Ant-Man was one superhero who had a good deal of practice at cutting his enemies down to size.
Because superheroes so frequently encounter foes who are either their mirror images, or their reverse mirror images, it was probably inevitable that Ant-Man was going to run across various giant menaces.
And so he did — the immense red Scarlet Beetle (Tales to Astonish 39, Jan. 1963); the gaseous, green Creature from Kosmos (TTA 44, June 1963) and a Cyclops robot on a Greek isle (TTA 46, Aug. 1963). After he became Giant-Man, Hank Pym encountered an even bigger foe in Colossus (TTA 58, Aug. 1964).
“No matter how big you are, Giant-Man, I am far bigger!” Colossus said, rubbing it in.
Drawn by Don Heck, plotted by Stan Lee and scripted by Ernie Hart, When Cyclops Walks the Earth is the story of Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne’s unrelaxing vacation in Greece.
“What (Heck) could do was draw very good-looking men and women, and make you like them,” Steve Englehart observed. “I’ve always said that one of Stan’s great strengths was, he made you like his characters, so that you cared about them, and in many ways, Don was the artistic equivalent. Ant-Man/Giant-Man and the Wasp hardly ever had a great story, but I was totally drawn into their relationship, and that was down to Don.”
“There was a certain sophistication to his artwork,” Stan Lee agreed. “His characters looked like real people existing in the real world.”
When local sailors are being terrorized by the legendary malevolent giant, Ant-Man and the Wasp step in and discover that Cyclops is a robot scout for alien invaders.
“Ant-Man enters the robot through its mouth (!) and finds that he can control it via his cybernetic helmet and thus is able to turn the thing onto its masters,” wrote Pierre Comtois in TwoMorrows’ Marvel Comics in the Early 1960s. “The move convinces them that Earth’s human population will be tougher to conquer than they thought. Consequently, they decide to abandon their scheme to move in. (Amazing how easily all these alien invader types give up on the slightest show of resistance!)
“Even though this tired plot was familiar to older fans, it was still new to the vast majority of Marvel’s younger readers who, at the time, had likely never encountered it before. And besides, didn’t it still feature that new superhero Ant-Man, plus an exciting Jack Kirby drawn cover?”
Robot giants operated by crafty enemies were kind of a thing in the early Marvel universe.
In his first appearance, Thor defeated the Mechano Monster sent against him by the Stone Men of Saturn (Journey into Mystery 83, Aug. 1962). The Fantastic Four tackled the dictator Kurrgo’s Gort-like robot from Planet X (Fantastic Four 7, Oct. 1962.) The Hulk destroyed Mongu, the “Gladiator from Space,” only to discover that the big bruiser was a Russian hoax (The Incredible Hulk 4, Nov. 1962). Iron Man encountered the huge “cave man” Gargantus in his second outing (Tales of Suspense 40, April 1963).
And the Mr. Fantastic battled the actual Cyclops, disguised as a robot (Fantastic Four 9, Dec. 1962). It was all part of the Sub-Mariner’s Hollywood scheme.
About Author
