Did You See the Movie? Now Read the Comic!

Ant-Man / Giant Man Epic Collection: The Man in the Ant-Hill

By Suzette Chan
August 6, 2018

The 2010s are proving to be a golden era of adaptations of comics to TV or movies. Not only are there a large number of adaptations over multiple platforms, there are so many comics worldwide to adapt! It's no longer surprising for hit shows to be based on comics that many people have either not heard of or haven't gotten around to reading.

After seeing Ant-Man and the Wasp in theatres, I read early Ant-Man and Wasp comics in Marvel Comics' Ant-Man / Giant Man Epic Collection: The Man in the Ant-Hill. There are a few big differences right from the start. The movies are about Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) as Ant-Man and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) as the Wasp. But they are not the first Ant-Man and Wasp. Those would be Hope's parents, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), who are supporting characters in the film. In the original comics, Hank and Janet are Ant-Man and the Wasp. I amused myself by reading the early stories as the back story for Douglas and Pfeiffer's characters, but quickly got caught up in Ant-Man and Wasp's little comics world.

Marvel Comics' Ant-Man / Giant Man Epic Collection: The Man in the Ant-Hill is comprised of Ant-Man stories from Tales to Astonish. However, in this collection, the Tales to Astonish title on the covers of each issue is inexplicably replaced by what looks like a computer-generated Ant-Man logo. Yet, the comics retain references to past and future issues of Tales to Astonish. Because Ant-Man's Epic collection was published in 2015, I assume the re-branding was meant to tie into the first Ant-Man movie, but the result is unnecessarily confusing. In contrast, the Black Panther: Panther's Rage Epic Collection (which I wrote about here) packaged together issues of Fantastic Four and Jungle Action without altering the cover art, and it was fine.

Also weird: the digital version of the collection, which I bought through my local comic shop's Comixology portal, did not include a table of contents. A collection of over 400 pages and multiple artists (Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, Don Heck, and Larry Lieber) and writers (Lieber, H.E. Huntley, and Stan Lee) is in want of a table of contents!

Perhaps it's appropriate that the new Ant-Man header is more science bro than weird science. In contrast to the slapstick tone of the movies, early Ant-Man stories were serious (unsurprising, as Jack Kirby was largely responsible for creating the character, with Stan Lee as the main writer). However, the stories are not ponderous: the characters just live in a world where weird science is part of their normal reality.

Other scientists think Hank is wasting his time on a pipe dream, and that he "should stick to practical projects" (#27, page 2). But Hank believes that he's a better scientist than any of them, and that his unrestricted imagination will lead him to create a serum that will be a boon to mankind.

In comics, appearances can be deceiving: nebbish Peter Parker is actually Spider-man; meek Bruce Banner is actually the Hulk. In these early Ant-Man stories, Hank Pym goes from being a solitary scientist with abstract aspirations, to part of two teams -- the Avengers (who make a guest appearance) and one-half of the Ant-Man and Wasp duo -- who perform practical feats of altruistic heroism.

Ant-Man's basic power proves that you can't judge a person by their size. When he shrinks, he retains the strength of a full-grown man, so he punches way above his weight. His nemeses in his early adventures tend to be people who have been misjudged, or villains who rely on misperception. One villain is an elderly, still-brilliant scientist who shoots people with an instant-aging ray because he was fired for being too old. In separate stories, two people turn out to be the instigators of crimes they claim they had suffered (they're very Scooby-doo in structure). Aliens disguise themselves as humans. Robots are made to look like giants.

Going from a lab scientist to a superhero, Henry Pym is unflappable -- until he mets Janet van Dyne (co-created by Kirby and Hart) in issue #44. Janet's personality is almost the opposite of Hope's personality in the Ant-Man movies. Hope is focused, serious, and, in Ant-Man and the Wasp, obsessed with finding her mother, previously assumed to be dead. In her comic-book debut, Janet van Dyne is a young socialite, seemingly devoid of her scientist father's gravitas and knowledge. She's into fashion and shopping. Hank dismisses her as a silly child, but he also can't stop thinking about her: it turns out that Janet looks exactly like Hank's late wife, a Hungarian national and former dissident who was assassinated when she returned to visit her homeland. Who knew that Hank was a widower?! Who knew that he became a crimefighter to avenge her death?! This new information (Ant-Man had been around for 17 issues of Tales to Astonish by now) recontextualizes the angry, driven Pym that was saw in his first few panels. It also makes his obsession with Janet a little creepy, but at least it gives him an excuse to keep thinking about someone he would normally ignore.

