Tales To Astonish #27

Tales To Astonish #27 (1962)
by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber & Jack Kirby
cover by Jack Kirby

The Fantastic Four are the only Marvel superheroes at this time, as this story shares the cover story of Fantastic Four #2… in fact this wasn’t even intended to be the origin of a superhero.

I guess the ants are green on the cover to make people believe they’re giant or aliens, but no, they’ regular ants as shown in the GORGEOUS teaser page.

Dr. Pym is not the first person we’ve see to develop shrinking technology, but unlike the Atom what he shrinks doesn’t explode.

No wonder he will have multiple psychotic breakdowns in his life, his origin story follows the most classic supervillain formula.

Fiction would be so much boring if its scientists actually knew what the scientific method is.
Instead, Dr. Pym immediately jumps to testing the shrinking serum on himself for no real reason.

The serum shrinks him more than he anticipated, and he accidentally drops out of his house’s door.
At his size, that’s like “accidentally” stepping out of a football field while you’re at the center.

Ant fact: ants don’t actually hear sounds. They sense vibrations, and I doubt an ant-sized human creates enough to be sensed.

Look I don’t know what I would do if I found myself chased by giant ants, but the last place where I would go in that situation would be THEIR ANTHILL.

Ant fact: they don’t store honey, but some store honeydew.
I don’t know much about this, but after checking out its Wikipedia article I stopped at the second sentence once I ran into the phrase “the sugary high-pressure liquid is forced out of the anus of the insects”.

For some reason an ant saves him (???), right before he finds a matchstick that ants took into the anthill.

Ant fact: most commont ants are between 3 and 7 millimiters long (0.11 to 0.27 inches) and a typical matchstick is about 5 centimeters long (1.96 inches).
At the most generous that translates into the matchstick being to seven times bigger than the ant’s body length. Ants deciding to carry one inside an anthill is even less likely than Dr. Pym successfully igniting it by throwing rocks.

Where else but in comics you can find a man using judo to defeat an ant?

Ant fact: they get really, REALLY upset if you set fire to their house.

And the story would have a gruesome ending if it wasn’t for the unnamed ant who saves Pym TWICE.

Returning to normal size, Dr. Pym destroys the serum and vows to never ever use it again.

He will start using them again in five months.

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Historical significance:  8/
Henry Pym is absolutely instrumental in the development of the Marvel Universe, even if he does fall off popularity quite often.

Silver Age-ness: 8/
Don’t tell me you already forgot the ant judo.

Does it stand the test of time? 6/
Think of the most generic “scientist accidentally shrinks himself down” story you could possibly imagine and add a scene where he judos an ant, and you have this.
Unless you get Jack Kirby to pencil it and the protagonist later turns into a superhero, not many people will care about it.

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How close is this to the modern character? 3/
There’s a touch of madness that will haunt Pym over the years and there’s the absurd overlap of talents, but not much else.

As mentioned, it will take Pym five months before he shrinks again and becomes Ant-Man.

He didn’t stay still in those months: fascinated by ants, and perhaps by the way the ant that saved him proved more intelligent than expected, he invents a helmet that allows him to talk to ants.
This is a core aspect of the character: being a world-class genius in areas that are wildly unrelated to each other.
He’s not like Reed Richards in the sense that he’s not shown to be an expert at anything remotely connected to science. Pym is just randomly a supergenius for very specific fields.

Pym takes on the identity of Ant-Man, and exactly like the Atom he retains his human strength even when he shrinks down.
That was definitely not the case in the previous issue, and honestly it won’t be consistent over the years.

I don’t rule out eventually doing a mini-retrospective on his Tales To Astonish series, because it’s COMPLETELY BONKERS.

The character wasn’t exactly a hit.

I loved Ant-Man, but the stories were never really successful. In order for Ant-Man to be successful, he had to be drawn this small next to big things and you would be getting pictures that were visually interesting. The artists who drew him, no matter how much I kept reminding them, they kept forgetting that fact. They would draw him standing on a tabletop and they would draw a heroic-looking guy. I would say, ‘Draw a matchbook cover next to him, so we see the difference in size.’ But they kept forgetting. So when you would look at the panels, you thought you were looking at a normal guy wearing an underwear costume like all of them. It didn’t have the interest.
STAN LEE

He would get a sidekick when the Wasp was introduced in #44 (I will review that), three months before both characters became founding members of the Avengers.
He would ditch the Ant-Man identity to change size in the other direction, becoming Giant-Man in Tales to Astonish #49 by the end of the same year.
If the effects of your growth pill last longer than four hours, see a doctor.

He would co-star with Wasp until Tales To Astonish #69 in 1965.
Changing identities would become Pym’s other key trait, becoming Goliath in Avengers #28 in 1966 (with a costume designed by Scarlet Witch!) and Yellowjacket in Avengers #59 in 1968, the issue before he marries Wasp.

The two would star very often on the Avengers and have occasional short series elsewhere.
Then Pym’s life… and the character’s legacy… would be impacted forever by Avengers #213, written by Jim Shooter.

If you’re a very casual comics reader, and especially if you’ve never read an Avengers comic before, there are exactly two ways you can possibly know about Pym.
It’s either because he’s in the MCU, or because of this panel.

The reputation of being a wifebeater has haunted the character ever since, but it’s blown way out of proportion in several ways.
First of all, this needs some context: at this point Pym has suffered a complete mental breakdown, and it’s not even his first. This is his absolute rock bottom.
So yes, he DID beat his wife… but the comic is doing anything BUT placing this in a good light!
In fact, Pym ends the story completely and utterly disgraced, and that’s even BEFORE the Avengers kick him out.

In 2011, Jim Shooter gave his account on the reaction to the storyline.

