Biography of Henry Pym, 1962-1963

The following is a biography of Henry Pym for the years 1962 to 1963, in which Pym established his alterego Ant-Man as a popular hero, began an often romantic alliance with the Wasp, helped form the Avengers, and introduced his alternate crimefighting persona, Giant-Man.

Biography

Clash with Comrade X

Shortly after creating his Ant-Man persona, Pym developed a system whereby he could receive signals from ants across the city, and it didn't take long for this system to bear fruit. He received word from the ants that a desperate woman was looking for him, and he used the signals to track her down and enter her room. She told him that she had been jilted by a former lover, a Soviet spy known as Comrade X; furthermore, he had just arrived in the U.S. aiming to discover Ant-Man's secret and bring it back to the U.S.S.R.. Ant-Man and a group of antsboarded the ship that Comrade X and his allies, but was caught in a trap: a communist threw a glass box down over him and the ants. However, Ant-Man was able to contact more ants through the box's air holes, who then floated out to the ship on bits of wood and helped him escape. Ant-Man radioed for authorities and found and attacked Comrade X, bringing Comrade to the ground and removing a mask to reveal the woman Ant-Man had spoken to underneath. She and her crew were taken into custody by the imminent Coast Guard.

The Protector misnomer

Ant-Man soon received another signal from his ants leading him to a jeweler named Gerald Marsh, who told him of a masked man called the Protector who had been shaking down local jewelry stores for "protection" by threatening them with his disintegrating ray. Ant-Man keeps track of his network of ants for signs of the Protector, and was able to catch him in the act, but Protector fended him off with a simple water gun. Ant-Man decided to rent a jewelry store as Henry Pym to bait the Protector; his plan worked, as the Protector arrived and delivered his usual spiel, and Pym was able to track him as he left using his ants' signals. He and the ants defeated the Protector and called for the police, who unmasked him to reveal Gerald Marsh. Ant-Man explained that Marsh's method of disintegration in fact consisted of him simply stealing the jewels and replacing them with piles of dust. Marsh was taken into custody.

An inkling of Egghead

Ant-Man later met his first true rival, albeit in ignoble fashion. Egghead, a former government scientist hired by New York criminals to defeat Ant-Man, attempted to use technology similar to Ant-Man's own to command the ants to betray him. However, the ants remained loyal, and warned Ant-Man of the trap that Egghead was setting for him. When Ant-Man arrived, he easily dispatched of the men who had hired Egghead, though Egghead himself was able to escape.

The Scarlet Beetle

Following another signal of trouble from his loyal ants, Ant-Man came upon a bizarre gathering of many insects in the sewer. They were all listening to a telepathic speech being given by the Scarlet Beetle, an ordinary beetle who had endured exposure to radioactive material and thereby been given human-level intelligence. Ant-Man attempted to defeat him then and there, but was thwarted by beetle bodyguards who knocked his cybernetic helmet and growth vials away from him, throwing him into a deep pit with no means of communicating with the ants. Nonetheless, the bright and loyal ants found and rescued Ant-Man and followed him into battle against Scarlet Beetle's forces, who had by then begun their revolt against humans in earnest. Ant-Man was able to thwart Scarlet Beetle's plans, puncturing his shrinking vial and bringing him to a reasonable size. Later, Pym counteracted the Beetle's radioactivity, converting him back into a normal beetle and returning him to the wild.

The scheme of the Hijacker

A criminal known as the Hijacker soon made a name for himself by robbing armored cars. Ant-Man learned of a recent score of Hijacker's, of Howard Mitchell's armored car company, through the ant network. He visited Mitchell in his office, and Mitchell explained that four of his trucks carrying payrolls had been stolen, their guards dazed and unable to remember what had occurred. Ant-Man told him to arrange and announce another payroll shipment in an attempt to bait the Hijacker. At the time of the truck's departure, Ant-Man feigned an excruciating pain in his appendix and left the scene, secretly following the truck in a model plane. The truck left and, beyond the city limits, was pulled by a giant magnet into the back of a large van, where the Hijacker dropped a gas grenade, incapacitating the truck's guards. Ant-Man resisted the gas, wearing a gas mask made of unstable molecules that he had recently developed. Ant-Man called for ant assistance and used Hijacker's own gas against him, knocking him unconscious and unmasking him to reveal Howard Mitchell. Mitchell was taken in by the police.

