Strange Tales: The Human Torch solo stories

IT'S FAIRLY WELL RECORDED that at the beginning of the 1960s, when Marvel publisher Martin Goodman instructed editor and head writer Stan Lee to kick off a superhero team comic to cash in on the success DC was having with Justice League, he wanted to revive Timely's Golden Age characters The Human Torch, Captain America and The Sub-Mariner.

The Human Torch had been the headline character in Marvel's first ever comic, Marvel Comics 1 (Oct 1939). When Stan was ordered to create a new superhero team book in 1961, Goodman wanted to re-use the Timely characters, but Stan went with The Fantastic Four, likely including The Human Torch to appease Goodman.

And if Stan had just meekly followed that order, it's doubtful that we would have a Marvel Comics today. At best, the company would probably have ended up as a curious footnote in the history of comics, and not the creative powerhouse it evolved into during the 1960s.

As good as Stan's instincts were, he did take a few mis-steps along the way. No shame in that. We learn only from our mistakes. The Incredibe Hulk was discontinued after just six issues, though the character would pop up as a guest star here and there until a new approach and a new home could be found for him. And Ant-Man too would struggle to find an audience during those formative years.

I actually enjoyed the exploits of both characters as a kid reading those books around 1963-1964, but I found it a bit inexplicable that The Human Torch enjoyed such a long run in Strange Tales.

Though I wouldn't have known it as the time, the lead Human Torch story in this early issue was during the period Stan was trying to hire in experienced scripters. This one was written by Superman co-creator and industry legend Jerry Siegel. Even so, his expository dialogue does squeeze Ayers' art literally into a corner.
Click on Image to expand.

I'm fairly sure that the first Strange Tales featuring the Human Torch I saw back in the early 1960s was issue 112 (Sep 1963), probably a year or so after it came out. The first of two stories written by Jerry Siegel, the issue was a good introduction to the character, as it established many strong plot points in its 13 pages. First there's the Spider-Man style sub-plot with tv commentator Ted Braddock attacking The Human Torch on air for being a hot-headed show-off ... not without cause, I have to say. The main plot has The Eel stealing a high-tech gadget from a scientist that turns out to be a miniature nuclear power supply. Just why a scientist is constructing a hazardous nuclear device in a populated area is never explored. The Torch goes after the Eel, runs into The Thing (see above page scan) and recovers the atomic device. But his troubles aren't over. The Torch's "flame molecules indicate the atomic pile will explode in a split second from now" and he flies the device into the stratosphere to contain the explosion with his own body. After that foolhardy but brave act, tv's Ted Braddock relents and decides The Torch is a hero after all, restoring the status quo.

Dick Ayers was inking Kirby's pencils on Fantastic Four at the same time as he was drawing The Human Torch in Strange Tales, so was the ideal artist (after Kirby) to be providing art for this FF spin-off. The first two panels are Ayer's art on The Human Torch. The third is an Ayers-inked panel of Kirby pencils from FF18, for comparison.

Yes, it is a little corny, and probably not how Stan would have scripted the same tale, but Dick Ayers' art is very good indeed here and it's very obvious he's doing his best to capture the spirit of Kirby, including typical "Kirby's Kast of Kharacters" shots, some strong action splash panels and good pacing. The only slight weakness, I was going to say, is Ayers' portrayal of The Thing. I've always thought that no one draws Ben Grimm as well as Kirby. But when I checked Fantastic Four 18, which came out the same month as Strange Tales 112 and was also inked by Dick Ayers - and it seems that Dick was drawing the Thing exactly as Kirby was ... or perhaps it was Ayers' inking that defined The Thing's look at the time.

The Lee-Ditko fantasy back-up story in Strange Tales 112 is a really good one, and the house ads for key first issues and equally important debut superhero annuals was very much a bonus for this newly-minted Marvelite.

Strange Tales 112 is rounded out with an absolute gem of a Lee-Ditko fantasy story, a pretty neat Larry Lieber-Paul Reinman sci-fi story and two great house ads for landmark Marvel comics. Weirdly, this issue didn't have Dr Strange. The character had first appeared in Strange Tales 110, with a follow-up adventure in ST111. He was missing from Strange Tales 112 and 113, so I had somehow stumbled across an anomalous patch of Strange-free Strange Tales.

But after this issue, I would go back to the beginning of the Torch run and start to amass a complete set of Strange Tales, plugging the gaps with the Marvel Tales reprints.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS KIRBY

When I began to back-fill my collection and got to read the earlier Strange Tales, a couple of major differences between the Torch in the Fantastic Four comics and this solo version became very obvious. The first was that plotter Stan and scripter Larry Lieber had tried to re-engineer the character so that he could have a secret identity and operate incognito in the small American town of Glenville where he was living. This made no sense to me as it was obvious from the Fantastic Four comic that the FF all lived in the Baxter Building, and that the public was well-aware that Johnny Storm was The Human Torch.

The story in Strange Tales 101 was a pretty daft, portraying The Human Torch as a superhero with a secret identity and having the villain revealed as "Charles Stanton, publisher of the town's newspaper. I can hardly believe it!" ... straight out of a Scooby-Doo cartoon.

Even dafter is Johnny explaining on the first page of Strange Tales 101 (Oct 1962) that, even though the townsfolk know Sue is Invisible Girl, no one knows he's The Human Torch. Really? They don't suspect Sue Storm's brother Johnny is the Human Torch? OK, if you say so ...

The only explanation I can think of is that Stan was trying to pitch these stories at a younger readership, who probably didn't read Fantastic Four. But even that is a bit shakey. Why would anyone think it was a good idea to pitch a character, whose power is to set himself alight, to small kids? And at this point, Fantastic Four was only up to issue 7, and wasn't yet exploring the slightly more grown-up themes that would start around the time of The Hate Monger story (FF21, Dec 1963), so I'm not convincing even myself, here.

The front cover of Strange Tales 102 almost seems to suggest that the Torch story is a back-up rather than a star attraction. Inside, The Wizard impersonates The Torch in order to discredit the young hero, a storyline that couldn't have been unfamiliar to comic readers of any age, and one that Stan would return to often.

Strange Tales 102 (Nov 1962) was a bit of an improvement. It introduced a major Marvel character, The Wizard, who would later go on the lead the Frightful Four and defeat the FF on a couple of occasions. The whole secret identity thing was hardly mentioned, though there is a scene where the Wizard douses Torch's flame, and Kirby draws the Torch's figure with his head still obscured by flames. But overall, there's more of a sense of menace here, with The Wizard portrayed as a smart and resourceful foe.

