ANT-MAN

The first villain Ant-Man ever faced as a costumed hero was not a monster or a conqueror but a disgraced atomic scientist named Elihas Starr, whose oversized cranium earned him the underworld’s least flattering nickname: Egghead. Fired from government research for espionage and hired by mobsters whom Ant-Man kept inconveniencing, he debuted in Tales to Astonish #38 (December 1962), in a story actually titled “Betrayed by the Ants!”

Starr’s masterstroke was eavesdropping. He reverse-engineered the frequency Henry Pym used to communicate with ants, broadcast his own message across the local colonies, and pitched the insects a revolution: lead their supposed enslaver into a flypaper-lined trap, and freedom plus riches would follow. He congratulated himself on appealing to appetites any creature would surely have.

The colony took the meeting and then reported every word of it to Pym. Forewarned, Ant-Man walked into the museum ambush prepared, sprang the machinery backwards onto the gangsters — complete with a sheet of flypaper dropped on the crooks themselves — and had the getaway cars’ tires slashed for good measure. Egghead alone slipped away, nursing the grudge that would define the rest of his criminal career.