Storytime with Annotations: TALES TO ASTONISH# 39 and 44, Ant-Man and the Wasp
Ant-Man and the Wasp ask, "Wanna get small?"
We're back in June 1963, where in TALES TO ASTONISH# 44, Ant-Man is about to get a partner. The Ant-Man strip had never seemed to really get its footing. It was a tricky assignment for artists, because the hero couldn't really be shown interacting with others... if he was drawn close-up, a normal human was just a foot or part of a face; if the normal guy was drawn fully, Ant-Man was just a little dot. And, let's face it, shrinking to ant size was not as exciting as other super-powers. Most Marvel heroes tapped into primal wish fulfilment fantasies for adolescent boys (that is, to be big and strong and able to thrash bullies soundly. Flying and starting fires and doing somersaults were secondary.) Even after the Wasp arrived, the strip faltered. The main character gained the power to grow to twelve feet high, but he still didn't quite catch on and both stars went on sabbatical while their berth in TALES TO ASTONISH by filled by Sub-Mariner.
Whoa. Getting a little bombastic about Ant-Man, aren't we? That's Ernie Hart, Golden Age staffer responsible mostly for funny animal strips, here writing as "H E Huntley." I've often thought that Ant-Man's problem was that he operated in a world bursting with the likes of Thor, Captain America and Spider-Man, and he was overshadowed. In our real world, someone who invented a way to become an inch tall or to actually communicate with and control ants... well, the Nobel Prize would be just the start. Pym's inventions would have revolutionized medicine, agriculture,any number of fields. Even if he limited himself to being a spy or detective, he would have been incredibly successful. But he wanted to be a super-hero, which is where he went wrong.
Jack Kirby is credited with "art" not layouts, so I gather he did full pencils here. Inks by Don Heck leave me blase. Heck did make women prettier but he weakened the monster. That creature from Kosmos probably looked more solid and intimidating in the pencils.
Then it's flashback time. I'm sorry, Dr Pym, but getting nagged into going to Cold War Hungary with your expatriate wife is, what's the word? Stupid. Of COURSE they'll know Mrs Henry Pym is the former Maria Trovaya. I'm not sure why her father was so important, I guess he was a scientist who fled to America, but yes, the dirty Commie Overlords would keep tabs on him and his family. It doesn't take a spy network to follow what happened to ex-Comrade Trovaya's daughter, especially if she obligingly insists on coming back to Hungary (which, in 1963, was not exactly a popular spot for American tourists).
Well, there's a classic motivation for adventure heroes. I get the feeling Pym knew Professor Trovaya well, maybe he was working with him and that's how he met Maria. There's a strangely prophetic moment here as the distraught Pym searches hopelessly for Maria's killers and ends up on the edge of a mental and physical breakdown. In later years, he will have all sorts of emotional and psychological problems, but we see here they didn't come out of nowhere. Almost from the start, size-changing was harmful to his mind and body, and things never came easy for him. To be honest, the trauma most super-heroes endure would wreck any normal person's mental balance; we're just lucky that powers are bestowed by fate on people with exceptional resilience and perspective. Or maybe on those are dumb and tough.
"Go to the ants, thou sluggard." Ha. It's a good thing Maria didn't tell him, "The early bird catches the worm," we'd have a super-hero called the Early Bird. I don't care for this little revision. In the original non-superhero origin in TALES TO ASTONISH# 27, Henry Pym experimented with his shrinking serum and accidentally got into a journey into an ant colony. It was this nightmarish first-hand experience that got him interested in ants, which works better in my opinion.
Ant-Man's big problem was that he got forced into the Marvel universe as a whole. He worked fine on his own.
They probably should've played him more up as a detective/spy than a super hero, the ability to shrink into near invisibility is very powerful is written right.
Again, we see the attitude that the Ant-Man is a major force for law and order in the world. Actually, Henry Pym took himself way too seriously even dealing with peers. Forming the Avengers, he took it for granted he was just as powerful and important as Iron Man, Thor or the Hulk. And they went along with it, humoring him because his specialized abilities were often useful;.