Interestingly, though the plot includes the cliche of the villain impersonating the hero to turn the public against him, the technology The Wizard uses to imitate The Torch's flame is not so dissimilar to the flame suit Reed builds for Johnny in Fantastic Four 39 (Jun 1965), after the team have lost their powers at the hands of ... The Wizard.

Strange Tales 103 (Dec 1962) gave us a Torch story that more resembled Stan's fantasy yarns than it did his superhero stuff. Check out the brazen Valeria (daughter of the despotic Zemu) using her feminine wiles on the hapless guard to effect Johnny's escape. That'll be the end of his career as an evil hench-person.

The next issue had an altogether more whimsical story, as its title "Prisoner of the 5th Dimension" might suggest. Again written by Lee/Lieber and drawn by Jack Kirby, the story seems to mesh together plots of two standard Stan Lee fantasy stories and tosses The Torch into the mix. The first plot is that of an alien disguised as an old man, scaring people away from an area so the aliens can invade. The second plot is the hero being transported to an alien world (in this case the 5th Dimension), then being helped by the beautiful daughter of the despotic ruler.

The Human Torch exhibits some powers that he doesn't seem to have over in the Fantastic Four comic. In this tale he can burrow through the earth using his flame power and create a tornado. He also manufactures a smoke screen and does skywriting (in neat block capitals that are almost as good as Artie Simek's) ... but I'm fairly sure I remember him pulling those stunts in the FF book, as well.

It's hard to say which aspect of Strange Tales villain Paste-Pot Pete is more ridiculous - his name or his costume. I doubt any of the parties involved would be able to remember why they portrayed him this way, but from this perspective, it doesn't seem to make any sense.

Strange Tales 104 (Jan 1963) was on sale the same month as Fantastic Four 10, and introduced a character who would go on to join forces with The Wizard and menace the FF in Fantastic Four 36 (Mar 1965). In these early appearance, Paste-Pot Pete was a depicted clownish figure, despite his criminal tendencies. Why Jack Kirby thought it was a good idea to draw him in a comedy artist's outfit, I really couldn't say. Perhaps Stan intended Pete to use his crazy appearance to make the police think he was harmless, until it was too late. Or maybe he was originally intended simply as a comedy antagonist (like Superman's Mr Mxyzptlk, also a denizen of the 5th Dimension), and somehow scripter Larry Lieber didn't get the memo.

To be honest, back in 1964 or 1965 when I would have first seen this story, it didn't much bother me, but now it just seems downright daft.

Strange Tales 105 was a catalogue of dodgy science ... I wouldn't have been convinced by the idea of the Torch stopping a shell from an artillery gun with his heat, however intense. The kinetic energy doesn't dissipate just because the metal's melted. The molten slag would still plough through his body at speed.

Strange Tales 105 (Feb 1963) featured the return of The Wizard, just three issues after we last saw him. Clearly a big fan of the Silver Age Lex Luthor, The Wizard has been behaving like the model prisoner until he could get assigned to the prison pharmacy. The using the available "harmless chemicals" he concocts a "serum" to "burn through the strongest substance" and makes a big hole in his cell wall. Panicky guards turn up and charge through the gap in pursuit of The Wizard - only he's hiding behind the cell door. He then calmly leaves through the front entrance.

Holed up in his hideout, The Wizard then issues a challenge to The Torch. Impulsively, The Torch rushes off to confront his enemy - on the foe's home ground. Which seems like an awful big strategic mistake to me (Sun Tzu, 10.25).

So, The Wizard's stronghold is a huge underground system of traps and weapons. Where did he get the field-gun he shoots The Torch with? Or the asbestos-lined chamber where he traps the Torch. How much did all this cost? And most importantly, who built it?

This is a sample of the books Martin Goodman published the same month as Strange Tales 105. Still only identified by the "MC" box on the cover, no Marvel Corner Box yet, and still pretty bland stories that don't really compete with DC's slick professionalism. The only ray of sunshine here is Fantastic Four. The story in issue 11 was kind of fun, probably Stan's first use of humour in a straight superhero tale, with the Impossible Man being more exasperating than menacing.

Even though the credits say that Stan was plotting, the story does scan like the sort of thing DC were publishing at the same time. Larry Leiber has said that he provided full scripts to Kirby around this time, indeed that Kirby was unhappy if he didn't get a full script. Still, this was early days for Stan and Marvel. Amazing Spider-Man 1 wouldn't come out until the following month. So I shouldn't complain simply because Stan hadn't found his editorial voice yet ...

The two big revelations for Strange Tales 106 are that Johnny's neighbours were just kidding on that they didn't know he was The Human Torch, and that The Acrobat is really a super-villain, not a super-hero. Ayers' pages are serviceable, but don't quite have the polish here that Jack Kirby's have.

The next issue, Strange Tales 106 (Mar 1963), saw series inker Dick Ayers take over as penciller as well. A character shows up on Johnny Storm's doorstep, offering his acrobatic skills and a partnership to The Torch. They'll form a new team called "The Torrid Twosome". Catchy. Of course, it's a scam and it doesn't take long for The Acrobat to show his true colours. The Fantastic Four come along at the end and save the day.

The most interesting this about this story is that Stan ditches the ill-advised attempt by the Torch to have a "secret identity". It's revealed that everyone in town knew Johnny was The Human Torch, but didn't let on, out of respect for Johnny's privacy.

Dick Ayer's work on pencils is pretty good. Individually, the panels are a fair attempt at the Kirby style, but the page layouts don't have The King's flow or design sense. 

It is a bit of a classic cover, pencilled by Jack Kirby, but the story inside Strange Tales 107 is a little disappointing. Johnny is again displaying hitherto unknown powers, as is Namor and the whole battle feels just a little unimaginative. Sub-Marine would get the epic battle he merited in the Fantastic Four Annual 1, on sale just three months later. Marvel Mystery Comics 8 had the first half of the epic 1940s Torch-Subby battle.

I don't know if Stan felt the title needed a bit of a boost, but Strange Tales 107 (Apr 1963) brought out the big guns and featured The Sub-Mariner as the foe. It's a bit reminiscent of Marvel Mystery Comics 8 & 9 (Jun & Jul 1940), where the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner strips were combined for an epic 44-page showdown. Sadly, this Torch vs Subby battle wasn't that epic. It had Sub-Mariner displaying the abilities of sea creatures, though he never again used these powers. And it had The Torch flying underwater with his flame on. His claim that he was using his super-nova flame fooled no one, it was just a daft idea.

