Hank Pym
receives several messages from the ants, suggesting that trouble is brewing in
the insect kingdom. As Ant-Man, he goes to check it out and the ants take him
down a sewer where he discovers a huge swarm of insects (“Hundreds of them!”)
gathering around an oddly glowing scarlet beetle. The Scarlet Beetle,
communicating with the others (and Ant-Man) by mental telepathy, reveals how
exposure to radiation endowed him with human-level intelligence and now he
wants to organize the world’s insects into an army to conquer the world.
Ant-Man’s presence is detected and he is overpowered and knocked unconscious by
bugs. The Scarlet Beetle seizes the hero’s vials of gas and enlarges itself to
human-size….
Hank
awakens trapped in a hole without his helmet, unable to summon the ants to his
rescue. Meanwhile in the outer world, termites are destroying telephone poles
to sabotage the nation’s communications, other bugs are stealing dynamite from armories,
venomous spiders are biting public officials, and the giant beetle is
terrorizing the humans, backed up by bees stinging the police….
Meanwhile,
the ants have discovered Ant-Man’s missing helmet and tracked him to his tiny
prison. They release him and he picks popsicle stick to fight the bad bugs. But
the Scarlet Beetle has seen him coming and dispatched a bug squadron to fight
the hero. Honey ants sticky up the enemy beetles while Ant-Man jumps into a
drinking fountain and uses his popsicle stick to spray a jet of water at the
attacking grasshoppers. The ants bring up a spray can of DDT to chase off the
bees. The human-sized Scarlet Beetle challenges Ant-Man to personal combat so
the hero leads his foe into a toy store. There, Ant-Man drives a toy car to
take a toy knight’s lance and hurl it at the bad guy, puncturing the tank of
reducing gas it is carrying, causing the Scarlet Beetle to shrink back to his
normal size. Hank wraps the Beetle up in a deflated balloon and carries him
back to his lab where he finds a method of counteracting the radiation, turning
SB back into an ordinary beetle. He sets it free in his backyard while the
police survey the situation and wonder why Ant-Man never showed up….