>Most Marvel heroes tapped into primal wish fulfilment fantasies for adolescent boys
Shrinking down and spying on girls changing isn't an adolescent fantasy?
I agree. One idea that might have been interesting was for Pym to use Ant-Man secretly. Gathering information, nabbing crooks, all done without exposing himself any more than he had to. Think of Ant-Man being an urban legend criminals tell each other but no one is sure if he even exists.
It wasn't mine.
Turning invisible and spying on girls, well sure.
Then we meet Vernon van Dyne and his daughter. (Cue either funky porn music or the sweeping LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING, as Jan and Hank meet.)I don't see any resemblance between Maria or Jan, do you? Not a bit. And twice in a few minutes, he reflects that she's just a child. Is Janet jailbait or what? I think she must be at least eighteen, when her father dies she runs around on her own without any sort of court-ordered guardian visible. Say she's just out of high school and ready for college and Hank is what? In his early 30s? And what is Jan's father going on about? Henry Pym specializes in insect communication and shrinking people (as he says). How is this going to be useful regarding a gamma beam signal sent into outer space? I dunno. Maybe Janet is getting on her father's nerves and he's introducing her to nice young scientists in hopes of getting her out of his hair.
Dang. Get into those captions. The fluid-life Creature from Kosmos is like a "cloud of snakes." Ernie Hart really lays on the descriptions. Whoops, there goes Professor van Dyne. Don't even ask what happened to his wife. If I had a nickel for every time I read a pulp or comic with a scientist who has a beautiful daughter and a dead offstage wife, I could.. ah. Let me see. Well, I could buy a soda and Subway club. Anyway, now it's Janet's turn to lose a loved one and get that avenging urge. You know, Henry Pym is not the nicest guy in the world, he's abrasive and egocentric from his origin story on. Why does he dismiss Jan's tearful pleading as a bit of fooling around by a bored society playgirl. Notice the pipe. In the early 1960s, many Marvel heroes posed with a pipe when they wanted to look manly and intellectual at the same time.
Does Ant-Man have some sort of loudspeaker built into his helmet so people can hear him? I suppose so. Otherwise he would sound like the poor guy at the end of THE FLY, only worse. As dramatic as this is, Janet seemed to come to terms with her father's death right away. I don't recall him being mentioned again, certainly she did not become a stern compulsive vigilante. Maybe they weren't that close, he was her mother's second husband or something. And it's a great touch that the ants desert Pym. They're afraid of the alien creature. I wish this terror of something truly unknown was played up more often, usually we get a casual, "Oh, it's an alien being from another planet. What's up?"
Think back before you were horndogs, think back to childhood. It's becoming small and seeing the world from that new perspective, going into things to see what's inside and how they work, turning a candy into a cake, turning your toys life-size and your desktop into a playground.
Thanks OP, I love Ant-Man.
I have a fondness for the character. He was such an underdog in early Silver Age Marvel. Lots of Ant-Man and Wasp coming up.
>And twice in a few minutes, he reflects that she's just a child. Is Janet jailbait or what? I think she must be at least eighteen, when her father dies she runs around on her own without any sort of court-ordered guardian visible.
She seemed to be written as younger than Sue, but older than Johnny, so probably 19-20 or so. Old enough to live on her own, but young enough that an adult man would think of her as "too young to have had much life experience".
Some classic worked-up dialogue here from both of them. It's melodrama but sometimes melodrama is appropriate. Then Jan gets her wings and antennae (although they only sprout when she's tiny.. I guess they're wasp-sized and under her skin when she's normal. I love the second panel, showing the operation. You can tell Kirby did the pencils. The machine has probes that contact her where the wings and antennae are being implanted; I don't know why she has to put on that space-age outfit or what it does, but I'm sure it's Very Science. Early, Hank was thinking he needed a partner, which is why he prepared the specialized cells. Now we see he also whipped up an unstable molecule costume. It's interesting to think he didn't necesaarily have a female partner in mind. The Wasp outfit does seem a bit aimed at a woman wearing it, what with that tunic design, but then Kirby had no trouble putting his male characters in kilts, as witness Iron Man, Darkseid, Hercules. Stan Lee didn't care for boy sidekicks, he just didn't like them, otherwise the Wasp might have been another Bucky or Robin.