For the next few issues, Stan sidelined Larry Lieber and had a revolving door of different scripters, working over Stan's plots with Dick Ayers art. The results weren't great.

Despite the presence of Kirby on pencils, the Torch stories in these issues weren't any better than what had come before. In fact, I thought the scripts of Robert Bernstein were less effective than Larry Lieber's work.

Strange Tales 108 and 109 (May-Jun 1963) were scripted by Robert Bernstein ("R. Berns"), who had started in the 1940s, working for both DC (Green Lantern) and Marvel (Black Rider & Wild Western). In the 1950s, Bernstein scripted for DC (GI Combat & Our Army At War), Quality (Blackhawk & Dollman) and EC (Psychoananlysis & Shock Illustrated). As the 1960s approached, Bernstein found himself working under the baleful eye of DC's Dark Overlord Mort Weisinger, writing scripts for Aquaman and Superboy in Adventure Comics, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, and even Superman. So scripting for Stan Lee over at Marvel was a risky business for him. So much so that one wonders why he didn't come up with a better disguise than "R. Berns".

For Stan he scripted the Thor feature in Journey into Mystery 92-96, Iron man in Tales of Suspense 40-46, as well his Strange Tales work.

Curiously, for Strange Tales 108, Kirby was back, though the story still had that pre-Marvel goofiness about it. The baddy is an artist who paints pictures that come to life and menace The Torch. Stan is still getting the plotter credit, so we can lay this one at his door. Bernstein's script was serviceable enough, though it lacked even Larry Leiber's little inspired touches.

Kirby also pencilled Strange Tales 109 ... though some of the panels look very much like they've been redrawn by other hands. Bernstein's script makes a better effort to emulate Stan's freewheeling, slang-laden style but the plot, with a suburban sorcerer using Pandora's Box to carry out crimes, lacks spark.

Strange Tales 110 was memorable for teaming The Wizard and Paste-Pot Pete for the first time. These two would go on the form the backbone of the Fantastic Four's most dangerous foes, The Frightful Four, and be directly responsible for defeating Johnny and his team-mates just two years later. Oh and it had the first Dr Strange story, too. Strange Tales 111 ... not so memorable.

With Strange Tales 110 and 111 (Jul-Aug 1963), Bernstein was out and Ernie Hart was in. Hart had been an editor at Timely during the 1940s, had scripted for Charlton during the 1950s and was drafted in by Stan Lee to write Strange Tales and Ant-Man in Tales to Astonish 44-48 under the pen-name "H. E. Huntley". His stint on The Torch lasted just two issues.

Issue 110 brought back both The Wizard and Paste-Pot Pete, teaming them up for the first time, in anticipation of their later Frightful Four alliance. Kirby was gone again, replaced on the art by Dick Ayers. And, as with the stories scripted by Robert Bernstein, Hart's dialogue is sort of serviceable ... but with the Wizard uttering lines like "You're fellow after my own heart. I'll join you gladly, Paste-Pot Pete, in such a delightful endeavour!" you have to wonder what on earth editor Stan Lee was thinking. 

Strange Tales 111 pit The Human Torch against The Asbestos Man ... the most surprising aspect of this is that it took Stan so long to figure out that the natural nemesis of fire is the ultimate flameproof substance. Hart turns in another competent but uninspired script and Stan must have thought so too, because after just two issues, Ernie H. was sent on his way, and Stan drafted in another scripter in an effort to pep the title up.

Industry legend Jerry Siegel had been the writing half of the team that created Superman, arguably the character responsible for single-handedly keeping the comics industry going thought the good times and the bad. It's impossible to over-estimate just how important a figure Siegel is in the history of US comics and how much of a debt anyone who's ever worked in American comics owes him. That said, Jerry made some ill-advised choices during his long career and by the early 1960s was having to beg at Mort Weisinger's table for the few crumbs he needed to survive. It's says a lot for Stan that he gave the guy some writing work at Marvel, even though he probably knew that Siegel wasn't really going to turn in the kind of script Stan was looking for.

The Torch's newest foe, The Plantman looks, for some reason, like The Shadow. The next time he appeared, less than a year later, he would be wearing his more familiar "foliage leotard".

Strange Tales 113 (Oct 1963), with the scripting credited to "Joe Carter", wasn't a terrific improvement over issue 112. The Plant Man was an okay villain, and the story did introduce Doris Evans, who would feature as Johnny's girlfriend for a lot of the Silver Age, but again the story lacked the level of humanity and humour that we knew Stan could provide.

By this time, it seemed that Dick Ayers had given up trying to imitate Jack Kirby and was drawing the strip very much in his own style. I suspect Stan had something to do with this. It's fairly well established that Stan didn't really want artists to draw like Jack Kirby. He just wanted them to try to capture Kirby's sense of movement and storytelling - which is what I think Ayers was trying to do here. I did find a quote from Ayers himself on the subject in a 2014 Comics Journal interview: "One day I came in to Stan, and gave him a story," said Ayers . "It was a Western and I had inked it just the way Jack penciled it, and he took it and said, 'If I wanted somebody to ink like Kirby, I could get him off the street! I know you with your brush, you can do anything. So add to it!"

And with this issue, Stan's grand new-script-writers experiment was over. He'd tried out several and all were found wanting. Robert Bernstein, Ernie Hart and Jerry Siegel - all experienced comics guys - seemed unable to capture the Stan Lee lightning in a bottle.

