A police
summons goes out from a jewelry shop which is picked up by the ants and relayed
to Ant-Man. Hank suits up, shrinks down, and catapults himself to the shop
where he is caught by the ants and escorted inside now that the police have
taken their report and gone. Proprietor Gerald Marsh relates how he was
confronted by the extortionist known as the Protector, demanding money from the
city’s jewelers. When Marsh claimed to have no money, the huge masked gangster
lifted Marsh over the counter with no difficulty, then used his disintegrator
ray gun to turn Marsh’s gems to dust. Ant-Man returns home and awaits further
developments….
A few days
later, Hank has a report of the Protector shaking down another shop and so
Ant-Man leaps to the site to confront the villain. Ant-Man scatters the pearls
of a necklace to tumble the bad guy to the ground. Outside, Protector swipes a
kid’s water pistol and fires it, washing Ant-Man down the sewer, where he
catches himself on a lollipop stick at the last minute. So he sets a trap for
the villain….
Hank rents
a jewelry store and the Protector soon arrives to demand money, wrecking the
shop with his strength and disintegrating diamonds with his ray gun. Hanks
promises to pay and the bad guy departs. Ant-Man follows him, having had a
couple of ants cling to the villain’s shoes. When he arrives at the villain’s
hide-out he is trapped by a vacuum cleaner. But with his normal human strength
he is able to break out of the bag and turn on a fan, blowing the vacuum dust
in the Protector’s face, incapacitating him until the police, summoned by the
ants, have arrived. He is unmasked as Gerald Marsh, wearing an exoskeleton to
increase his size and strength; Ant-Man explains how the smoke generated by the
ray gun was enough to cover the Protector’s throwing the gems in his pockets
and replacing them with sand. The diminutive hero then vanishes into the
crowd….
“The
Magician”
Writer:
Unknown. Art: Unknown.
Synopsis: A
page at a television station dreams of becoming a magician; one day he meets a
man who claims to be a sorcerer who was accidentally teleported there from the
future. The sorcerer asks to swap clothes with the page so he can sneak past
the guards in the page’s uniform and send himself home via the transmitter. The
page then discovers that the sorcerer’s outfit enables him to perform genuine
magic and he becomes a TV star!
“Afraid to
Dream!”
Writer:
Larry Lieber. Plot: Stan Lee. Art: Don Heck. Colors: Stan Goldberg. Letters:
John D’Agostino.
Synopsis: A
worker exposed to radiation finds his dreams come true the next day. He makes
himself dream of wealth and the next day he inherits a fortune. He dreams that
his hated boss is gone and the next day the man quits. Then he dreams of his
death so to avoid it he hides in the hills, only to be killed in an avalanche!
“The Star Raiders”
Writer:
Stan Lee. Art: Steve Ditko. Colors: Stan Goldberg. Letters: Artie Simek.
Synopsis: A
gang of space pirates are contacted by the ruler of the planet Zenn, asking
them to prey on their enemies’ planet, an easy job because they are “midgets.”
The pirates invade the planet and find that the natives are giants compared to
them and the pirates are easily defeated.
Only the leader escapes and he discovers that the people of Zenn are
even bigger!