Tales to Astonish contains examples of the following tropes:
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One-off stories
- Accidental Hero: In text story The Heat's On, boy genius Bobby Tyler responds to an unexpected global heatwave by building his family their own air-conditioning system. Not only does the fan he mounts in their window create enough power to bend trees and telegraph poles, it brings down the UFO that was secretly causing the heatwave. It's implied that the world would have continued to bake if the alien wasn’t stopped.
- Anthology Comic: Early issues typically have three or four comic stories, usually accompanied by a short text story.
- Ascended Extra:
- In seven-page story The Man in the Ant Hill, a scientist creates a shrinking potion, but finds he's miscalculated the dosage and is now too small to reach the antidote. After escaping an ant hill, aided by one friendly ant, he returns to human size, destroys the potions and abandons his research. Eight issues later he returns as the new superhero Ant-Man.
- The villain of I Challenged... Groot! The Monster From Planet X! is the titular Groot. Despite his apparent death at the end of the story, he was later reinvented as a member of the Guardians of the Galaxy.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: We Found the Ninth Wonder of the World starts with a twelve foot lobster before introducing two huge turtles, both bigger than a house - the second one is large enough to wreck a ship.
- Bring It Back Alive:
- Discussed in We Found the Ninth Wonder of the World, as Captain Kane briefly considers bringing Experiment 247, a snapping turtle that's grown to a huge size, back to America. Then he thinks about the possible Kaiju rampage this could lead to, and decides against it.
- Dunstan Craig, protagonist of When Aliens Meet, is a hunter capturing alien animals - which are then sent back to Earth's zoos. He's so gleeful about it that his friends start to worry about his attitude. Laser-Guided Karma means that he then ends up as an exhibit in an alien zoo after crashlanding on an uncharted world.
- Create Your Own Villain: The Hollywood Natives of We Found the Ninth Wonder of the World try to offer Doctor Parker up as a Human Sacrifice to the giant turtle Experiment 247. But they're only doing that because it's wrecked their fishing fleet and caused havoc - which only happened because Parker dosed the turtle with his experimental growth formula and then lost control of it. Parker seems a bit apologetic when explaining all of this to the other prisoners.
- Death by De-aging: In "What Was the Strange Power of Simon Drudd!!" the eponymous villain decides not to share his youth serum with the world once he's developed it, instead opting to use it on himself so that he can become an immortal and eventually go on to rule the world. For good measure, Drudd even locks his assistant Bentley in the freezer just so he won't be able to stop his bid for immortality. Unfortunately for Drudd, once the Transformation Exhilaration stage is finished, it turns out that the serum is a lot stronger than anticipated - and can't be stopped. With Bentley still locked in the freezer, Drudd is left helplessly regressing to infancy, before quietly vanishing out of existence and leaving behind only empty clothes.
- Fantastic Racism: Tom Jonson, protagonist of The Mystery Planet, despises robots. Unfortunately for him, the inhabitants of the planet are Telepathic robots, and - knowing how he feels about them - they're really not inclined to make a trade deal for their atomic oil.
- Fauns and Satyrs: The poltergeists of I Know the Secret of the Poltergeist are normally invisible, but when seen they look much more like satyrs, with pointed ears, beards and goat legs.
- Hollywood Natives: The "primitive aborigines" of We Found the Ninth Wonder of the World play this straight, although they're not actually natives of the island they're encountered on. The survivors of the initial shipwreck are captured by natives at spearpoint, then chained up and offered as a Human Sacrifice to Experiment 247, a huge snapping turtle. There are Jungle Drums as an accompaniment, of course. None of the tribal folk are named, and none get any dialogue.
- Jungle Drums: The Hollywood Natives of We Found the Ninth Wonder of the World play drums when offering the shipwreck survivors and Doctor Parker up as a Human Sacrifice to Experiment 247.
- Latex Perfection: The nameless protagonist of I Know the Secret of the Poltergeist pulls off his mask to reveal that he's actually a poltergeist himself.
