Marvel Year One: The Ant-Man

Our second superhero in the world of Marvel doesn't start as a superhero, but as a standalone story in Tales to Astonish.  Henry Pym shrinks himself with a shrinking potion, has an adventure with ants, before returning to normal size, pouring his formulas down the drain, never to be used again.

They are used again.  Pym gets a regular feature in Tales to Astonish at The Ant-Man, with the article and hyphen, though no hyphen on the cover, beginning Marvel's complicated history with the punctuation mark.

This is before the Wasp and before Giant-Man.  Pym and his ants face the street level crooks, mainly communists, and is about as exciting as this character gets.  Pym, a character so dull that he actually improved by becoming a wife beater, was the only Marvel hero to not graduate from a monster title to his own comic, and I think only headlined a comic decades later as the Wasp.

Tales to Astonish 27-38 (periodically)

Available in Ant-Man/Giant-Man Epic Collection: The Man in the Ant Hill in paperback and Kindle.