Featuring: Giant-Man and Wasp
Release: February 4, 1964
Cover: May 1964
12 cents
Story by: Happy Stan Lee
Art by: Heroic Dick Ayers
Lettering by: Honest Art Simek
18 pages
For the third comic in a row, I feel the need to point out that we are reading a February comic when not yet done with the January comics. I have reasons.
Please recall that Hulk and Namor remain at large.
Actually, you often look foolish and clumsy. Do you have any footage of your recent battle against El Toro?
Human Top is Dr. Pym’s third repeat villain, after Egghead and Porcupine. Returning villains have become much more common across all the titles these last couple months, now that a staple has been built up.
Remember when Ant-Man used to always travel by catapult. Well, now that he’s Giant-Man, he needed an even dumber system. This new transportation rig thingie hanging out like a flagpole from the building with his Manhattan lab.
Human Top (a name I keep accidentally typing as “Human Torch”) steals Giant-Man’s pills and takes them himself. That’s the second super-villain to take Hank’s pills for personal use, and actually the third issue in a row where his pills get taken. This is a huge vulnerability in your powers you may want to address.
There’s a weird trope that’s been happening and it’s going to keep happening. Villains are always surprised when Giant-Man grows. I think the idea is they don’t know he’s also Ant-Man, so when he grows from Ant-Man to Giant-Man, he seems to appear out of nowhere. We’ll discuss this bizarre trope in more detail at a later date. But this occurrence is especially odd, because Human Top obviously knows how Giant-Man’s powers work. He just took his pills and used them to grow. Why would Giant-Man size-changing size be at all surprising? Maybe I’m misreading. Perhaps Human Top’s “But how–” refers to Giant-Man escaping his fiendish lock-in-the-closet trap.
This story is 18 pages, which leaves no room for sci/fi backups. Wasp is still narrating her sci/fi tales, and there’s a single page of reprinted prose science fiction. But the era of the tales to astonish that gave this comic its name is coming to an end. It will soon be all-superhero, all the time.
We leave you with this moral from Hank.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆, 39/100
Significance: ★★★☆☆
I read this story in Marvel Masterworks: Ant-Man/Giant-Man vol. 2.
You can find the story in Ant-Man/Giant-Man Epic Collection vol. 1: The Man in the Ant Hill. Or on Kindle.
Characters:
- Giant-Man/Henry Pym/Ant-Man
- Wasp/Jan van Dyne
- Human Top
Story notes:
- Human Top has been in prison for a few months.
- Human Top spins so fast that he is invisible.
- Human Top can spin fast enough to rise in the air defying gravity.
- Giant-Man has new transportation rig.
- Giant-Man suggests Wasp’s personality an act.
- Human Top steals Giant-Man’s pills.
- Ant-Man controls termites.
- Giant-Man has the “thick suspenders” look.
- First issue with no weird tale backup, except the one Wasp narrates.
#169 story in reading order
Next: Tales to Astonish #55, Story B
Previous: Amazing Spider-Man #12
