You would be hard-pressed to find a superhero identity that is more disrespected than Ant-Man. Think about it this way: Ant-Man was one of the first superheroes in the "Marvel Age" of comics to get his own ongoing feature in a comic book, but he was also the first Marvel Age superhero to lose his own monthly feature! Hank Pym, as Ant-Man, helped form the Avengers, but by the second issue of the series, he had already given up his initial identity and changed his powers to become Giant-Man. While Scott Lang appeared as Ant-man in the 2015 Ant-Man film, by his next film appearance in Captain America: Civil War, he, too, ultimately went with his newly-discovered growth abilities in the big fight between Captain America and Iron Man's rival group of superheroes.

This is a shame, as Ant-Man's suit and his helmet are two of the more fascinating pieces of superhero attire at Marvel Comics, despite the fact that no one seems interested in continuing to be known as Ant-Man. Perhaps it has something to with the rare superhero feat that all three characters that have been Ant-Man over the years (Hank Pym, Scott Lang and Eric O'Grady) have passed away at one point or another. Luckily, Scott came back to life! Hopefully he spends more time appreciating how cool it is to be Ant-Man now. He can literally shrink down to the size of an ant and then talk to actual ants and get them to do things for him! That is awesome... and only a drop in the bucket in what he can do with his suit!

20 THE SUIT DEFIES PHYSICS

This topic actually came up in, of all places, an issue of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. You see, in physics, there is a mathematical principle called the "Square-Cube Law," which suggests that as objects grow taller, their volume grows at an exponentially greater rate.

Ant-Man violates this law, as his volume remains the same whether he is tiny or if he grows to a large size. As we learned in Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, however, the Ant-Man suit allows its wearer to violate this law. There apparently was even an amusing paper written by Hank Pym titled, "Ha ha, I'm Giant Man now. [EXPLETIVE DELETED] you, other physicists."

19 KALLING OUT TO THE KOSMOS

When it comes to explaining the science of superheroes in comic books, there is one "go to" answer that is often used and it is simply put as, "other dimensions are involved!" Where does the mass come from when Bruce Banner transforms into the Hulk? Another dimension! Where does Ant-Man's mass go when he shrinks to ant-size? Why, another dimension, of course!

In the case of Ant-Man, however, we actually know which dimension. It is called the Kosmos dimension and Ant-Man fought a powerful being who had conquered his world and managed to escape to Earth when Janet Van Dyne's father accidentally opened up an interdimensional portal. Her father perished and Ant-Man made Janet into the Wasp to help avenge her father's death.

18 BEATING REED RICHARDS TO THE PUNCH

In the world of superhero fashion, the most famous fabric used in superhero costumes is something called "unstable molecules." This is the explanation for how Johnny Storm's Fantastic Four costume doesn't burn up when Johnny turns into the Human Torch or how Mister Fantastic's costume stretches along with his body. It was famously invented by Reed "Mister Fantastic" Richards.

However, unstable molecules actually appeared in Tales to Astonish #35, the first appearance of Ant-Man, a week before they made their debut in the pages of the Fantastic Four. It is how Ant-Man's costume was able to shrink with him. Stan Lee ultimately decided to give Reed the credit for the invention, though.

17 THE PYM PARTICLES AXIS

A few years back, the Fantastic Four decided to go on a trip through time and space. While the trip should have only been a few seconds in our time, it ended up lasting a year for the Fantastic Four. In case something went wrong, each member of the team appointed a fill-in for them. Of course, something went wrong and Ant-Man and a group of other heroes had to fill-in as the FF for a while.

During this period, Ant-Man discovered his suit allowed him access to the "Pym Particles" axis, which intersected with the intangibility of Vision and the super strength of Wonder Man. The basic upside is that Scott figured out to use his suit to give himself super-strength, as well.

16 SPLISHING AND SPLASHING

Right before Marvel launched the "Marvel Age of Comics" with a series of superhero characters, their most popular comic books were a series of science fiction and horror anthologies with names like Journey Into Mystery, Tales of Suspense and, of course, Tales to Astonish. In Tales to Astonish #27, we met a scientist named Henry Pym who invented a shrinking serum.

He splashed it on himself and shrunk down to the size of an ant and went on an adventure in an ant hill before making it back to his normal size and vowing to destroy the formula as being too dangerous. Then Stan Lee decided that this character could become a superhero. Initially, Ant-Man bizarrely just poured the serum on himself to change sizes!