This is what the scripting map at Marvel looked like between August 1962 and November 1963, when Stan took over scripting pretty much the entire Marvel line, and started using "The Marvel Method" to cope with the workload:

Month	Journey into Mystery	Strange Tales	Tales of Suspense	Tales to Astonish
Aug 1962	Lieber	-	-	-
Sep 1962	Lieber	-	-	Lieber
Oct 1962	Lieber	Lieber	-	Lieber
Nov 1962	Lieber	Lieber	-	Lieber
Dec 1962	Lieber	Lieber	-	Lieber
Jan 1963	Lieber	Lieber	-	Lieber
Feb 1963	Lieber	Lieber	-	Lieber
Mar 1963	Lieber	Lieber	Lieber	Lieber
Apr 1963	Lieber	Lieber	Bernstein	Lieber
May 1963	Bernstein	Bernstein	Bernstein	Lieber
Jun 1963	Bernstein	Bernstein	Bernstein	Hart
Jul 1963	Bernstein	Hart	Bernstein	Hart
Aug 1963	Bernstein	Hart	Bernstein	Hart
Sep 1963	Bernstein	Siegel	Bernstein	Hart
Oct 1963	Lee	Siegel	Bernstein	Hart
Nov 1963	Lee	Lee	Lee	Lee

You can see that most of the Marvel anthology characters started off being scripted by Larry Lieber from Stan Lee plots. Lieber admits he didn't think too much of the superhero stories Stan was bringing in during the early Sixties. "Thor was just another story," Lieber told Roy Thomas for Alter Ego magazine. "I didn't think about it at all. Stan said, 'I'm trying to make up a character,' and he gave me the plot, and he said, 'Why don't you write the story?"

Stan had been teaching Larry the rudiments of comic writing even before this, as Lieber had written many fantasy tales for the pre-hero Marvel anthologies. "Before the superheroes," Lieber told blogger Danny Best, "Stan was teaching me to write. Now he had never taught anybody else to write so he didn’t know how well somebody learns or doesn’t learn or, he didn’t know how to compare me to anybody else. All he knew was I didn’t write as well as he did.

"He wasn't always the most patient person and I had problems [writing] the dialogue and he said, 'Why did you say that? You could have said it this way, or this way or that way,' and I’m realising, yeah, I didn't think of it that way or this way.

"So at any rate finally I think at one point he got a little exasperated and he said, 'I’m going to hire some of the old pros.' He remembered writers from the past. He still gave me work, he didn't want to take work away, but we were putting out a few more books.

"So he hired somebody and then the next week when I came back to him he said, 'Larry, you know something, you’re no good, but you're better than these other guys.' So that was my first victory ... if you want to call that a victory, right? The others are worse than me."

I know I used the above quotes in the Rise of Giant-Man blog entry but I think they're worth repeating here in the light of the pattern you can see in the above table. Stan had to go through that journey in order the realise that only he could deliver the characterisation and feel needed to produce the kind of stories he envisaged for Marvel.

It was this realisation that lead directly to the intertwining of the plots of the whole line of Marvel comics and Stan's method of giving his artists the bare-bones of the plot and leaving them to fill in the details.

Next time, I'll look at the first few Human Torch stories Stan scripted after the failure of his "new-script-writers" experiment and consider whether Stan's Human Torch stories were any better aligned with the Fantastic Four comic than these early tales had been.

Next: More Strange Torch Tales

Ant-Man Antics: More Astonishing Tales

BACK IN 1964, the first Marvel comic I ever saw was Tales to Astonish 51, with Giant man battling The Human Top on the cover. Up until that point, I'd survived on a steady diet of Mort Wiesinger's Superman family comics and Julius Schwartz's Flash and Green Lantern titles. But here was something new and different and within a few months I was working hard to track down every Marvel comic I could get my hands on.

But what I didn't realise until much later was that Giant-Man had quite the back story. He hadn't just suddenly sprung to 2D life that moment I set eyes on him in early 1964. He'd been around for a couple of years, and had originally been smaller. A lot smaller.

ANTS IN YER PANTS

It’s no secret that small boys like creepy-crawlies. When I was a kid, I was endlessly fascinated by ants. I’d often spend time on sunny summer afternoons watching the little critters marching in straight lines from their nests, stopping to talk to each other, or struggling under the weight of a bit of twig twice their own size. And in the comic books of the period, I’d often see ads for ant-farms, a bargain at $2.98.

The Ant-Farm was a common mail order item in the American comic books of the 1950s and 1960s. If only I'd been able to lay my hands on $2.98, something that was bit hard to come by in the South-East London of the early 1960s.

The ant farm wasn’t a new idea. Invented in 1932 by French entomologist Charles Janet, but popularised by Milton Levine, the “Ant Farm” was a familiar toy sold by mail order in the comics of the 1950s and 1960s. Levine had been an engineer with the US military during WWII. On returning to civilian life, he formed a company with his brother-in-law and began selling “100 toy soldiers for $1” through mail order ads in the comic books of the period. In the mid-1950s, Levine had the idea to manufacture and sell plastic antariums under the name “Ant Farm”. For (originally) $1.98, the customer got just the ant farm. Ants were extra …

Ant-Man's beginnings were a bit more convoluted. Over the decades a legend has evolved that Marvel editor Stan Lee was casting around for a follow-up super-character to his successful Fantastic Four comic and his slightly less-successful Incredible Hulk book. The official version goes that Stan tried out two insect heroes in his anthology titles Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense to see which the readers reacted to better. However, looking at the timings of the issues that "Man in the Anthill" and "Man in the Beehive" were published in, I seriously doubt that story.

The "Man in the Beehive" story appeared nine months after Henry Pym's debut in Tales to Astonish. The stories were quite different and it's hard to see how the premise of the Tales of Suspense story could have translated into a superhero concept, though it does contain one of Stan's earliest uses of the term "mutant".

Fantastic Four 1 was cover dated November 1961 and was on the newsstands three months earlier in August. The “Man in the Anthill” story in Tales to Astonish appeared in issue 27 (Jan 1962). The vaguely similar “Man in the Beehive” seven-pager was published in Tales of Suspense 32 (Aug 1962, on sale May 1962). And the debut of Ant-Man in costume was in Tales to Astonish 35 (Sep 1962), on sale just a month after the Beehive story. If Stan really was trying out insect heroes, why would he leave publishing the Beehive story until after the decision to go with Ant-Man had already been made?

Quality's Doll Man was the first of the vertically challenged superheroes. The character was a hit and ran for six years in Feature Comics and was awarded his own book. The Atom debuted in Showcase 34 (Sep 1961) and went on to be one of the mainstays of DC's stable of B-team characters.

There has also been speculation that Stan rushed Ant-Man into Astonish to cash in on the success of DC's similar small hero, The Atom, another theory that I don't think holds water. Besides, The Atom wasn't the first height-challenged hero in comics. Will Eisner's creation for Quality Comics, Doll-Man appeared in December 1939 in issue 27 of Feature Comics and enjoyed a long and successful run, eventually getting his own title in the autumn of 1941.

