“Gutter of
Horror” is a Brazilian column from Dinamo Studio website that talks about horror
comics.
This is the translated version of the article.
This is the translated version of the article.
He has two
movies and was and important part of the last Avengers film (not the original one, but you know what I mean). In the comics, he is a founding
member of The Avengers. But what many people may not know is that Ant-Man
started as a horror character in a short story.
First, let’s
dive in into some historical context: well before the publisher we know as Marvel
Comics existed, there was a man called Martin Goodman. Goodman was the owner of
Red Circle Publishing, an umbrella brand that included several publisher
companies. In the 1930s and 1940s, Red
Circle published mainly books and pulp comics by sharing many of the
same staff for its various companies. One of those companies was Timely Comics.
At that
time, we didn’t have horror comics per se. What we had was a mixed bag of
genres, including some related to horror such as crime, supernatural stories
and, of course, the weird menace type stories that were very popular (more on
that here). Superheroes were created in this mixed bag, so it borrowed a lot from
several genres in pulp, including horror. Story and character elements
like science gone wrong, giant monsters, people that become weird creatures,
aliens and mythical creatures were just a few examples of the things that
transitioned to superhero comics.
Timely published
several comics, but through the 1940s the flagship titles were superheroes like
Captain America, Namor the Submariner and The Human Torch (the original, not
the Fantastic Four one). But after World War II, like most of superhero
comics, the Timely heroes ended up dying out. Captain America ended
with issue #75 (1950) after been renamed Captain America’s Weird Tales for 2
issues – with the last one being just a anthology issue with mostly horror
stories and no superheroes. Namor and Human Torch comics finished the year before with Sub-Mariner Comics #32 and Human Torch Comics #35. Another
publication, Marvel Mystery Comics (previously Marvel Comics) became the horror Anthology Marvel Tales. By 1951, Martin Goodman started to use the logo of his newsstand-distribution
company: Atlas.
Martin
Goodman was not exactly an innovator, but he followed trends, which were his successful
route until then. And in the 1950s E.C. Comics titles were the trend, so Atlas
published several horror, western and horror titles, such as Adventure into
Mystery, Adventures into Terror, Amazing Adventures, Astonishing, Marvel Tales,
Mystery Tales, Strange Tales, Uncanny Tales, among others. Goodman tried to revive
some superhero titles like Captain America but without success. Some titles like
Amazing Adventures ended up being re-titled as Amazing Fantasy - title that later would introduce us to Spider-man; others such as Tales of Suspense, Journey into
Mistery and Tales to Astonish transitioned to Marvel Comics keeping the names and helped
introduce many of the Marvel Characters we know today. And one of them was
Ant-man.
When Marvel
began “officially” in the early 1960s1, the company was in a transition. Titles inherited from Atlas included horror, western,
humor and romance titles, but Stan Lee decided to follow another trend: the
revival of superheroes made by DC Comics, which were rebooting characters such as The Flash
and Green Lantern. Maybe because of that transition, basically all the first heroes from the Marvel Universe had
one foot in horror – Fantastic Four were a bunch of weird monsters, so as The
Hulk. But unlike them, Ant-man actually started as a horror story.
In 1962 issue #27 from “Tales to Astonish” featured a short story titled “The man in the Ant
Hill” that was about Hank Pym, a scientist that developed a formula
capable of reduce the size of objects – and another one that enables him to return
to normal size. Putting just a few sips of the reduction serum on his arm, he shrinks - just to realize that he had left the back-to-normal serum far from his reach.
The journey to get there and return to his normal size putted him in many
problems, such as being followed by ants, which appeared giant to him. After
almost die, Pym manage to get to the serum and returned of his normal self. After
this little adventure (see what I did there?), Hank Pym decided that his
invention was too dangerous and threw the serum out.
It was only
eight issues later that Hank Pym was reintroduced, this time as a superhero, with an uniform and a codename. Some issues later, we were also introduced to Janet
Van Dyne, Hank Pym’s girlfriend and also the superhero Wasp. Both became
regulars on Tales to Astonish, that was not a horror comic anymore - much like Tales of Suspense and Tales do Astonish which became the
house of Iron Man and Thor, just to name a few. And the rest is (Marvel)
History.
Rafael Algures is a Bachelor of Philosophy specialized in Neurosciences of Language. He is also a copywriter, content and science writer, and a comic book creator. His latest work, “Gutter of Horror: Transition”, is available at Amazon – digital and paperback.
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1. The name
“Marvel” was already used by Martin Goodman in some publications since at least
1944, were we could read “A Marvel Magazine” on some covers.