- Lilliputians: Harry Grant, protagonist of I Was a Man in Hiding, plans to rob his employer, then hide out on a newly-discovered primitive world with "earth type" people until the heat dies down. Unfortunately, he doesn't realise that the inhabitants of that world are only knee-high by human standards. The police who follow him find him immediately.
- Masquerade: The lead character of I Know the Secret of the Poltergeist is an investigator who debunks poltergeist activity, finding logical explanations - but he only does it so that he can reassure the humans and protect the masquerade.
- No Name Given: The investigator who's the narrator and lead character of I Know the Secret of the Poltergeist is never named.
- Paper People: The Tenuous, villains of I Foiled an Alien Invasion are two dimensional. The billboards appearing everywhere, showing Tenuous soldiers with a "THE TEN UOS ARE COMING" slogan, actually contain real Tenuous soldiers.
- Real After All:
- The investigator in I Know the Secret of the Poltergeist racks his brain desperately trying to find a mundane, logical solution for the haunted house, eventually realising that the "poltergeist" activity coincided with earth tremors and unusual electrical activity in the atmosphere. The poor couple living there are reassured. But then it turns out he's a poltergeist himself, and was so determined to explain it away so that he could protect the Masquerade.
- In I Fell to the Center of the Earth, Dr. Burke is convinced by his colleagues that the prehistoric land he found at the bottom of the drill shaft - complete with dinosaurs and Neanderthals - was a hallucination. And then they find the remains of his cigarette lighter alongside fossilised bones, proving that he really did time travel into the past.
- Transformation Exhilaration: In the finale of "What Was the Strange Power of Simon Drudd!!" the eponymous villain uses his prized youth serum on himself and begins to laugh triumphantly as it takes effect, continuing to do so over the course of the ensuing transformation sequence. Indeed, he's so overjoyed at being young again that he's still laughing even as he regresses into childhood. It's not until he's been reduced to a baby struggling to crawl out of his gigantic lab coat that Drudd realizes that he's underestimated the strength of the serum and begins to wail in terror - before being abruptly silenced by a Death by De-aging.
- Villain Protagonist: Several stories have the bad guy as the lead. The stories tend to end badly for them, reinforcing the message that crime doesn't pay.
- I Was a Man in Hiding stars Harry Grant, who decides to rob his employer and hide off-world, avoiding the tracking system the police use to locate citizens. They still catch him, as he tries to hide on a world of Lilliputians.
Ant-Man
- Aliens Are Bastards:
- The Creature from Kosmos, who was a monstrous criminal on his home planet, and is eager to be a bigger monster on Earth.
- In Issue #67, an alien known as the Hidden Man shows up on Earth to drain people's intelligence and then conquer the world.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: In Issue #58, a giant alien known as the Colossus (no relation who is around thirty feet tall, arrives on earth intending to conquer it. This is a problem for Hank at the time, given that his limit was fifteen feet, and thirty was seriously pushing into the danger zone.
- Breakout Character: Hank's first appearance in Tales to Astonish #27 was a seven page story where as a scientist, he just tests his shrinking experiments on himself and runs afoul of some ants. "The Man in the Ant Hill" was intended as a one-off story, but positive response led to bringing him back almost a year later as a superhero.
- Brown Note Being: The Creature from Kosmos, which can kill anyone who looks into its eyes.
- Cassandra Truth:
- Hank initially refuses to believe Janet calling him to say her father's dead, believing she's just making a prank call. Crow-eating presumably follows when it turns out Vernon van Dyne actually is dead.
- Issue #57 has Janet thwart a robber, but Hank refuses to believe her because the news said Invisible Woman did it (actually, Janet had been pretending to be Sue to bluff the guy into surrendering).
- Characterisation Click Moment: Not Hank, but rather the Hulk. Issue #59 is the first story with the Hulk to codify the idea that Bruce Banner turns into the Hulk when stressed.
- Compelling Voice: The Voice. Hank's immune thanks to his helmet.
- Death by Origin Story: Maria Trovaya-Pym, Hank's wife, was killed by Communist authorities, spurring Hank to become Ant-Man. In the same story, Vernon van Dyne is killed by the Creature from Kosmos.
