TALES TO ASTONISH #38 (1962)
by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber & Jack Kirby
I get that he stars on “Tales to Astonish”, but… “the most astonishing hero in comics”? Really?
Ant-Man is probably one of the worst-aged serials of the very early Marvel, but Jack Kirby is still Jack Kirby.
Little know fact, but Ant-Man nearly stopped all crime on his own.
Which is why the mob is contracting supergenius Egghead to stop him!
He reasons that Ant-Man is able to talk to ants, so naturally as an atomic scientist he can easily build a device that can translate ant.
I wonder what he’s going to tell the ants.
Well actually he’s surprisingly articulate.
The plan works (SOMEHOW): Ant-Man shows up at the museum, and Egghead traps him inside a box of flypaper.
However Ant-Man escapes thanks to the springs in his boots. Yes, really.
I’m not entirely sure WHY he needed the springs, though: Ant-Man has the strength of a regular human even when he shrinks… so shouldn’t he be able to jump out of the box on his own!?
The the help of ants, he’s able to trap all of Egghead’s gang beneath a giant sheet of flypaper.
And just how was Ant-Man able to do this? Because the ants refused to betray him!
Also the flypaper didn’t work because Ant-Man took a bath in “a special oily chemical”.
Why is he naked doing this? Shouldn’t covering the costume with the chemical be enough!?!?
Also the ants helped preventing the mobsters from leaving the scene.
(As an aside, an image search for “ant car” brings up several stock drawings of ants driving cars. The Internet is a weird place.)
And so we end with Egghead being depressed about being defeated by ants.
And really, can you blame the guy?
Historical significance: 3/10
Egghead does have the slightest bit of significance for the Avengers.
Silver Age-ness: 10/10
In future stories, Ant-Man’s relationship with his ants is (relatively) more realistic… but here it’s pretty obvious the ants are fully sapient!!!
Does it stand the test of time? 0/10
Is this still a fun read? Absolutely! Can you do ANY of this today and be taken seriously? Not a chance!
How close is this to the modern character? 10/10
Considering he’s not exactly a complex character, all the basic facts are already present.
Egghead was Ant-Man’s nemesis in his own series, returning a few times with… less than stellar plots.
He didn’t really translate into an Avengers villain until 1982, where he assembled the Masters of Evil to engineer the final demise of his nemesis…
…and in the same story ended up being killed by Hawkeye.
Being dead provided Egghead with a small rise in popularity: whenever there’s a scene set in the past that required an oddball super-genius, Egghead is often there as we’ve seen before.
He was resurrected in 2015 and has faced a couple of different Ant-Mans, retaining the dignity you might expect for a guy called Egghead.
Most of the “deadly perils” Ant-Man found himself in could be circumvented or defeated by just remembering to use his enlarging gas. Stuck in flypaper? Grow to human size, beat up Egghead. Menaced by an anteater? Grow to human size, beat up Egghead. I suppose Egghead might anticipate it and shoot Ant-Man with a gun, but Egghead would probably consider that too mundane for a genius (snicker) like himself.