Tales to Astonish #27: the scientist before there was an Ant-Man
Tales to Astonish #27, cover dated January 1962, introduced scientist Henry Pym and the size-changing formula that would make him Ant-Man. Larry Lieber scripted it from a Stan Lee plot with art by Jack Kirby, though Pym would not appear in costume as Ant-Man until issue #35 later that year.
Marvel’s monster anthologies in 1962 were still running through the last of the giant-creature stories that had filled the line before superheroes came back into fashion. Tales to Astonish #27, cover dated January 1962, is technically one more of those, a self-contained science fiction short rather than a superhero launch. It is also the first appearance of Henry Pym, the scientist who would become Ant-Man within the year.
A one-off story, not yet a hero
Larry Lieber scripted the issue from a plot by his brother Stan Lee, with Jack Kirby drawing and Dick Ayers inking. The story is a self-contained cautionary tale: Pym develops a serum that shrinks him to insect size, gets trapped in an anthill, escapes with help from a friendly ant, then pours the formula away, vowing never to use it again. There is no costume, no alias, no ongoing series attached. It reads, on its own, like exactly the kind of single-issue science fiction morality tale Marvel’s anthology books had been running for years.
Why Marvel came back to it
Marvel revisited the concept within months, which was unusual for a stand-alone anthology piece in that era. Tales to Astonish #35, cover dated September 1962, brought Pym back with the costume, the size-changing helmet, and the Ant-Man name attached for the first time, retroactively turning issue #27 into an origin rather than a one-off. That gap between the character’s first appearance and his first costumed appearance is one of the clearer examples in Marvel’s history of a concept getting promoted from a single story into an ongoing feature months later.
What the character became
Ant-Man grew into a founding member of the Avengers alongside Iron Man, Thor, the Wasp and the Hulk in Avengers #1 in 1963, and Pym himself cycled through several superhero identities over the decades, including Giant-Man, Goliath and Yellowjacket, making him one of the few Marvel characters to hold that many codenames under one continuous history. The mantle eventually passed to Scott Lang, introduced in the 1970s as a new Ant-Man with his own family-driven motivations, and Lang became the character most audiences know today through Paul Rudd’s performances across multiple Marvel Studios films starting in 2015.
The collecting picture
Tales to Astonish #27 sits in an unusual spot for a Silver Age first appearance: it is genuinely scarce in high grade, as almost all early 1960s newsprint anthology books are, but it has never carried the same demand as the character’s actual costumed debut in issue #35, since most collectors treat #35 as the true Ant-Man key. That split has kept #27 a respected but comparatively affordable piece of early Marvel history relative to its cultural importance, a book collectors chase for completeness rather than for the character’s first costume.
Marvel history on VeVe
Ant-Man does not currently have a dedicated figure or artwork in VeVe’s catalog, so this one stays firmly comic history. The platform’s broader Marvel lineup and comics section cover figures, artworks and licensed digital editions across a wide range of the publisher’s eras, working the same way throughout: a numbered edition displayed and read in the app, its record kept on a public ledger. How blockchain provenance works explains that mechanism in plain terms if it is new to you.
New collectors can start a free VeVe account and get US$10 in credit toward a first piece, no card required, covered on the free credit page.
An anthology format built for exactly this
Tales to Astonish itself is worth understanding as part of the story. It was one of several Marvel anthology titles running through the last stretch of the monster-comics era, alongside books like Tales of Suspense and Journey into Mystery, each one testing new concepts in short standalone stories before committing to an ongoing feature. That format is exactly why Henry Pym could appear once, vanish, and come back months later without any editorial mess to untangle. There was no ongoing plot to interrupt, no supporting cast to account for. The anthology structure gave Marvel room to experiment cheaply, and more than one future Marvel mainstay, not just Ant-Man, got its start in those same pages before graduating to a dedicated series of its own.
The scientist who got a second chance
Most Marvel monster-anthology one-offs from this era stayed one-offs. Henry Pym’s story is the exception that shows how deliberate Marvel’s early universe-building actually was: a single self-contained tale, revived eight months later and turned into a costume, a codename and eventually a permanent seat on the Avengers roster.