True to this comics' ethos, Janet's apparent fecklessness is deceptive. Sure, she is really into fashion and girlish pursuits, but Pym recognizes that she's also very smart. She also had no qualms about avenging her father's death and donning an experimental suit and to carry out some superheroics by the end of the issue.

To be honest, I feared that their relationship would have a skeevy father-figure / manic pixie girl dynamic -- and it sometimes did! However, Hank is well aware of the age and power disbalance and keeps his distance. A couple of sharp turns occur, where he is courting her, and, later, when the tables flip, and she wants a relationship. (Some relationship milestones may have taken place in early Avengers comics, which ran concurrently with Tales to Astonish. Both Ant-Man and Wasp were founding members of the Avengers.) It takes a dozen issues before Hank and Janet become an official couple. By that time, they had fought many battles together and were equals in their relationship.

Reading the stories of a serious Ant-Man and a flighty Wasp prompted me to reflect on how the personalities were reversed in the movies. Scott is the feckless one who carries the comedic tone of the movie, while Hope has dark past and a dire mission. Scott does face some serious challenges, like how to overcome a criminal past and be a good father, but overall, the high-drama that characterizes many cinematic superhero stories is displaced onto Hope and her family. It's up to Scott's ridiculous associates to be even funnier as the comic relief.

Although the comics are not played for laughs as much as the movies are, there are hints that its writers were well aware of how comical some of Ant-Man's adventures are. Some stories have an undercurrent of metanarrative awareness, the ones featuring Ant-Man's fan club, or the Wasp back-up stories, where she visits schools and prisons to tell what amounts to modern folk tales about monsters and aliens.

As charming as most of the stories are, the series runs out of steam. By #56, Ant-Man and Wasp are already telling his fan club about a villain they fought way back in #50-51! The quality of the artwork also takes a few dips. Jack Kirby pencilled about a third of the 30 Ant-Man issues of Tales to Astonish. This collection features comics pencilled by two of Kirby's inkers, Dick Ayers and Don Heck. Their work ranges from rushed to very good. Issue #50, which stood out for its sketch-like art, was "illustrated by Jack Kirby" and "rendered by Steve Ditko"! However, the very next issue, #51, published in 1964, looks most like Kirby's future signature work Silver Surfer and New Gods. It's the only story in this collection with the cosmic aesthetic Kirby became known for.

Ant-Man's powers change in these later issues. The cover of #49 blares "BEGINNING IN THIS SPECIAL SUPER-ISSUE: ANT-MAN BECOMES GIANT MAN". Because Hank and Janet's powers are based on external agents (enlarging fluid and reducing pellets), they can both either shrink or grow, but Janet maintains the Wasp form and Hank is Giant-Man until Tales to Astonish changes its headliner to the Hulk in #68. Hank gets dizzy when he first grows to super-size, so there is comic-book precedence for his movie counterpart's disorientation when he grows too large. Stan Lee does not go for huge guffaws as the movie does, but he does have Janet joking about Hank's new obsession with size.

In #58, Hank discovers that he can use his cyber helmet to control both his and Janet's sizes. Thankfully, Janet van Dyne will not let any man make her feel small. She says, "Henry J. Pym!! I asked you not to do that! You're just showing off with your new cybernetic mental size control, that's all!" For all the times this relationship could get creepy, Hank and Janet's high-spirited, 1940s movie banter is delightful.

In the end, I found Ant-Man / Giant Man Epic Collection: The Man in the Ant-Hill worth reading, both for Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne's backstories, but also to trace the origins of some screen elements that were distributed between characters played by Douglas, Pfeiffer, Lilly, and Rudd. (Scott Lang's origin as Ant-Man in the first movie follows the comic-book Scott Lang well enough, but that's tale for another time.)

Besides getting into the minutia of comparing the source to the adaptation, Ant-Man / Giant Man Epic Collection: The Man in the Ant-Hill is worth reading because it shows off what Lee, Kirby, et al. could dash off for smaller characters in their pantheon, and that's a pretty big deal.

Ant-Man / Giant Man Epic Collection: The Man in the Ant-Hill — Marvel Digital Comics Shop