It's doubtful either Stan or Jack thought of "The Man in the ant hill" as anything other than a throwaway fantasy filler for their most successful anthology title. Jack's artwork looks as though it's had less attention than Kirby normally lavished on the giant monster tales like Fin-Fang Foom and Groot.

The story in Tales to Astonish 27 that established Dr Henry Pym and his ability to shrink to insect size was similar to the standard O Henry style fantasy tales Stan had been filling out his anthology titles with. Plotted by Stan, pencilled by Jack Kirby and scripted by Stan’s brother Larry Lieber, the story was never intended as anything other than a throwaway filler, despite its cover-feature status. The art by Kirby looks rushed and certainly couldn’t be held up as a stellar example of his work during that period.

In the story, Henry Pym is working on a chemical that can reduce the size of objects. In time-honoured mad-scientist tradition, he tests it on himself. He shrinks to the size of an insect, then manages to fall out a window into the garden, where he’s chased around by a bunch of ants. One ant inexplicably takes a shine to our hero, and helps him get back to his lab, where he’s able to restore himself to normal size. Pym destroys his formula as it’s “far too dangerous to ever be used by any human again.”

And with that, the story was forgotten for the next few months.

THE RETURN OF ANT-MAN

But with the strong reader reaction to the Fantastic Four comic, and The Thing being singled out as a fan favourite, Stan and Jack Kirby came up with a story about scientist Bruce Banner being accidentally irradiated by gamma rays and transforming into a massively strong anti-hero, The Hulk, and put the character out in his own comic Incredible Hulk 1 (May 1962), on sale in February. Then, without waiting to see how either FF or The Hulk were faring sales-wise, Stan pressed on with two new heroes, The Mighty Thor and Ant-Man.

Stan Lee's brother, Larry Lieber.

Already busy with his scripting work on much of the Marvel line, Stan drafted his brother Larry in to write the dialogue for the new characters over his plots and Jack Kirby’s pencils. Though many have made a case for attributing Jack Kirby as the main author on these early superhero stories, Lieber described a different scenario in a 1999 interview for Alter Ego magazine: “Stan made up the plot, and then he'd give it to me, and I'd write the script. Tudor City had a park, and when it was nice I'd sit there and break the story down picture by picture. I was unsure of myself just sitting down to write a script. Since I knew how to draw, I'd think, 'Oh, this shot will have a guy coming this way ... this shot will have a guy looking down on him,' and later I'd sit at the typewriter and type it up. After a while, I'd just go to the typewriter ... These were all scripts in advance … Jack I always had to send a full script to. Also, what Stan liked was that I made up names. As a matter of fact, I made up the name ‘Henry Pym’.”

Stan has been quoted many times as saying that he liked to give his characters alliterative names as that made them easier for him to remember. So The Fantastic Four had Reed Richards and Sue Storm and the Hulk’s human identity was Bruce Banner. It wasn’t foolproof, however, as Stan referred to Banner as “Bob” in Avengers 3. Larry Lieber evidently didn’t need that trick. His characters’ civilian names were Don Blake, Tony Stark and Henry Pym.

In this first adventure, Henry Pym shrank and grew by sloshing his formula all over himself. Over the next few years this would change to gas, then pills and finally he was able to change size just by thinking about it.

Ant-Man returned, fully costumed, in Tales to Astonish 35 (Sep 1962), which hit the newsstands in June 1962, the same month as Journey into Mystery 83. Ant-Man’s costume featured a cleverly rendered stylised ant silhouette as a chest emblem and a really cool helmet, with antennae and ant mandibles, all of which was made of “unstable molecules”. Where Henry Pym gets his hands on proprietary technology invented by The Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards isn’t revealed.

Over and above his shrinking ability, Ant-Man’s Unique Selling Point was that he could communicate and work with the ants as allies in his fight against communism and other forms of injustice. So when a gang of commie agents tries to steal an anti-radiation formula that Henry Pym is working on, he turns into Ant-Man once again and battles to save his colleagues from the dastardly foreign agents.

As with the story in Tales to Astonish 27, “The Return of The Ant-Man” is not one of Jack Kirby’s more inspired art jobs. Kirby has often said on record that he always strived to come up with the best ideas and artwork in order to “make sales” and guarantee his continued employment, yet his work on Ant-Man was decidedly lacklustre compared to what he was doing on The Fantastic Four at the same time … as though he didn’t much care for the character and was just knocking out the pencils for the page rate.

Once the series was off and running, it seemed to lack a clear sense direction that The Fantastic Four had, and that we’d also see in later creations like Spider-Man. The biggest problem that Ant-Man had as a feature was that there wasn’t a single iconic villain. Villains help define the heroes in the minds of the fans. Batman wasn’t a massive success until he battled The Joker. The Fantastic Four already had The Skrulls, Sub-Mariner and Doctor Doom in their first five issues. While, without a defining villain, The Hulk struggled to establish himself.

These earliest Ant-Man tales lacked a clear sense of direction. And Jack Kirby would often as not, struggle with finding interesting ways to frame a cover to make the most of the tiny hero.

So the earliest stories in the Ant-Man run were largely unmemorable, with the hero battling more communists in his second adventure, a local protection racket crook in his third and the mediocre Egghead in his fourth outing.

The second proper Ant-Man adventure also gave us an insight into how a diminutive character is able to exit and enter his regular-sized laboratory and how he doesn't get smeared on the pavement after being fired out of a catapult.

Tales to Astonish 36 was cover-dated October 1962 and gave us the menace of Comrade X. The surprise denouement of the tale has the villain being revealed to be female. No adequate reason is given for this drag act, and it may be that it’s more of a reflection of the times, where women were mostly viewed as mothers and home-makers rather than as real people with their own ambitions for either good or ill. However, there is a neat explanation of Ant-Man’s “human cannonball” catapult device he uses to get across the city quickly and quite a nice schematic of the secret exit/entrance to his laboratory.

Finding traces of machine oil where The Protector had been standing earlier, Ant-Man is able to deduce that he's using a mechanical exoskeleton to appear larger and stronger than he actually is.

Issue 37 was a little more prosaic, and had Ant-Man battling a criminal who’s been extorting money from neighbourhood jewellery businesses. In the end, Ant-Man deduces that the Protector is actually one of the jewellers who’s being extorted and turns the culprit over to the police. The adventure ends with a single panel ad for the rest of the Growing line of Marvel superhero comics.

One interesting aspect of Kirby's art on Ant-Man is the use of these forced perspective shots to put the reader down at Ant-Man's eye level. Really not sure about the spring-loaded boots, though.