During the time the story was running, I got a great deal of hate mail.  It worried me enough to ask Stan what he thought.  He said he got the same kind of mail in the ‘60’s regarding Peter Parker’s various romantic travails.  He asked me how Avengers sales were doing.  They were in fact, increasing by 10,000 copies per issue.  Stan said that people obviously cared passionately about what was happening to Hank and Janet, as if they were real people.  That’s the key.  And he said, “Don’t worry about the mail.”
JIM SHOOTER

He also says that that was not the way the scene was supposed to play out.

There is a scene in which Hank is supposed to have accidentally struck Jan while throwing his hands up in despair and frustration—making a sort of “get away from me” gesture while not looking at her.  Bob Hall, who had been taught by John Buscema to always go for the most extreme action, turned that into a right cross!  There was no time to have it redrawn, which, to this day has caused the tragic story of Hank Pym to be known as the “wife-beater” story.
JIM SHOOTER

That defense sounds a bit shaky, considering the same issue has a scene with the Wasp having a black eye…

…but artist Bob Hall doesn’t exactly confirm or deny it.

I never heard Jim’s side of the story. He never said he didn’t like the slap panel — on the other hand, I can’t imagine that he did. I would never have drawn that panel two or three years later and I certainly wouldn’t draw it now the way I did then.
I have no memory of how the panel was described in the synopsis but the Marvel method gave you lot of lee way. What I interpreted then might have been quite different from how I would look at it now. I can’t imagine Shooter would not have asked for a re-draw had there been time.
I hope this clarifies things a bit. I’m not ashamed of the issue — I did the best I could then — but I in this instance, I don’t doubt Jim’s story.
BOB HALL

Also Shooter (who would quit the series pretty soon) had a redemption arc in mind. Which is kind of what happened anyway, just more slowly.

My plan was to bring all birds to roost, to have him break down, lose his beloved wife, fail catastrophically, end up in prison….hit bottom. Then come back, become a great hero and save the world. The ultimate fall from grace and redemption. The very stuff of heroes.
JIM SHOOTER

I have never had a problem believing Pym’s redemption arc. The first issue when I started reading Avengers regularly is at the beginning of the Roger Stern run, specifically a story that details the entire history of the character.
And the issue with his aforementioned breakdown was in the very first batch of back issues I ever purchased, so I have fond memories of the entire thing.

After his last showdown against Egghead, Pym would then move to a supporting character on West Coast Avengers during the Englehart run.
Where he hits rock bottom again, coming extremely close to suicide.

But Englehart completes the redemption arc by making him find the will to live an rejoin the team.
Not with any super-identity, but simply as Doctor Pym: he can how change sizes of objects by touching them. Presumably including the lengthy scarf he wears for a couple of issues there.

But he would later become a superhero again, switching back and forth between being Giant-Man and Yellowjacket.

In 2007, after Wasp was presumed dead following Secret Invasion, Pym took her codename until her return.

The most notable point of that era is that Eternity appointed him as Scientist Supreme, the scientific counterpart of the Sorcerer Supreme.

I like the idea of the Scientist Supreme, but the explanation for why Pym was chosen was clunky.

The same series has Loki claiming it was his lie. Far from me to trust Loki, but if the Scientist Supreme was a thing, I think it would have come up in other series and it seems to have been dropped.

If Dan Slott was the writer to bring Pym to his most triumphant incarnation, he also wrote his biggest downfall when he merged with Ultron in 2019.
Well technically his body merged with Ultron, since Pym was basically dead and Ultron had been wearing his corpse.

But after Ultron absorbed the powers of Odin and became All-Father Ultron in 2022… because comics…

…Pym would eventually be resurrected through a mixture of complicated time travel shenanigans and magic nonsense.
This made him age a lot and understandably made him decide to stay as far from superheroes as possible. At least until the next writer.

It has not been an easy journey for the character.

And no matter how many times creators have tried to redeem the character and put him back on a noble, heroic path and have him express his sorrow and express how he and Jan have moved on past that moment — and quite honestly, most of the people who dislike these attempts haven’t even read that story or understood that moment within the context of the original story, which was “Hank is having a nervous breakdown and is not in his right mind” — that became what the character is about. And part of that is because that was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to that character, and so that really cemented it.
TOM BREVOORT

If you have problems keeping track of his changes of identities, here’s an useful summary:

Doctor Pym -> Ant-Man -> Giant-Man -> Goliath -> Yellowjacket -> Ant-Man -> Yellowjacket -> Dr. Pym -> Giant-Man -> Yellowjacket -> Wasp -> Giant-Man -> Ultron -> Doctor Pym

And yes, I actually do remember 90% of that sequence without looking it up.

Time will tell if he gets back into the spotlight.

Leaving aside the wifebeater problem, there’s also the fact that most of his other identities already have OTHER successors, and that applies to ALL of them!
The primary Ant-Man has been Scott Lang since 1981.
While there isn’t exactly another Giant-Man, Scott’s daughter Stature has the same power.
There was a villainous and female Yellowjacket around for a while.
There has been a villainous Goliath (who later became a hero with Thunderbolts) and more than one Black Goliath.
We currently have TWO Wasps, the original and Pym’s daughter Nadia… who being a supergenius like him could potentially be called Doctor Pym one day.
And it’s not like Marvel has a shortage of super-geniuses.

But still, if the few appearances since his last status quo are an indication, he did find a sweet spot in playing the scientist who goes along comics nonsense.

It’s kind of a miracle that Pym didn’t turn into an outright supervillain out of jealousy.
Think of all the Fantastic Four villains whose motivation is proving to be smarter than Reed Richards and don’t tell me Pym doesn’t fit shockingly well with their profile!