-upped by the Magician, who has a killer bunny! “Only the Magician could have trained a rabbit to be an obedient beast of prey! Go, my pet . . . catch those two fools for your master!” That’s not quite Monty Python level of funny, but it’s getting close.

I hope that all gives some idea of the highs and lows in this volume. Like I say, it’s silly stuff but for the most part makes a refreshing change of pace from the later excesses of the Marvel multiverse. The 1960s shouldn’t seem so long ago, but much has changed, and in these pages you can really feel some of the distance between then and now.

Graphicalex