Astonish 38 (Dec 1962) had the first proper “super-villain” for Ant-Man to fight. Egghead is an unnamed, disgruntled crooked scientist who’s fired from government employment for allegedly selling secrets to rival nations. The scientist joins forces with some gangsters and attempts to carry out a plot to turn the ants against Ant-Man. The plan backfires when it’s revealed that the ants are willing allies of Ant-Man in his battle against crime rather than helpless slaves, and Egghead is left a mumbling basketcase at the shock of learning that the ants are smarter than he is.

Although Egghead is the first recurring villain of the Ant-Man series, he’s just not a very good one. There were better villains ahead, unfortunately, the readers had to wait just a little too long for them to show up.

My views on Tales to Astonish 39 (Jan 1963) are documented in one of the first blog entries in this series. It was the first Ant-Man comic I ever saw back in the day, and it is one of the most popular of the early Ant-Man stories. It does use a variation on the old “hero’s doppelganger” plotline so commonly seen in DC comics of the Silver Age (Green Lantern’s Sinestro and Flash’s Professor Zoom), but this one had a twist. Stan pits his insect-sized human against a human-size insect, and I think it’s that aspect that resonated with so many fans. Unfortunately, Stan failed to capitalise on the idea and by the next issue, we were back to run-of-the-mill adversaries.

Despite some changes in personnel, these early Ant-Man stories still struggled to find a distinctive style. The problem was lack-lustre villains and no clear rhythm to the writing.

Tales to Astonish 40 (Feb 1963) had Ant-Man try to solve the mystery of a spate of armoured truck hijackings, where the trucks vanish and the guards have no memory of what happened. As with the earlier Protector story, Ant-Man uses his powers of deduction to uncover the villain, rather than his powers of ant-ness, which might go some way to explaining why the wider readership was failing to connect with the character.

There's quite a different feel to this Kirby artwork, inked by Sol Brodsky. This would be the last Ant-Man story in Astonish to be pencilled by Kirby.

Unusually, the Kirby pencils were inked by Sol Brodsky, who usually confined himself to production duties in the early Marvell Bullpen. The result is markedly different to the finish frequent Kirby collaborator Dick Ayers had been doing on the title, but I really like Brodsky’s inks on Kirby’s art.

Incoming penciller Don Heck brought a different feel to the Ant-Man strip. Heck's lightness of touch works better for me that Kirby's sometimes bombastic pencil art.

Astonish 41 (Mar 1963) featured the first change in personnel … Jack Kirby was replaced on pencils by Don Heck. Some commentators have tried to paint this as a negative – in a particularly spiteful interview, even for The Comics Journal, Harlan Ellison once called Don Heck "the worst artist in the field” – but I strongly disagree. Heck, especially when he inked his own pencils, was a subtle and delicate artist. If you’re not sure, then take a minute to look back at some of the work he did on earlier Marvel fantasy stories. And of course, he was the signature artist on The Avengers from issues 9-40, a career defining run.

In this page from the fantasy backup story in Tales to Astonish 38, "I Found the Impossible World", Don Heck demonstrates how he makes even a talking page interesting. Perhaps some fans found his superhero art unsatisfying because Heck himself preferred fantasy tales to action yarns.

WHO THE HECK IS DON HECK?

Donald L. Heck began his comics career in 1949, when he joined the staff of Harvey Comics, re-arranging the panels of of Milton Caniff newspaper strips into comic book pages, a process we would call "bodging" in the UK. While there, Heck became friends with Pete Morisi, who would later create Thunderbolt for Charlton Comics. When Morisi left Harvey to join a comics startup, Comic Media, he took Heck with him.

Don Heck did many covers for Comic Media and even designed the cover logo for Horrific. Later in the 1950s, Heck drew the tv-tie-in comic for Captain Gallant, a book that was very common in the back issue bins of 1970s comic marts, after a warehouse find.

At Comic Media, Heck began drawing early horror comics like Weird Terror as well as romance and war stories. But in 1954, Morisi had been showing art samples to Atlas editor Stan Lee. In Morisi's portfolio were a couple of Heck's pages. Lee pointed to the Heck samples and said, "This is the way you should have drawn it." Morisi testily suggested that if Stan wanted Heck's style he should hire Heck. Lee said that if he saw Heck he might have a story for him. "So I went up there on a Wednesday afternoon" Heck later recalled. "Stan never saw anybody on Wednesdays, and he never saw anybody in the afternoon. But he came out. He looked at the first two pages and said, 'Aw, hell, I know what your stuff looks like. Come on in. I got a story for you'." Heck joined the staff of Atlas and worked on a variety of titles until the Great Atlas Implosion of 1957, when he and just about every other artist was let go.

Heck drew one of the rare non-Kirby Marvel covers of the late 1950s/early 1960s, Tales of Suspense 1. It must've been an omen, as Heck would later pencil a long run on Suspense's signature superhero, Iron Man.

Within a couple of years, though, Heck was back at Atlas, which was in the process of transforming into Marvel Comics. Unusually, Heck drew the cover for Tales of Suspense 1 (Jan 1963), as a time when just about every Marvel cover was drawn by Kirby or Ditko. Later in the series run, Heck provided the art for the first (and subsequent) instalments of Iron Man. Legend had it that Kirby did pencil breakdowns for the origin story, but "that's not true," Heck said in a 1985 interview for Comics Feature. "I did it all. They just didn't bother to call me up and find out when they wrote up the credits. It doesn't really matter. Jack Kirby created the costume, and he did the cover for the issue. In fact the second costume, the red and yellow one, was designed by Steve Ditko. I found it easier than drawing that bulky old thing. The earlier design, the robot-looking one, was more Kirbyish."

As Marvel developed, Heck was one of the mainstay artists, pencilling (and often inking) runs on top Marvel titles: Tales of Suspense 39-72, designing Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts, Black Widow, Hawkeye and The Mandarin, and missing only a couple of issues; The Avengers 9-40, co-creating The Swordsman and Power-Man; and of course, his run on Ant-Man in Tales to Astonish.

Towards the end of the 1960s Heck was getting less work from Marvel as tastes - and editors - changed. But he landed a lucrative gig, ghosting art for Lee Falk's The Phantom from 1966 to 1971, and provided a lot of pencil art for DC strips like Batgirl and Rose and Thorn, probably because he drew especially glamorous girls.

