The Hulk had ceased his homeless wanderings through the Marvel universe just as Giant-Man and the Wasp were about to embark on theirs.
Despite a desperate last-minute costume redesign in Tales to Astonish 65 (Feb. 1965), Dr. Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne would be out in five issues, their feature replaced by the Sub-Mariner’s. That would turn Tales to Astonish into a title focusing on the exploits of two super-antiheroes.
“Interesting how often this new costume gimmick was employed by Marvel,” Richard Akis said. “You also saw it with Iron Man, Daredevil and the original X-Men. It obviously worked with Iron Man and DD, less so for the X-Men.”
And because writer/editor Stan Lee rarely abandoned a character, he’d find Pym and Van Dyne a home in the super-team they’d helped found, the Avengers, a year later.
“Yes, Reed Richards was smart, and Dr. Strange was mystic, but most early Marvel characters were punchers — the Thing, Hulk, Thor, Cap, Namor, even Spidey, Daredevil and Iron Man,” wrote David Colton. “The shrinking Ant-Man never really explored the small. His turn as Giant-Man, then Goliath, never really added much except someone else to battle brute-of-the-month. Easily the most badly handled Marvel hero.”
Vincent Mariani disagreed. “You’re omitting Prof. X, Marvel Girl, and Cyclops of the X-Men, all with more brains than brawn,” Mariani said. “And the Beast, after he became written as an acrobatic intellectual.
“It was a neat trick Lee and Kirby pulled, turning Ant-Man into Giant-Man… and making him even more accessible and appealing as a hero. The key was making his size occasionally as much a drawback as an asset, and also making him bigger but not necessarily stronger than some of his foes. And the Wasp, able to shrink in the manner of Ant-Man and sting much larger enemies with precision, served as a perfect counterbalance.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Bruce Banner had fallen into the clutches of a Russian submarine. By this time, Lee and artist Steve Ditko had focused on rage as the trigger for his transformations, so Banner was able to use his anger to break free and hurl himself On a Rampage Against the Reds!
“This approach first appeared in the Lee/Ayers Giant-Man/Hulk story just prior to the Ditko run,” Harmony Gates noted. “It was a much handier trigger than the day/night or gamma-machine explanations previously employed.”
The Vietnam war was growing increasingly unpopular, and Lee’s anti-communist crusading — which had seemed timely in the McCarthy era of a decade before — was looking shopworn. Lee would soon drop that angle in his stories.
As for Giant-Man’s helmeted redesign, after several decades the jury is still out.
“I always loved this Giant-Man costume,” Stu Serchuck said.
“That was not only the single worst costume Hank Pym ever wore, but the worst costume any hero ever wore,” Tony Ingram wrote.
“Terrible costume, especially the helmet,” Steven Grant said. “Even then, I thought it smacked of a character on his way out…”
“It was my favorite of his costumes, probably because that helmet was a callback to the original Ant-Man helmet,” Hoy Murphy recalled.
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