- De-power: At the very tail end of the series, Hank lost his ability to shrink and was also forced to put more limits on his ability to grow (making it so he could only grow to one fixed size, and that the change was more gradual) since his size-shifting was starting to wear down his body.
- The First Cut Is the Deepest: Hank is initially unwilling to consider dating Janet not just because he thinks she's a ditz, but also because of Maria's death.
- "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome:
- The Scarlet Beetle is a beetle who gains super-intelligence thanks to radiation (naturally). However, it wears off and Hank releases the guy into his backyard.
- In Issue #60, Communist scientists use a ray to enhance the intellect of gorillas, so that they could do their bidding. It turns out that the ray only lasted temporarily, and the scientists didn't know how it worked, just that it did. So Hank smashed the ray, and the enhanced gorillas returned to normal.
- He Knows Too Much: The Creature from Kosmos expounds on its history, then tells Vernon van Dyne he's seen too much.
- Inexplicably Awesome: The Human Top can spin in a circle so fast that he becomes a blur, for no reason that is stated in the series. Readers of The X-Men might have guessed that he was a mutant, which would later be confirmed, but for the series' run all the characters seemed oddly disinterested in where his powers came from.
- Let's You and Him Fight:
- Issue #57 has Hank and Janet tricked into fighting Spider-Man by Egghead, so he can go commit robberies.
- Issue #60 is Hank versus Hulk, both sides having been set up by the Top.
- My Species Doth Protest Too Much: The Hidden Man's people aren't as awful as he is. Once Hank defeated him, they actually arrested him.
- Pet the Dog: Madame Macabre recalls the Mandarin saving her from an accident as a child, and then, when seeing that she was clutching an abacus and not a toy, paying for her education so that her mind wouldn't be wasted. While Macabre grew up to be a villain herself, the Mandarin seems to have had no ulterior motive beyond uncharacteristic kindness.
- Rapid Aging: Elias Weems invites a device that can rapidly age people, animals and even trees. He uses it to lash out after being let go for being too old.
- Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Hank manages to defeat the Colossus by sucker-punching him while shrinking out of sight. Thinking he'd vanished into thin air, the Colossus fled Earth and told the other Vegans to stay away.
- Samus Is a Girl: In Issue #36, Comrade X, the great master of disguise, turns out to be a woman.
- Snark-to-Snark Combat: Hank and Janet frequently had this dynamic, wittily putting each other down even as they were fighting villains together.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Wasp and Spidey do not get off on the best first footing, and it would take many years for them to get along.
- Tyrant Takes the Helm: In Issue #54, El Toro, having gotten into power via communist-backed chicanery, proceed to turn Santo Rico into a police state, until Hank and Janet investigated for the American government and uncovered proof of his deeds.
- Yellow Peril: Madame Macabre, an Asian supervillain.
The Hulk
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Faced with certain death at the hands of his rebellious New Men, the High Evolutionary hyper-evolves himself into a sort of floating glowing face that soon leaves the universe behind for something else.
- Deal with the Devil: When cornered by General Ross and seemingly without hope, the Hulk agrees to serve the Leader for a time in return for being teleported to safety. Though since Hulk is the one who carries out his side of the bargain to the letter and the Leader is the one who ends up regretting the deal because of it, it's arguably Hulk who's the Devil in this scenario...
- Elite Mooks: The Leader commands an army of artificial "humanoids" that are surprisingly tough for mass-produced mindless goons. While not anywhere as strong as the Hulk, they are Nigh-Invulnerable enough that even he can't seem to make a dent in one.
- Evil Counterpart: Hulk gets one in the Abomination, another gamma-radiation-spawned monster who's as big, green and stupendously powerful as himself.
- Foil: The Leader is this to Hulk, since he is another green-skinned, physically deformed man who got transformed by gamma radiation but who gained superhuman intelligence instead of the Hulk's superhuman strength. He's also driven by cold, amoral self-interest instead of the Hulk's mix of vague honour and sudden mood swings.