The great Don Heck at his drawing board, during his 1960s heyday.

Don Heck died of lung cancer on 23 February 1995.

AND BACK TO ANT-MAN ...

The same month he drew the Ant-Man story in Tales to Astonish 41, Heck also provided pencils and inks for the “Iron Man is Born” story in Tales of Suspense 39. If I have any criticism of Heck's art on Ant-Man it’s that he didn’t seem as engaged with the character as he did with Iron Man. But it’s still better quality work than Kirby was turning in on the strip.

The Ant-Man uniform in the interior of Astonish 35 shows a stylised ant, the mandibles around Henry Pym's throat, the antennae across his shoulders and the mid-legs around Pym's waist. On the cover, usually drawn after the interior, the antennae have disappeared and Kirby would continue to draw the uniform this way from Astonish 36 on. When Heck began drawing the character, he went back to a design similar to that in Kirby's original version.

What is interesting is that Don Heck’s version of the Ant-Man uniform is very similar to the one Kirby drew in Astonish 35. With Astonish 36, Kirby had revised the design slightly (this is also the version that appears on Astonish 35’s cover). And the revised version was the one Kirby drew until his last Ant-Man story in Astonish 40. Heck must have been given Astonish 35 for reference, because that’s the version of the uniform he drew through his entire run, even while Kirby was drawing the revised version on the covers.

“Prisoner of the Slave World” has Henry Pym investigating the disappearances of fellow scientists. He discovers that a small-time crook is working with aliens from another dimension to abduct the technicians. So Pym arranges to have himself kidnapped then changes to Ant-Man to defeat the baddies. And the traitorous human ends up in jail in the alien dimension.

I really like Heck's page design in Tales to Astonish 42. He really gets across the sense of scale from Ant-Man's perspective and contrary to what some fans think, I rate his action art pretty highly.

The Ant-Man adventure in Tales to Astonish 42 (Apr 1963) also resembled one of the fantasy yarns Stan was turning out that the time. Radio announcer Jason Cragg is involved in a freak microphone accident that gives him a fantastically persuasive voice so he decides to use his new ability to turn the general population against Ant-Man. There’s no rationale given in the tale as to why he would use such an awesome power for such a mundane ambition – and this is also symptomatic of why these early Ant-Man tales weren’t more successful. In the end, Ant-Man defeats Cragg by giving him laryngitis which causes him to lose his powers of persuasion.

Tales to Astonish 43 has one of the earlier instances of Stan Lee's abiding crusades - the battle against discrimination in all its forms. Here he makes a very good case against the then-common practice of age discrimination, which elevates an otherwise-mundane tale.

“The Mad Master of Time” in Astonish 43 (May 1963) is unfortunately another fantasy tale masquerading as a superhero story. In this one, elderly scientist Prof Elias Weems is fired from his job for the simple sin of being too old. Seeking revenge, he concocts an aging ray and begins firing it indiscriminately at members of the public. Ant-Man investigates and discovers the cause of the mysterious aging malady afflicting random citizens.

Once the misguided man is captured, Ant-Man pleads on his behalf in court. The one interesting aspect of this story is that Stan and Larry – this would be his last scripting job on Ant-Man – mount an effective case against age discrimination at a time when this sort of thing was the standard way of doing business. These days we have laws against this type of practice, but back in the early 1960s, workers were routinely discriminated against for their age.

In Tales to Astonish 44 we learn about a major event in Henry Pym's past - the death of his wife Maria, depicted here as a beautiful mature woman with fetching iron-grey hair. On first seeing Janet van Dyne, Pym is struck by how much she resembles a much younger version of his dead wife.

Tales to Astonish 44 (Jun 1963) ushers in some more changes – both in the creative team and in the Ant-Man concept. Stan must have felt that there was something lacking in the scripting and replaced his brother Larry with old-time Atlas editor Ernie Hart, who was credited as “H. E. Huntley”. In a 2007 interview, Leiber said that Stan “wasn't always the most patient person and I had problems [writing] the dialogue and he said, 'Why did you say that? You could have said it this way, or this way or that way,' and I’m realizing, yeah, I don't think of it that way or this way. So at any rate finally I think at one point he got a little exasperated and he said, 'I’m going to hire some of the old pros’.”

Hart had been a staff editor at Timely Comics during the 1940s, sharing an office with Al Jaffee. He remained on staff through the Atlas years, and was brought on as a scripter on the Human Torch strip in Strange Tales and the Ant-Man series, presumably to give it a shot in the arm.

That shot in the arm was the introduction of a partner for Ant-Man. “The Creature from Kosmos” opens with Henry Pym musing about his long-dead wife, Maria Trovaya, a Hungarian national. On a trip back to Mrs Pym’s mother country, she’s arrested by communist secret police and is later found murdered. This incident might go some way to explaining why Pym fought so many communists during his formative years as Ant-Man. Back in the present, Pym is visited by fellow scientist Vernon van Dyne who is experimenting with gamma ray beams to detect signals from other planets. Van Dyne has brought his daughter Janet along, though she seems more interested in taking in the city nightlife than listening to scientific theory. Pym is struck by the uncanny resemblance of Janet to his dead wife, but is also aware of how much younger she is. In the flashback, Maria is shown with grey hair and could conceivably be in her mid-to late thirties, so it’s likely that Pym is supposed to be about 40 here. Perhaps Janet van Dyne is supposed to be about 20.

Pym is unable to help, so Van Dyne continues with his work alone, only to unwittingly unleash a criminal alien on Earth, whose first act is to murder Doctor van Dyne. Pym investigates as Ant-Man and learns the truth. Then in his guise as Pym, reveals his secret identity to Janet, offers her super-powers and asks her to join him in the hunt for her father’s killer.

Rather than simply enabling her to shrink and grow, Pym implants – somewhat recklessly – wasp cells in Janet’s back, so that she’ll grow natural wings when she reduces in size. Putting on a uniform of unstable molecules, Janet shrinks to insect size and sets out with Ant-Man to defeat the alien.

As they battle with the creature, Pym is thinking that Janet is so like Maria, but also that he must avoid falling in love with her as she’s too young. The adventure closes with Wasp gazing at Pym and thinking that, “someday I will make you realise that you love me as I love you.” Later in the series, Stan would play down the age difference. Even here, it sounds a little creepy.

