8 Incredibly Ridiculous Things About Early Ant-Man Comics
5. His Villains Tend To Be The Person Who Claimed To Be The Original Victim
There is a weird trend in early Ant-Man comics. His villains tend to be the person who originally contacted him to fight crime. Even more strangely, Ant-Man seems to always know that this is the case.
It's not clear if Stan Lee literally forgot the plot of previous issues or just didn't care, but three of Ant-Man's first ten or so stories feature a criminal pretending to be the victim of a crime, only for Ant-Man to reveal that the "victim" was actually the real supervillain all along. He then tends to give a long lecture to the police that the villain was just pretending to be wronged to throw off the scent of law enforcement, and that he, being a genius superhero, of course knew all along.
This is doubly weird if you remember that Ant-Man hears about crimes almost exclusively through his chain of ant gossip. That means these grown adult criminals, with no knowledge of how Ant-Man uses ants to eavesdrop, based their whole plan on Ant-Man somehow finding out about their scheme by just talking about it aloud in some random room. But hey, it worked.