Marvel Compass #3

Tales To Astonish #27

 “It works! I've done it!!" -Henry Pym

"The Man In the Ant Hill" by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Inks by Dick Ayers, Colors by Stan Goldberg, Letters by Artie Simek
                         

In the splash page opening, like blood flowing through your veins after a wound, a man is being chased by hundreds of ants through their colony.
Having successfully shrunk a chair, a scientist named Henry Pym declares that his formula is ready. He pours a growth serum onto the chair, turning it back to normal size. Henry recalls a science convention months ago, where his peers had mocked him for his wild theories. He tells them he will show them all, and prove to be a better scientist than any of them. While working on his formula, he envisions a world where he can shrink items to reduce shipping costs, and able to shrink an entire army so they will all fit in one plane.
Back in the present, Henry uses the shrinking serum on himself, and begins to shrink. Too fast it turns out, suddenly he is reduced smaller than a blade of grass. He quickly runs out of his lab to the outside. Henry has left the growing serum on a table out of reach, and cannot turn back to normal height without it. As he runs through his lawn some ants working on their ant hill hear his shouting, and run towards him, ready to attack.
Henry Pym outruns the ants and uses their ant hill to escape. Falling through their colony, he lands in a puddle of honey. He struggles with the sticky honey, when an ant spots him. Coming towards Henry, the ant offers a limb which the scientist grabs to pull himself out with. Henry spots a matchstick poking out of the ground, as more ants start to come after him. He throws a pebble, striking the match head.
The fire keeping the ants at bay, Henry climbs up a lasso he has made to the top of a cliff. Up there another ant awaits him, but he manages to knock it down using Judo. He flees the ant colony outside to right next to his building where he spots his enlarging serum on his windowsill. The ants come out and begin to rush him, Henry spots the one that rescued him out of the honey, and signals to the window to it. The ant comprehends, and Henry mounts the ant up the wall of his building to the waiting serum.
Bathed in the serum, Henry grows back to his normal size. He decides to dump what is left of his formulas, so there will be no danger of them being used on an unprepared society. When he sees his science peers again, he tells them that his experiment simply did not work.

Bearings

• Henry Pym will appear again in Tales To Astonish #35

Notes/Observations/Thoughts

• Our second superhero. Not yet, but in his next appearance he will be able to communicate with ants more fully, and begin many new adventures, as Ant-Man. Not many of them are all that good, but we might find something interesting as we go through them. At least they only take up about 8 pages of story.

• I love that of all things, the benefits Henry Pym thinks up for his serum, is a reduced shipping rate. How would those items then get back to normal size?

• A lot of this reminds me of Alice in Wonderland with all the growing and shrinking going on.

• Not a whole lot more to say about this issue. A lot of good shading effects by Ayers in this story. It's a bit of a stealth origin, since I don't think Stan or Jack had in mind turning him into a hero until later, when their hero books started to become successful and decided to bring him back for competition with DC's The Atom.

• I’m not going to talk about the other 2 stories in this issue, just the Marvel Universe related one. This goes for the other anthology titles. I just want to focus on that for these Marvel Compass segments. Maybe somewhere down the line I’ll feature some of those in a different section.

Quotes

“Then, you shall know I’m a greater scientist than any of you!" -Henry Pym

“Nobody *gasp* can even hear my small, weak voice now!" -Henry Pym

The images, story, and all character names on this page are trade marked Marvel Characters, and used without permission. No infringement is intended.