Tales to Astonish 45 featured the return of an old villain, Egghead, the first such repeat appearance in the series so far. It also had The Wasp use a needle to mimic a wasp's sting. She would't get her compressed air Wasp's Sting until much later in the series, in Tales to Astonish 57.

Tales to Astonish 45 (Jul 1963) featured the return of Egghead, Ant-Man’s first recurring villain. This time, Egghead plans to use The Wasp as bait to trap Ant-Man. But far from being the helpless victim, it’s The Wasp who saves the day, using a needle to sting Egghead and his henchmen into submission.

Ant-Man shows up as a guest star in Fantastic Four 16, a quite clever piece of plotting that follows up on Doctor Doom's disappearance into the microworld at the conclusion of Fantastic Four 10.

The same month (though actually on sale a week later on 9 Apr 1963), Ant-Man appears, drawn once again by Jack Kirby, as a guest star in Fantastic Four 16. At the end of Fantastic Four 10, Doctor Doom was cast into a microworld, the very fate he intended for the FF. Still there six months later, Doom devises a way to shrink his arch-enemies to his size. After a couple of random shrinking incidents, Reed Richards contacts Ant-Man for help. The tiny hero gives Mr Fantastic a few drops of his shrinking/growing gas so the FF can counteract any further attempts to shrink them. However, The Fantastic Four still find themselves in Doom’s microworld and have to rely on Ant-Man’s help to defeat Doom.

Clearly this was an attempt on Stan’s part to boost the visibility of Ant-Man with fans of other, more popular Marvel comics. Yet, when you look at the sales of Tales to Astonish, it wasn’t faring any worse than its companion title Tales of Suspense and was actually doing better than Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales.

The sales figures for 1962 show Suspense at an average monthly sale of 126,000 with Astonish at 140,000. Strange Tales is at 136,000 and Journey into Mystery is selling an average of 132,000.

The following year, Suspense has risen to 188,000 with Astonish at 189,000, with Strange Tales also at 189,000 and Journey into Mystery average at 188,000. Did Stan think that Astonish should be doing better than the rest? He wasn’t guest-starring Iron Man or Thor in FF during 1963, so I can’t see what he was worrying about.

The last couple of Ant-Man adventures aren't a huge improvement over what had come before. Stan Lee was very obviously dissatisfied with how the character was turning out and planned some really big changes right after this trio of issues.

For all that, the next three issues of Astonish continued in a similar vein. In issue 46 (Aug 1963), Ant-Man and the Wasp battle a giant Cyclops monster while on holiday in Greece. The monster turns out to be a giant robot, constructed by invading aliens to scare away the locals, which does, admittedly, sound a bit like a Scooby-Doo plot.

Tales to Astonish 47 had a villain called Trago (Spanish for "drink" by the way), a sort of bargain basement Ringmaster, who hypnotises his audiences and robs them. Ant-Man and The Wasp make short work of him.

Tales to Astonish 47 (Sep 1963) has Ant-Man and The Wasp fight against a musician called Trago, who is able to use his trumpet music to mesmerise his audience so he can rob them. Scripter Ernie Hart does introduce a bit of banter into Janet's relationship with Henry, calling him "Hank" and teasing him for not wanting to relax and for not knowing anything about jazz music. That aspect would be developed more fully later in the series.

The Porcupine in Tales to Astonish 48 was probably the most memorable Ant-Man villain to date - though that's not really saying very much.

Astonish 48 (Oct 1963) introduces another villain who would return to plague Henry Pym and Janet van Dyne at a later date – The Porcupine. When I first read this story, as a kid, I thought The Porcupine was quite sinister. His mask is very creepy, and it’s a tribute to Don Heck’s skill that he’s able to render a credible villain out of such a ridiculous idea. Scientist Alex Huntley constructs a porcupine costume loaded with ingenious weapons and uses it to rob a bank. But Ant-Man and The Wasp devise a way to neutralise his weapons. While The Wasp distracts the villain by stinging him with a pin, Ant-Man sprays him with quick-drying cement. Though the controls of his suit are useless, Porcupine manages to escape to fight another day.

Avengers 1: Scripted by Stan Lee and pencilled by Jack Kirby, Ant-Man and the Wasp's characterisations here foreshadowed the chemistry they would have in the yet-to-debut Giant-Man series over in Tales to Astonish.

The same day that Tales to Astonish 48 hit the newsstands, Ant-Man and the Wasp made their debut as charter members of The Avengers. Martin Goodman had long wanted a team comic, starring Captain America, Sub-Mariner and The Human Torch, to rival DC's Justice League of America. Stan Lee had ducked that one and given him The Fantastic Four instead. But at last, with a larger roster of superheroes to draw on, Lee was finally able to field a team that matched the JLA in power, if not in sales.

The plot involves Thor's long-time enemy Loki trying to manufacture a battle between The Thunder God and The Incredible Hulk. When Rick Jones tries to contact The Fantastic Four for help with an apparently out-of-control Hulk, Loki diverts the radio message to Dr Don Blake's radio instead. Unknown to Loki, the SOS message is also received by Henry Pym and Tony Stark, and the four heroes converge on the Teen Brigade HQ. One of Ant-Man's ants sights The Hulk, hiding out with a travelling circus and the superheroes set off to track him down. Ant-Man and The Wasp play a decisive role in the battle, first undermining (with the help of ants) the ground on which The Hulk stands then, when the fighting's done, suggesting they team up regularly to battle large-scale menaces ... and it's The Wasp who gives them their name: The Avengers. But this would be Ant-Man's only appearance with the team. By issue 2, he would have a change of name and powers and by issue 16 left The Avengers, both team and comic.

While Ant-Man was never a fan-favourite with hardcore Marvel readers, at least he managed a longer run than The Hulk. The weakest aspect to the character was that the dialogue wasn't written by Stan Lee, and thus lacked the light touch and banter between characters that was very much Lee's trademark. Larry Lieber admitted that this style wasn't for him in that 1999 Alter Ego interview with Roy Thomas: "I didn't do enough of the superheroes to know whether I'd like them. What I didn't prefer was the style that was developing. It didn't appeal to me. ... Maybe there was just too much humor in it, or too much something ... I remember, at the time, I wanted to make everything serious. I didn't want to give a light tone to it."

Still, for whatever reason, Stan was dissatisfied with how the Tales to Astonish stories had been shaping up and began preparing a Really Big change for Ant-Man. He was going to take over scripting and add two letters to Ant-Man's name.


Next: Big things ahead for Ant-Man.