- Hidden Villain: When Hulk is sent into the future time period where Kang the Conqueror tends to hang out, the natives keep talking about an enemy that they loathe too much to say his name. The audience is presumably meant to assume it's Kang, but at the end of the issue it turns out to actually be minor Thor villain Skurge the Executioner.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The Leader has the Hulk fetch him the Watcher's Ultimate Machine, which contains all the information in the universe. When he tries to absorb the knowledge in it, he drops dead on the spot - because there are limits to how much data even his brain can handle!
- Muggles Do It Better: While the Hulk goes to fight the Leader's giant humanoid as it attacks an American Army base, the Army turns out to be perfectly capable of defending itself by means of its "Sunday Punch" super-missile, which disables the humanoid and almost kills the Hulk in the bargain.
- My Skull Runneth Over: Any mortal trying to use the Ultimate Machine suffers from this. Hulk tries it, and immediately has to rip it off again.
- Playing Both Sides: The Leader runs a spy ring, but isn't working for either side of the Cold War. Instead, he looks to profit from the political situation and ultimately make himself ruler of the world.
- Killer Robot: In Issue #86, the Leader made a robot to kill the Hulk, which he titled... Hulk-Killer. Spoiler alert: It did not kill the Hulk.
- Shout-Out: The Executioner's "walking pillboxes" that he tries to conquer the future Earth with look uncannily like the alien tripods from War of the Worlds.
- Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist: Major Talbot is certain that Bruce Banner is connected to the Hulk and up to something nefarious (and he's technically right about the first half), but is also a brave and honourable man who does what he thinks is right. Bruce laments that he can't prove to Talbot that they're on the same side without revealing his secret.
- Turned Against Their Masters: The High Evolutionary kidnaps the Hulk to help him against his "New Men," who have returned to their feral origins and are now attacking him.
- Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway: With the Hulk approaching the White House, General Ross decides to fire Bruce Banner's "T-Gun" at him, despite not knowing what it even does since Banner kept that to himself. The T stands for "Time." It ends up sending the Hulk into the future.
- Villainous Underdog: Just about anyone who goes up against the Hulk, obviously, but a special no-prize goes to Boomerang, who's just a random mercenary with some gimicky weapons who still acts like he stands a chance. His fight against the Hulk goes about how you'd expect.
- We Wait: The Leader wants to capture the Hulk, but upon finding out that he's in a Communist nation he decides that trying to catch him there would be too much trouble and that it's easier to just wait for him to return to America on his own. Sure enough, he does before long.
The Sub-Mariner
- A Lighter Shade of Black: Namor still considers himself the rightful ruler of the entire Earth and plans to conquer it eventually. However, Krang is even worse in that he wants to invade the surface right away, heedless of the fact that the resulting war might wipe out both races.
- Always Save the Girl: Downplayed. When faced with the choice between continuing his quest and saving Lady Dorma from the Faceless Ones, Namor eventually goes to help her. The downplayed bit is that he only did so after his quest had stalled and he had no immediate leads to continue it, whereas he chose to ignore Dorma's plight upon first becoming aware of it since at that point he did know where to go next.
- Awesome Underwater World: While Namor obviously always spent a lot of time under the sea, this series stands out as having him spend numerous issues without ever breaching the surface, dealing only with aquatic dangers and challenges.
- Cool Boat:
- Krang's acquatic battleship, which is bristling with armaments and piloting which he can fight Namor on something like equal terms.
- The Plunderer's high-tech sub is pretty sweet, too.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Krang turns his and Dorma's skin from blue to pink so they can blend in with surface-dwellers better. Dorma says that she doesn't feel any different, and Krang says there's no reason why she should - it's not like a person's skin colour determines who they are.
- Giant Squid: One of Namor's early trials is having to get past one in an underwater cave.
- Godzilla Threshold: The Behemoth was created by the Atlanteans as a weapon of last resort if they were ever facing destruction by the surface world. It's so powerful, they have no reliable means of controlling it.
- The Good Chancellor: Vashti becomes this after Namor raises him to the nobility and he begins serving as Namor's trusted advisor.
