Tales to Astonish #39
Vengeance of the Scarlet Beetle
By Stan Lee with Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers
Villains: the Scarlet Beetle
So, What Happens?
Hank notices a disturbance amongst the cities insects and follows a parade of different species underground. He discovers they are being addressed by the Scarlet beetle.
A regular Beetle has been given intelligence by a human nuclear test; and now wants to destroy human civilisation. While the ants stay loyal to Hank every other insect species joins up for the Beetle’s assault.
Hank is spotted and overpowered by beetles, his helmet is discarded and his growth and shrinking gases are stolen by the Scarlet Beetle who uses them to grow to a huge size.
The insects begin their assault, bringing down electricity wires, biting key figures and stealing explosives from army depots.
Eventually the loyal ants find Pym and give him back his Ant-Man helmet. Armed with a lollipop stick he leads the fight back, downing grasshoppers with drinking fountains, shooting DDT at beetles and chasing the Scarlet Beetle in a toy car before shrinking him and wrapping him up in a balloon.
The crisis is averted but Hank’s heroism has gone unnoticed and people in fact wonder if Ant-Man was in league with the insects.
So is it any good?:
It has its good points. Lee and Kirby actually take the story fairly seriously and show the Scarlet Beetle’s insects attacking mankind in fairly serious and quite creepy ways.
While Hank is out of the picture the insects are quite effective bad guys and you can see how their plots would cause havoc and spread terror. It falls apart once Hank is back on his feet and taking on the insects, at that point you just have the tiny Hank rushing around a toy store and exerting himself to spray some water on some grasshoppers.
The problem is largely that Hank could just grow to normal size and find much more effective ways to battle the insects as a regular human, or indeed that any other regular human could deal with them while Hank was stuck underground. As creepy as the sabotage and spider bites section is you are still left with Hank fighting grasshoppers with a lolly stick. That isn’t really any high point of threat or heroism.
The art’s nice and I quite liked the idea of pitting Hank against insects as the ants have done most of the hard work in the title until now and the series has been a much better showcase for the coolness of insects than of Hank Pym to date.
The idea of a rabble rousing radioactive beetle who has used Pym’s own technology to grow huge is actually pretty cool in a campy way but it doesn’t overcome the huge personality vacuum that is Ant-Man.
Are there any goofy moments?
You’d imagine the whole plot would be but they actually manage to make some of it fairly creepy. It’s still stupid but it’s not played for laughs that much.
That said the ants wielding huge DDT sprayers is pretty funny.
As is Hank stood on the lip of a drinking fountain and using a lollipop stick to direct streams of water at grasshoppers.
The final panel of the police officers wondering why Ant-Man let them down during the whole crisis is pretty corny.
Trivia:
The Scarlet Beetle has actually appeared quite frequently over the years.
His first actual reappearances was in a one off Ant-Man story in Iron Man 44, presumably an inventory holdover from somewhere.
Chronologically he next appeared after this story in Untold Tales of Spider-Man 12 where Kurt Busiek pitted him against Spider-Man and Bluebird.
He also faced Scott Lang in a Ditko pencilled Amazing Spider-Man annual back up and the West Coast Avengers in Englehart’s Tales to Astonish reunion storyline which I guess I really have to reread at some point.
Is it a landmark?:
No.