You know, now that you mention it, yeah. It wasn't a favorite childhood daydream as flying or invisibility was. But there was an afternoon or two in the backyard where I imagined running around in the grass, maybe getting chased by a spider or something.
So long ago. One thing they don't tell you about getting old is the vast amount of memories you can browse through.
Jan really saved the Ant-Man/Giant-Man strip. The banter between her and Hank is a delight to read.
Yes, I have a panel later on where she's in her ritzy apartment answering the phone.
And even if Henry Pym is not THAT old, mid-thirties at the most, he has that stuffy self-important attitude where he sees himself as the voice of wisdom,
Janet is gonna shake that up, stay tuned!
Early Janet had the same kind of flirty attitude college era Mary Jane had, so I'd put her at 3 years older than Marvel's original batch of "teen-ager characters" (ie Peter, Johnny and the X-men).
Heck was good at drawing people in general. People always bring up his romance comics, but he was really good at westerns too.
Absolutely! Jan was one of the very few characters I found to be actually funny. Her back and forth with the too-serious Henry reminded me of the THIN MAN movies,
Check out this panel:
I warmed up to Don Heck when I saw some of his early 1950s horror comics. Quite atmospheric and detailed.
My theory is that during the Marvel era, Heck was rushed and turning out pages quick to make a living at a low page rate. He inked his own pencils and inked other artists too, and i feel he wasn't producing what he was fully capable of.
I don't think it's that much of a revision, really. The accident in TTA27 is what gave him an interest in ants, while this new flashback explains why he chose to use his new inventions to fight crime as a superhero. There's no real implication here that the ant proverb specifically brought around an interest in ants, he seems to treat that more as an amusing coincidence..
"The voice of the insect world.." That's eerie. So, why didn't Ant-Man give himself wings? Because on a metatextual level, it would have made the Wasp redundant. She contribute flight to the partnership. Whoa, settle down there, Janet. Did the shrinking gas stir your hormones or something? That falling in love sure popped up from nowhere. Then again, her father was just killed and now she's under the mentoring of a self-assured older man. Maybe her feelings are confused at the moment.
Here's a Heck western example. He was much better at drawing faces than action.
Again with the "child" stuff! Knock it off, Henry, she's not fifteen. But when we get the original Henry Pym story from TALES TO ASTONISH# 27, we see he was always egotistical and full of himself. Also, if she does remind him of his late wife, Pym must be feeling his loss stirred up again and he resents Jan for it. I always like the way Pym hurtles miles through the air and crashes into a mass of obliging ants. Some of them must be injured or even killed. My theory is that ants have a very low sense of individual self, they regard themselves as parts of a whole and some get sacrificed as no big deal.
Ernie Hart is doing a good job at presenting the creature as something truly apalling and unnatural "Don't look at it!" It seems more genuinely alien than the usual ET. And there's the final bit of dialogue that sounds like the Wasp we'll get to know.. "Yes SIR, boss man!" Janet wasn't a former Navy SEAL or State Trooper or anything like that, she actually was a spoiled headstrong young debutante and she acted like one. This goes over badly with a lot of modern fans who want women characters to all be strong-independent-multiple skilled-tough asskickers. That's not who Janet van Dyne was, she had a lot of Katherine Hepburn from BRINGING UP BABY in her.
That's a lot more detailed and substantial than his Marvel work. I wonder sometimes how today's artist would feel about turning out two twenty-odd page stories each month? (In Kirby's case, more often three with a bunch of covers and some layouts to break new artists in,)
Modern fans suck, 60s Jan was great fun.
Notice the black shape on Ant-Man front and back resembles an ant. Later on, it would become simplified to simple vertical stripes like suspenders, just another good design gone downhill. Also, the Wasp's legs reverse Ant-Man's colors. This was also a Golden Age thing, where Captain America and Bucky had leggings and boots the reverse color of each other.