- Heel–Face Revolving Door: Dorma manages to change sides twice over the course of the first issue, first betraying Namor to Krang and leading to his capture, then betraying Krang by helping Namor escape.
- Idiot Ball: Dorma and Vashti grasp it pretty hard when they get Namor exiled as a traitor because they saw him a hazy image of him talking to the Plunderer and jumped to the conclusion that they must therefore be allies (the Plunderer was actually holding him captive at the time). Namor, with his rigid honour and loathing of surface-dwellers, would almost certainly rather die than consort with a surface-dwelling crook like the Plunderer, and Dorma and Vashti should know that perfectly well.
- I Have You Now, My Pretty:
- During his usurpation of Atlantis, Krang tries to get Dorma to marry him, both for her beauty and because it would lend legitimacy to his rule. Dorma isn't having any of it.
- After he's been ousted, he returns and gets Dorma to elope with him by claiming that in doing so she can save Namor from being killed by the Behemoth under Krang's control (Namor has actually already beaten the Behemoth at that point, but Dorma doesn't know that).
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Namor has a brief case of it after being injured by Krang, during which time he's manipulated by Number One of the Secret Empire into attacking the Hulk for him.
- Mêlée à Trois: The Plunderer's attack on Atlantis becomes this when stray fire causes the crew of an American warship to think they're under attack and they start dropping depth charges that wreak havoc on both sides.
- Out-of-Genre Experience: Issue #70-76 is essentially an epic fantasy story that just happens to take place in (its own corner of) a superhero setting.
- The Quest: The series starts out with Namor having to travel the ocean in search of Neptune's trident, guided by messages from Neptune himself.
- Rescue Romance: An odd variation. Dorma loved Namor from her first appearance, but he always ignored her in favour of the Invisible Girl. It was only after he rescued her from the Faceless Ones that he realised that he loved her in turn.
- Secret Test of Character: Neptune ultimately gives Namor his trident because he abandoned his quest for the trident to rescue Lady Dorma, proving that he had a heart, and then calmly admitted to Neptune that he had failed, proving that he was able to make hard choices and accept their consequences.
- Sissy Villain: Byrrah gains power in Atlantis partly by having spent time establishing himself as a man of peace in contrast to Namor's aggression, only wins a fight against him by cheating outrageously, and of course his baldness-and-huge-blonde-moustache combo doesn't make him look particularly straight (though that part might be unintentional).... Either way, he ends up inviting genuine manly-men villains Krang and Attuma to Atlantis as his allies, but once his plans fall apart they leave in disgust, kicking themselves for teaming up with a wuss like Byrrah.
- Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway: When going off on an ill-advised offensive against the surfacers, the Atlantean fleet bring along an untested weapon known as the Hurricane Inducer. Namor, who is currently on the outs with his people, destroys it rather than let them do anything as foolhardy as fire it, even though that further cements his exile.
- The Usurper:
- Namor's warlord, Krang, takes over Atlantis while Namor is away. He has some early public support from the fact that Namor is seen as too soft on the surface-dwellers, but quickly loses it by taxing the life out of the populace to pay for his armies.
- Later, Namor's cousin Byrrah manages to turn the people against Namor, win a duel against him by cheating, and briefly get himself declared ruler.
- Villain Has a Point: While Byrrah's peacenic rhetoric is self-serving and hypocritical, and much of it is simply lies, he ain't wrong that Namor could stand to chill out a little.
- Villainous Valor: When Namor sees Krang's ship departing the scene of their battle, he realises that Krang must think he's killed Namor, as otherwise Krang would never flee while he still had even a single functional weapon left.
The Wasp
- A Day in the Limelight: Wasp got a couple of stories all to herself where she got to save the day without Hank's help.
- Being Good Sucks: At one point the Wasp managed to capture a thief by tricking him into thinking she was the Invisible Girl (since she was too small for him to see her, so her voice seemed to come out of nowhere) and that the rest of the Fantastic Four was on its way, causing him to turn himself in. This made her late for a date with Hank, and when she tried to explain that she'd been busy catching a thief, he told her to stop lying - because everyone knew it had been the Invisible Girl who caught that thief.
