Tales to Astonish #42 (1963)
By Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck
So, What Happens? A certain Jason Cragg has the power to control people with his voice, and orders the crowd to push Ant-Man away from the city. A few weeks earlier, he was a simple radio announcer, and not a particularly good one at that, but one day due to a nearby experiment his microphone became radioactive and made his voice impossible to resist to. He immediately quit his job and started travelling, until eventually deciding to test himself by defeating Ant-Man and gaining control of the city. Back to the present, Cragg stirs both the general public and the police against Ant-Man, whose helmet fortunately makes him immune to the villain's powers. Hank Pym manages to get away and tries to go back to his lab to return to normal size, but when crossing a field he is found by the crowd, who use magnets to pull his helmet and empty gas canisters. Without his helmet, Hank is powerless against Cragg's voice and has to obey his order to dive from the pier and drown, but his ants are loyal and save him even without a telepathic order. Back to the lab, Hank returns to full size and prepares a plan: a few days later, the night before Cragg is scheduled to appear on live TV, Ant-Man steals a bottle of germs and a fake gun, which he then uses to force Cragg to retract his accusations againt him. Realizing he has been outsmarted, the guy tries to take control of the crowd again, but Hank had covered his microphone with the microbes of laryngitis, making his voice hoarse and powerless. Convinced that he will never regain the exact same voice, Cragg leaves the city.
Notes: Cragg will eventually return decades later in the pages of West Coast Avengers as The Voice. He has a profile at the Marvel Appendix. This adventure is only 13 pages long, as Ant-Man still had to share Tales to Astonish with another random sci-fi story.
Something Silly This Way Comes: A radioactive microphone, a city looking for Ant-Man with magnifying glasses and the germs of laryngitis. Need I say more?
Review: How you feel about this story will largely depend on how you feel about the sillier side of Marvel's Silver Age because, let's face it, from the premise to the execution to the resolution, this is a very silly story. Cragg, who doesn't even get a supervillain name yet, has interesting powers, which will be recycled in a far more sinister way with the Purple Man over in Daredevil, but everything else from his origin story to his look and plan is very surreal, almost as much as seeing Ant-Man defeating thieves by throwing a tiny fork at their rear ends. The problem is that I'm not sure if it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek, or if it's supposed to be taken seriously, which in a nutshell is a question that could be asked for Ant-Man's entire run of stories.
If you do take it in stride, then the story is in fact quite good, in its own goofy way. Cragg has a small crook mentality, so it's not surprising he sets his sights on Ant-Man instead of the Fantastic Four, and we see the growing bond between Hank and his ants, who are depicted as having human-like feelings and rush to his aid even without being summoned by the helmet. Ant-Man wins the day with brain and tactics more than with his powers, which if anything seem to hinder him for a while when he has to rush back to the lab to grow to human size. Ant-Man's debut story was all about the fear of remaining ant-size forever, but by now he is comfortable enough to travel across the city without worrying about risks or predators.
Having said that, there still is a gulf of quality between this story and what Marvel was producing elsewhere, especially Fantastic Four #13 that came out the same month. Despite being plotted by Stan, the script of the story is by his brother Larry, and it tells. Larry is a good storyteller and was instrumental during the early Marvel years, but he never quite seems to have the same grasp on the characters as Stan, and was mostly there to help taking some of the workload off his brother's shoulders. Generally speaking, when Larry's name is in the credits it means Stan didn't have a lot of time for that particular issue or character, which more often than not ended up having a bad impact on the quality of the stories. This was also the case with Thor's earlier tales, which would get a completely different tone once Stan started devoting more attention to them. Here, we get a fun tale, but also one that at the end of the day doesn't add anything to the expanding Marvel Universe.
The art by Don Heck is quite polished and detailed. Even in large crowds everyone looks different and expressive, which is especially helpful given the relative lack of action. I'm not Heck's biggest fan, but his work here is solid.
Final Verdict: A fun read if you don't mind the goofiness, but nothing to blow you away. 2.5/5
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