Tales to Astonish #36

The Challenge of Comrade X

By Stan Lee with Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers

Villains: Comrade X

So, What Happens?

Ant-Man is rapidly making a name for himself capturing bank robbers. His citywide network of ants alert him to crimes and he is able to rush anywhere in the city due to his catapult and loyal ants. His fame travels behind the Iron Curtain and the commies are soon vowing to do something about the new hero.

The ants pick up an FBI communication discussing a young woman who needs to see Ant-Man and Hank soon tracks her down and hides inside her purse.

Revealing himself to her in her apartment she tells him that she is the ex-lover of the communist master of disguise Comrade X who is in town to deal with Ant-Man. She tells Hank that Comrade X will be onboard a freighter in the docks.

Pym manages to get aboard the ship but sets off an alarm and is soon trapped in a plastic tank. However the air holes in the tank allow him to cybernetically contact more ants and they soon swarm all over the Russian gunman watching over the tank, smashing it in the process and allowing Pym to go free.

Pym finds Comrade X’s cabin and despite being threatened with DDT he and his loyal ants overwhelm the spy and pull his face mask off, revealing that he is actually the young woman who told Pym about the Russian threat.

This wasn’t a surprise to Ant-Man who had actually seen the mask inside the young woman’s purse when he hid in there earlier. The coast guard arrive and arrest everyone.

So is it any good?:

Some of the art is nice, the unmasked Comrade X has a really classic Kirby femme fatale look and Kirby and Ayers do a solid enough job throughout. That said they did dozens of other stories equally good or better so that doesn’t really make this one a must-read.

It is generally said that what made the Silver Age Marvel heroes different was their personalities and the way that the soap opera of their lives was as important as the villains they faced. That is totally missing from Ant-Man, if anything he has even less personality than the DC heroes of the period as well as less interesting adventure plots.

Lee’s fall back plot at this point was the commie espionage story and the mood of the times meant that such villains generally had no redeeming features. There might have been some pathos involved in the Hulk’s encounter with the Gargoyle but none of the other reds featured in the fledgling titles have had any plus points at all.

Without an interesting lead or two dimensional adversaries you are left pinning everything on the twist ending mystery and the novelty of a tiny hero surrounded by insects and these things don’t really hold up all that well.

Comrade X really being a woman is a twist but they had to be someone and we weren’t really introduced to any other candidates so it’s hardly a big surprise when it comes. This is a recurring failure of the stories from the period with the first issue of the Human Torch and the next issue of Ant-Man having a very similar problem. This is perhaps because we don’t really have many super villains yet, merely regular criminals or spies using codenames to protect their identity. Those identities become a plot point but there isn’t enough space or subtlety in the stories to introduce competing candidates for the big unmasking that the stories require.

So all in all still quite a flat story, I can’t really dislike any story with Kirby/Ayers art but I was kind of left wishing they had been given a different assignment.

Are there any goofy moments?

I liked the way the police precinct house is overrun by ants, hiding in the waste paper baskets and desk drawers on the off chance they get to hear about a crime Ant-Man would be interested in.

The ants carrying little chunks of wood who hurl themselves into the sea and raft across to the commie ship are brilliant.

The Russian commissar is so annoyed at radio broadcasts about Ant-Man foiling bank jobs that he has to send his best agent to the states to deal with him. Things really must have been perfect in his socialist utopia for that to be his first priority.

Rubber full face masks are of course a comics tradition, not sure there has ever been an example quite as weird as this pair of panels though.

Trivia:

Comrade X would return, as Madame X, in an arc of West Coast Avengers that I am going to have to reference quite a lot during the write ups of the Ant-Man run. It featured the Avengers against Quicksilver, Hungarian communists and every, until then, rightfully forgotten commie Hank Pym villain Steve Englehart could drag up. I can’t really remember anything about it despite having read it. Those issues are her only appearances since this story.

Is it a landmark?:

No.