Marvel Compass #11

Tales To Astonish #35

 “Now it is time to use another formula of mine..." -Henry Pym

The Return of the Ant-Man 

by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber & Jack Kirby, Inking by Dick Ayers, Letters by John Duffy
                         

After a brief retelling of his origin, we find Henry Pym has decided to restore his shrinking potion. This time instead of throwing it away, he chooses to keep it hidden in a safe in his office. Since his previous adventure, Henry has started to study up on ants, in particular how they communicate. After months of work, he uses this knowledge to create a special helmet devised to communicate with ants.

The same day that Henry has finished the work on his helmet, he receives a top secret project from the US government, to develop a formula to create a gas that makes people immune to radiation (WHAT?!!). It helps that Henry Pym also find this a bit far-fetched “What won’t those government boys ask for next?!” but not by much.

After weeks of work are put into this anti-radiation formula, some reds gets wind of this project. They decide to notify some of their agents in the US to steal the formula for themselves. The agents burst into Henry Pym’s lab with guns drawn. The red agents try to get information out of Pym, but he refuses and tells them that he’s the only one who knows the whole formula, while his assistants each only know part of it. The reds threaten that they will blow the lab up after they have gotten the information they need.

As the agents leave Henry’s office, he notices another agent posted outside his window, so he can’t slip out that way. At least not in his normal form. He suddenly dons his ant helmet and a suit he made, to prevent being wounded by ants. In his Ant-Man garb, he fashions a small contraption out of a rubber band around an ash tray. He takes the shrinking potion out of his safe, drinks it, shrinks, and uses the rubber band contraption to launch himself up to the window ledge. Ant-Man is able to crawl through a small crack in the window to reach the outside, where he lowers a string to climb his way down towards an ant hill.

Inside the ant hill, Ant-Man watches the colony and starts to get a feel for their vibrations. He tries to be stealthy but forgets that the ants can smell him, and the start to rush him. Ant-Man switches his helmet on to attempt to communicate with them. He manages to get most of them to stop, except for a vicious bull ant. Ant-Man lifts the ant up, suddenly realizing that while in his smaller form he pertains his normal human strength, and tosses the ant away. The bull ant returns to retaliate, seizing Ant-Man’s arm between it’s pincers. The pain his reduced due to Ant-Man’s steel mesh suit, and he punches the and out with some judo move. He tunes his helmet in again to the ants’ wavelength, getting them all to follow him.

Outside of the ant hill, Ant-Man is encountered by, what is to him, a massive beetle. He quickly digs a large hole beneath his own feet, and lures the beetle towards it. The beetle falls in and Ant-Man seals it up with dirt. Ant-Man mounts one of the ants under his control, as they all head back towards his lab.

Looking in through his window, Ant-Man sees that the red agents have gathered up all of his assistants tied up inside of his lab. He and his ants slip in through the window crack, and he starts to untie one of his assistant’s ropes. The assistant feels something on his hand, and tries to shake it off, unintentionally knocking Ant-Man off. He is caught by his swarm of ants. Eventually Ant-Man manages to loosen his assistant’s bound hands.

Ant-Man realizes he still needs to deal with the red agents’ guns. He uses his helmet to tell the ants to swarm all over one of the enemies. They comply and begin the sting and bite him all over, forcing the gun from his hand. Once on the floor, the gun’s barrel is infiltrated by more ants producing large amounts of honey inside to jam it up. Swarmed with ants, the red agents all drop their weapons, frantically trying to get the ants off of them. As they do this, Henry Pym’s science team have gotten loose.

While the scientists take care of the situation, Ant-Man mounts an ant to sneak back into his office, where his growth serum is. After bathing in it, he turns back to normal human size, takes off his outfit, and joins the others so they won’t get suspicious. The science team keep the reds bound as they were, until officers will arrive to deal with them. Henry Pym ponders if he’ll ever have to become Ant-Man again, as the shadow of Ant-Man looms behind him on the wall.

Bearings

• Ant-Man will return in the next issue of Tales To Astonish. (These bearings will work better once we’re fully into the Marvel Universe and it’s harder to tell which way is up.)

Notes/Observations/Thoughts

• This was okay, nothing great. I like the adventures of Ant-Man better when he’s outside and in the ant colony, than when he’s dealing with the typical commie villains. If they had focused more on that kind of action, I think Ant-Man’s stories would have been a lot more fun, than what we will get in issues to come.

• Anti-radiation gas. WHAT?!! Wouldn’t this still be a pretty big deal, even in the Marvel Universe where things like Unstable Molecules and Pym Particles and Atlantean technology exist? I can suspend my belief on a great number of things in the Marvel Universe, since I know the history with Kree and the High Evolutionary and Atlantis and visits by the Celestials. And even then there’s all the magic and other dimensions. (I know all of that doesn’t exist yet, but it’s a lot more fun to me of thinking that way.) Maybe there’s leftover technological advances that make some of these things work, that we don’t have access to in our reality. But an anti-radiation gas still seems like a big deal.

• Henry Pym sure gets invested in things rather intensely, I wonder if this type of behavior will have any ramifications later on...

Quotes

“If I could discover what their electronic wavelength is, I could tune in and learn more about them!” -Henry Pym

“Ants! They’re all over me!! Hundreds of them!!” -Red agent

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