Sometimes you simply run out of animals.
That may have been Stan Lee, Ernie Hart and Don Heck’s problem when they created the much-mocked Porcupine to battle Ant-Man in Tales to Astonish 48 (October 1963).
“Yes, that’s right: The Porcupine,” wrote comics historian Don Alsafi. “I’d be tempted to wonder if this newest creation is the weirdest or most laughable terror that’s featured in the pages of Tales to Astonish, but let’s remember — this is Ant-Man we’re talking about. On the subject of lame baddies, this guy fits right in! … Porky is, in fact, only the fourth character Ant-Man has gone up against who could rightly be called a super-villain, given how many times Pym has gone up against spies, aliens, and mutated beetles. And the previous three super-villains were Egghead, the Protector and the Hijacker! Like I said: Fits right in.”
Actually, at age 9, I had no problem with the Porcupine, who was just a variation on the already familiar Iron Man theme. Embittered Army research scientist Alex Gentry realized that the protective combat suit he designed could make him “as rich as Midas” (yes, Gentry’s personality could fairly be described as “prickly”). His “quills” could do all sorts of cool stuff — spray fire, fog, liquid adhesive, and knock-out gas or fire off stun pellets, suction cups, darts, and even jets that enabled him to fly.
“It’s such a multi-use approach that you can’t help but wonder if the character could have become something more,” Alsafi grudgingly admitted.
“I’ll use this lab as my headquarters,” Gentry gloated. “Who would ever think of looking for a master criminal at an Army ordnance center?”
Meanwhile, Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, while playing the verbal tennis game that characterizes their romantic-comedy relationship, attend the grand opening of a new “burglar-proof bank.”
When the Porcupine falsifies that advertising with a gas attack, smoke screen, and his acetylene flame quills, Ant-Man goes after him, leaving Jan to sleep undisturbed because she’s coming down with the flu.
Using ants to trace the Porcupine’s movements back to the Army base, Ant-Man is nearly eaten by a guard dog there, and then stripped of his super-equipment and trapped in a full bathtub. Luckily, the ants inform the Wasp of his whereabouts, and she flies to the rescue — but not without some irritation at being underutilized and underestimated.
“I’m sure Henry’s in trouble!” the Wasp thinks. “Although he wouldn’t be if he hadn’t treated me like an invalid, and had taken me with him!”
“I … can’t hold out much longer,” Pym says. “Never been so glad to see anyone in my life!”
“Some compliment!” the Wasp quips. “When you’re drowning, you’re glad to see me!”
porcupine problems, too.
Together, the two tiny ones utilize the Army’s supply of liquid cement to paralyze Gentry’s weaponry, although he can evade capture using his jets.
Five months later, in Tales to Astonish 53 (March 1964), Pym has become Giant-Man, and his higher profile has attracted a fan club of kids. Anticipating comics conventions, they like to dress up as pint-sized versions of their heroes’ enemies.
“How do you like our costumes, Giant-Man?” the fans ask. “Can you tell who we are?”
“Of course I can!” replies Giant-Man. “You’re the Black Knight, standing next to Dr. Doom. But yours is the most realistic costume, Porcupine!”
As well it should be, because the real Porcupine has used the cover of the fan club to get within striking distance of his archenemies.
The clever criminal captures the Wasp, but lets her escape so his radio-transmitter quill can trace the location of the superheroes’ lab. But he outwits himself when he grabs and swallows what he thinks are Pym’s growth capsules, and shrinks himself to the size of a microbe.
That diminishing figure might have been the last we saw of the Porcupine, but Lee had other plans for him. Roy Thomas had taken over the scripting of the X-Men title, and Gentry reemerged there as part of a team of also-ran villains (X-Men 22-23, July-August 1966). The Porcupine was recruited by Count Nefaria along with the Eel, the Unicorn, the Scarecrow, and the Plant Man.
“I remember that, as I was new on the title, Stan specifically suggested that grouping — which was fine with me, liking super-hero/villain team-ups as I do,” Thomas recalled. “I had a bit of a particular interest in the Porcupine because of the Porky Pine character in my all-time favorite comic strip, Pogo.”
If the Porcupine did not strike me as a particularly outré choice for a costumed character, that can be attributed to the fact that, by 1963, I was well accustomed to seeing super-powered animal men pop up at every conceivable opportunity.
Ant-Man, Hawkman, Batman, the Fly, the Jaguar, the Black Cat, the Black Condor, Spider-Man, etc. — superhero animal-people have always been thick on the ground in comics. A surprising number of them can even converse with animals (Aquaman, Hawkman, the Fly, and the Jaguar among them).
And given that their super-enemies are often their mirror opposites, that naturally means that the heroes must each fight any number of criminal animal-men. Spider-Man alone faced the Chameleon, the Vulture, Dr. Octopus, the Lizard, and the Scorpion in his first few issues.
But this shouldn’t really be surprising. For humanity, the line between the superhuman and the infrahuman has always been a bit fuzzy. Animals possess fascinating characteristics that we have admired since before the dawn of civilization. You can see that in our gods, our monsters, and our superheroes.
“If you go back far enough in history and prehistory, you find humans investing animals, especially large and sometimes dangerous animals, with a charismatic quality, a connection to the divine or at least the occult,” observed Barbara Ehrenreich. “Ancient, premonotheistic cultures worshipped animals, animal-human hybrids like Sekhmet, the lion-bodied goddess of predynastic Egypt, or human-shaped deities with animal familiars, like the Hindu goddess Durga, who rides a tiger. Almost every large and potent animal species — bears, bulls, lions, sharks, snakes — has been an object of human cultic veneration.”
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