The slave world of Kulla

Visiting a scientist friend, Pym found that he was conspicuously absent. Over the following days, he learned of a series of scientist disappearances, and was soon abducted himself by a supposed window washer. His captor used a strange device to teleport the two of them to another world, where the alien warlord Kulla was attempting to use captured human scientists to build him a weapon to conquer his world. Pym acted up in such a way as to get him thrown into a solitary dungeon, which he used to his advantage by shrinking into Ant-Man. He found the appropriate frequency to communicate with the insects in the dungeon and returned to Kulla's chambers where the other scientists had finished developing a death ray for him. Ant-Man cooperated with the insects to operate the ray, shooting and killing Kulla, and allowing him and the rest of the scientists to return to Earth safely.

Muffling the Voice

Ant-Man was soon antagonized by the Voice, Jason Cragg, a man who possessed the uncanny ability to have people believe that whatever he said was the absolute truth. Ant-Man was uniquely resistant to this ability, as his cybernetic helmet filtered out whatever aural quirk caused the Voice's power. Seeing Ant-Man as a threat to his rise to power, Cragg commanded the police to track him down, and eventually succeeded in removing Ant-Man's helmet and getting him under his spell. He ordered Ant-Man to walk off of a pier into the ocean, and he obeyed, but was saved from the water by his ant friends and carried to safety. Later, Cragg was scheduled to appear on a televised broadcast where he would at last take control of everyone watching. But Ant-Man showed up at the studio and crawled up to Cragg's ear on the stage, telling him to tell the crowd that he was wrong about Ant-Man, threatening him with an (unloaded) gun. Cragg did so, believing he could simply say the opposite again later, but then Ant-Man revealed that he had planted laryngitis microbes on the microphone, which in moments began to harm Cragg's voice irreparably. It lost all hypnotic quality, and the citizens ran him out of town.

The reformation of the Time Master

The local police soon learned of a new villain calling himself the Time Master, who threatened to use a special ray gun he had developed to rapidly age the city's residents. Ant-Man identified the Time Master as scientist Elias Weems, who had been fired from his laboratory job for his advanced age after turning 65. Ant-Man confronted Weems at his home, but was caught off-guard and fired upon by Weems' aging ray. Weems dumped the tiny, frail Ant-Man in the trash and left for City Hall, firing his aging ray upon a great number of people at once. Weems unwittingly fired upon his beloved grandson as well, dropping the aging ray in a panic. Ant-Man was able to recover, and using his ant army took the ray and reversed the aging on the citizens. Weems was taken into custody, but Ant-Man himself testified for his release, arguing that he had value to society if only he weren't discriminated for his age. Weems was rehired to his lab and lived out the rest of his days as a prospering scientist.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Pym soon realized that he needed a crimefighting partner. He was approached by Vernon van Dyne, a fellow scientist who proposed collaborating on a project he'd been working on to detect extraterrestrial life. Vernon also brought his daughter Janet to the visit, whom Pym noticed had a striking resemblance to his late wife Maria. Pym was altogether uninterested in van Dyne's work, and the two parted without incident. Later, Janet found her father mysteriously dead in his laboratory. Pym arrived as Ant-Man, and he and Janet speculated that Vernon's interest in alien life may have been the cause. There was also a strange mist around Vernon's lab. Janet demonstrated great resolve and determination in seeking to avenge her father's death, and Pym decided that she was the correct choice to become his partner. He offered van Dyne the name of Wasp and proposed teaming up to find her father's killer. The determined van Dyne accepted, and a heroic alliance was formed.

Pym introduced van Dyne to his size-changing equipment, and not a moment too soon, as the alien creature that indeed had killed Dr. van Dyne was now threatening the city. The two suited up, Ant-Man fitting Wasp with a pair of functional wings to allow her to fly. The young and impulsive Wasp abruptly confessed that she was falling for Ant-Man, but he firmly rejected her advances, privately afraid to love again after the death of his wife. They soon found the creature, a large mass of green goo, terrorizing the George Washington Bridge. Ant-Man's ants informed him that the creature was made of formic acid, also found in the ants themselves. Returning to his lab, Pym synthesized an antidote to formic acid, and the heroes and ants brought a shotgun with antidote-loaded shells to the creature, blasting away and seemingly dissolving the creature into nothing.

