Tales to Astonish #27 - The Man in the Ant Hill!

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. 

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Even as I type these words, The Incredible Shrinking Man is on The Horror Channel. And that sounds, to me, like fate's demanding I take a new look at Marvel's very own incredible shrinking man; Henry Pym.

Dr Pym, famously, went on to become Ant-Man and Yellowjacket and Goliath and God knows who else but, before all those costumed caperings, he was just a scientist in search of a great invention.

And in Tales to Astonish #27, he found one.

Or did he?

We begin with him testing out his latest and greatest invention, a potion that makes things shrink, just by touching them. Why it doesn't make the test tube it's contained within shrink isn't explained.

Unless it started out as a really gigantic test tube.

Regardless, the man who's determined to prove the scientific establishment wrong in mocking his wild ideas decides it's time to test the potion on himself. 

And, by crikey, it works. Within moments, he's the size of an insect. 

He, of course, responds to this triumph as any man would - by running out into his garden where he's promptly attacked by ants.

Showing the sort of smarts only a man of science can possess, he decides to escape them by hiding in their own ant hill. After all, what are the chances of them ever looking in there for him?

Almost disastrously, he falls into the ants' honey store where it seems he'll be stuck until he dies but, as luck would have it, he's rescued by the one friendly ant in the colony.

Still, the other ants are back and looking to play football with Pym's head.

But, once more, luck is with him, as he spots a discarded match and lights it. In the ensuing fiery chaos, he flees the nest.

But how can he get back to where his growth serum resides, before the ants regain their composure and catch up with him?

Very easily, it turns out. For that friendly ant comes to the rescue, once more, and gives him a lift to his house's window sill where the serum's lying.

Now returned to normal size, Henry pours his shrinking and growing potions down the sink and vows never again to mess about with the awesome power of size-changing.

And he resolves that he'll also never forget that friendly ant who saved him.

It's certainly a valuable life lesson for us all, but certain things leap to my mind.

The obvious one is that we all know Hank Pym later goes on to have several mental meltdowns but, to be honest, he seems to have started his career with one.

Even in his first panel, he's drawn as a man unhinged. The fact that he leaves his growth serum in a place where his shrunken self can't possibly reach it, and that his response to rapid diminution is to rush straight out of the house, for no good reason, also suggests he's not exactly operating with a full deck.

Also, never trust a scientist who's out to prove the world wrong for laughing at him.

Other things strike me. One is that, in this tale, his serum shrinks anything it touches, rather than having to be drunk. And it works on the inanimate as well as the animate, meaning even chairs aren't safe from its powers. Is this tale the only time that's ever been the case?

Also, page 3 contains a panel in which Pym contemplates that he'll be able to shrink a vast army to the size of insects, so they can all fit in one plane, in a scene almost identical to the one in Fantastic Four #7 where Reed Richards shrinks the entire population of Planet X (apart from Kurrgo) to the size of insects, so they can all fit into one spaceship. Interesting that this tale preceded that one by nine months and that Lee and Kirby were not exactly reluctant to recycle ideas.

Anyway, it's a short and breezy tale that makes little sense at all and depends on Pym enjoying incredible strokes of fortune in order to survive - as well as displaying incredible levels of stupidity, in order to be imperilled in the first place.

Still, despite all that, I can't help feeling Henry's been very hard done by; in that, somehow, by some cruel twist of fate, he was nowhere to be seen in the pages of Origins of Marvel Comics.

There he was, having arthropodal adventures, months before Spider-Man was thrust upon the world and, yet, if you believed that book, he ever even existed.

Good God above, with treatment like that, no wonder the poor man went mad.

And there's one thing I haven't even mentioned.

At one point in this tale, he defeats an ant by using his superior judo skills on it.

I mean, come on, if defeating ants at judo doesn't get a man into Origins of Marvel Comics, what will?