Egghead's revenge

Ant-Man and Wasp next heard of a diamond heist nearby, but messages from his ants were garbled, apparently due to deliberate interference on the part of the criminal. Some time later, Wasp alone attended an exhibit on wasps, where she saw the stolen diamond. Determined to prove her worth on her own, she returned to the exhibit at night in costume, but was trapped by Egghead, who had devised the entire thing. She signaled for Ant-Man with her antennae, and he arrived, but was soon himself trapped in a glass tank with an insectivorous iguana. Egghead gave him a pin to give him a sporting chance, and Ant-Man plunged the weapon into the lizard's scales, defeating it. Wasp was soon freed from her own trappings, only for the two to be confronted by Egghead's next minion, an anteater. Ant-Man used a powerful fiber lasso to snag and swing the animal, using his full-sized strength to easily subdue it. The heroes then took the fight to the criminals themselves, easily taking down Egghead's henchmen Ape and Twister, but allowing the man himself to escape.

Doctor Doom and the Micro-World

Through his ant network, Ant-Man learned that the famous superhero team the Fantastic Four, for some reason, required his help. Making his way to their lab, Ant-Man learned that the Four had recently been suffering from spontaneous shrinking events, suddenly finding themselves to be no more than an inch tall. Mr. Fantastic requested a means by which to shrink down manually and discover the cause. Ant-Man happily supplied them with his formula, allowing them to shrink and grow at will. Leaving them to their quest, Ant-Man returned some time later to find them nowhere to be found. He shrunk even further than he usually does, surfacing in a world in another dimension, known as the Micro-World. He found that this world, once quiet and peaceful, had been conquered by Doctor Doom, who was responsible for the Four's spontaneous shrinking. Ant-Man was captured by Doom's men, and was to be handed off to the Lizard Men of Tok as a slave. But he was rescued at the last moment by the Fantastic Four, who themselves had escaped Doom's prison moments earlier. The five fought off Doom's forces and the visitors from Tok, though Doom himself escaped back to Earth.

The robot cyclops

After weeks of relative inactivity in the city, Henry and Janet decided to take a vacation to Greece. Upon arrival, they looked to sail through the nearby islands, but a local captain refused to take them on account of a supposed giant living on one of those islands; further investigation suggested that it was a cyclops. The heroes were able to secure a ship to the island, donning their costumes and indeed coming face-to-face with a cyclops, over 50 feet tall. The boat grabbed the cyclops' attention, but the minuscule Ant-Man and Wasp were able to avoid his gaze. The two flew off (Ant-Man on a flying ant), quietly following the cyclops back onto the island. The cyclops led them to a series of strange lights in the hills, where they found a number of sailors held captive by aliens from the planet A-Chiltar III; the cyclops was in fact a giant robot constructed by the aliens. As Wasp and a group of friendly insects fought the aliens, Ant-Man entered the "brain" of the cyclops robot, controlling it and sending it after the aliens, forcing them to flee for good and freeing the captive sailors.

The Avengers

One day, Ant-Man and the Wasp heard a radio signal from the Teen Brigade, a league of young do-gooders led by Rick Jones in the southwestern U.S., warning that the monstrous beast the Hulk had resurfaced and apparently tried to destroy a train along with its passengers. His intentions were unclear, and in any case he had to be found. The duo answered the call, taking a pair of flying ants for the long trip. When they arrived at Teen Brigade headquarters, they found that they weren’t the only ones: Thor and Iron Man had also come, though Thor strangely left only moments after. Ant-Man soon received an urgent message from his ant network, that Hulk had been spotted disguised in a nearby circus. Ant-Man and Wasp, followed closely by Iron Man, made their way to the circus and attempted to reason with the Hulk, but to no avail. The long-antagonized Hulk ran from them, and only Iron Man was fast enough to pursue. The insectoid heroes trailed behind, keeping a close eye on the action and devising a plan for the final outcome. As Hulk and Iron Man fought, Thor finally returned, his brother Loki in tow: he explained that Loki had framed Hulk for the train incident in a long-winded attempt to get at Thor. Desperate, Loki turned himself radioactive, threatening the rest of the heroes to leave him and Thor alone. But Ant-Man’s plan was soon realized, as a group of ants triggered a trapdoor underneath Loki that trapped him inside of a lead-lined container. Loki could not maintain his radioactivity indefinitely, and Thor would wait it out before returning him to Asgard. During the wait, Ant-Man and Wasp made a proposal: given the combined power that they all shared, the five of them would make an incredible team. Iron Man and Thor readily agreed in the interest of better serving the public, while Hulk figured that it was better than staying on the run. All that was left for the new team was a name, which the Wasp provided: The Avengers.

The hypnotic music of Liso Trago

Ant-Man and the Wasp's crimefighting pursuits continued, stopping an attempted jewel heist. The owner of the jewel, a man from India, told the heroes a story as thanks. He spoke of a man in India known as Ghazandi who was capable of hypnotizing people with his music. He also noted that doing so incorrectly could result in hypnotizing oneself. One night soon after, Hank and Janet shared a night on the town, taking in a nightclub performance from jazz trumpeter Liso Trago at Janet's insistence. After the show, the two spotted Trago stealing the night's profits from the promoter, and the heroes sprung into action. They stopped Trago and brought him to the promoter, who decided to send him out of the country to India rather than call the police on account of their friendship. Two months later, the two heard over the radio a song from Trago, and were quickly overcome by a bizarre frequency and passed out. One of their ants carried them to a nearby anthill to recover, and sacrificed itself to protect them from a garden snake. Protected by their cybernetic helmets, the two traced Trago's signal to a radio station in town. Ant-Man deduced that Trago had returned from India having learned the techniques of hypnotic musicianship from Ghazandi. The two found Trago using hypnotized band members to rob nearby stores and banks. As Wasp herded them with her stinger, Ant-Man and the ants distracted Trago and forced him to botch his hypnotic melody, inadvertently wiping his memory all the way back to his first job as a musician and putting an end to his brief life of crime.

The many quills of the Porcupine

Hank and Janet attended the grand opening of a bank in town that promoted itself as burglar-proof, implementing security technology developed by Dr. Pym. The opening was crashed however by a bizarre villain calling himself the Porcupine. The Porcupine was appropriately clad in a bulky, spined suit, each of his "quills" armed with a different substance, from sleeping gas to liquid cement. Taking the crowd by surprise and obfuscating his crime with various gases, Porcupine easily got inside the bank safe and stole a large amount of cash. By the time the heroes had gathered their senses, Porcupine had escaped. Janet in fact had inhaled too much of the gas, and Hank was forced to bring her home to recover. Soon after, he received word from the ants that they had followed Porcupine after another robbery, trailing him undisguised to an army laboratory. As Janet recovered, Hank donned the Ant-Man costume and went into action. Arriving at Porcupine's lab, Ant-Man walked into a trap: the villain was waiting for him, and dropped him inside a full bathtub to toy with him before leaving the room. Stuck in an impossible situation, Ant-Man was saved by the arrival of the Wasp and an army of ants. The two heroes and their insect friends quickly built up a stockpile of Porcupine's own liquid cement, and as the villain returned in full costume, squirted it into his quills to block his offense. Porcupine was knocked from the window, but survived the fall several stories down with some unclogged jet tubes, and escaped.

The birth of Giant-Man

Pym made several scientific advancements in this time. He stabilized a method of growing himself beyond his normal size, discovering that a height of 12 feet was as tall as he could reasonably make himself. Beyond that, his natural frame could not support the increased pressure. He also integrated the abilities of his signature cybernetic helmet into a suit that was also adjusted to allow for the aforementioned increase in size. Finally, he and Wasp each equipped belts filled with a series of capsules that would transform them to various sizes. One day, as he and Wasp tested these new capsules in their home, they were attacked by a humanoid alien creature while. With a few swipes of his hand, the alien "erased" the two as a tiny Wasp stood on Pym's finger: in fact, this teleported them both to another dimension, called Dimension Z. Pym and some other Earth scientists had been kidnapped by the aliens there, with the intention of forcing them to teach the aliens the secrets of atomic weaponry. Wasp had simply been taken along by luck, unnoticed by their alien captor. She used a shrinking capsule on Pym to free him of his binds, and the two went to work rescuing the other scientists. As Pym unleashed on the aliens his new 12-foot persona, which he dubbed Giant-Man, Wasp tracked down a way to return to their own dimension. She tracked down the locals' lead scientist, who led them to the alien that possessed the dimensional device. Wasp and Giant-Man fought their way into claiming the device and returned themselves and the captive scientists back to Earth. Soon after, the Avengers fought and defeated the Space Phantom, but Hulk left the team, upset with his treatment by the other members.

See also

• Biography of Henry Pym, 1964
• Biography of the Wasp, 1963
• History of the Avengers, 1963-1964