15 ANT-MAN'S TRUSTY... ROPE?

Besides his remarkable cybernetic helmet that allowed him to communicate with ants, Hank Pym's suit was very low tech at first. He did not have any real weapons to speak of, as he mostly just used his legion of ant friends to help him attack people.

However, in an early issue, Ant-Man unveiled his first real weapon and it was, oddly enough, just a lariat of nylon rope. You see, because the tiny hero still had his strength of his normal adult body, he could toss the rope around bad guys and then spin them around even while shrunken down to ant-size.

14 JUMPING JACK FLASH

Ant-Man's mode of travel in the early issues was hilariously absurd. He would catapult himself through the sky and command a group of ants to gather together and catch him by using their bodies as cushions for his hurtling form. Once he got to the scene of a crime, however, it would take him forever to get places because he was so tiny.

He sometimes rode ants, but when no ants were handy it was a long, hard climb just to get to the top of a table. So he unveiled special boots that had coiled springs in them that he could use to spring into the air. They did not seem to last long.

13 HE'S A GAS

Early on, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby realized that it was pretty constricting for Ant-Man to have to pour serum onto himself to shrink down, and then, more importantly, to travel back to his home to douse himself with the growth serum. This effectively meant that Ant-Man could not increase in size while away from his home and the growth serum.

So now, they turned the serum into gas form and had Ant-Man carry canisters with him -- one shrinking gas and one growth gas. This was actually how Scott Lang changed his size for years. The issue, though, is that wouldn't the gas potentially hit people nearby if the wind got it? Talk about awkward, if you start shrinking people!

12 ROCKET MAN

As noted, Hank Pym dropped the Ant-Man identity by the second issue of the Avengers. He went through two more identities, Goliath and Yellowjacket, before he returned to the Ant-Man name during the Kree-Skrull War. This was setting up a new Ant-Man feature in Marvel Feature, where Hank Pym ended up trapped in his ant-sized form.

Hank was not just going back to the old name in this story, though, as he debuted a number of upgrades in his suit. One of them was a gas mask and the more notable one was a jetpack that he used to get around. It was an impressive improvement on coils in his boots!

11 HARD-HEADED

An aspect of Ant-Man's helmet that gets downplayed a lot is the protective nature of it. When Hank Pym came up with his costume, he included unstable molecules to allow it to shrink with him, but he also put in steel mesh to keep himself protected from being bitten into pieces by ants. Similarly, his helmet is sturdy enough to survive direct hits from contextually giant ants.

In fact, during one battle, Scott Lang even survived a gunshot directly to his head because his helmet took the brunt of the blast. It's not so strong that it can survive a gunshot without breaking the helmet, but that's still a significant help to the hero.

10 A VOICE IN THE CROWD

Audio is a strange issue in the world of Ant-Man. Obviously, being so small, it would normally be difficult for anyone to communicate with him, but due to another aspect of his helmet, he can make it so that people can understand his voice at its normal level. By the way, notice all of the people surrounding Ant-Man? He was super popular back in the day.

While Spider-Man gets headlines calling him a threat or a menace, people were starting Ant-Man fan clubs in multiple cities around the country! However, while he speaks normally, his ears actually have a problem adjusting to the loud noise from the now suddenly gigantic humans around him.

9 ANT TRACKER

Something that you might notice about Stan Lee is that when he comes up with an idea, he tends to hit it constantly. Once he came up with the idea that Iron Man's armor used transistors to power it, every other issue involved the armored hero using transistors for some reason or another.

Similarly, when he introduced Ant-Man's helmet, Lee had him communicate through "electric impulses." These impulses were then used for a bizarre tracking system. Ant-Man would have an ant sneak on to a bad guy and then send off an electric impulse, which would transmit to all the ants along the way, who would send it back to Ant-Man's helmet for a bizarre tracking system.

8 ALIEN INSECTS? NO PROBLEM

Even though Ant-Man's helmet is best known for its ability to communicate to, well, you know, ants, it actually can communicate with all manner of insects. Ant-Man once even explained to an Avengers teammate that each group of insects have their own personality and that ants were noteworthy for how much they all just want to chip in and help with any problem.

As it turns out, Ant-Man's helmet doesn't just communicate with ants or even just Earth insects, he can also use it to communicate and control insectoid creatures from other worlds! It came in handy on a recent trip to the Multiverse.

7 HELMET IMPROVEMENT

Few parts of Ant-Man's costume have changed as much over the years as his helmet. As noted earlier, the 1970s saw the addition of a gas mask appendage to the helmet, but later versions of it went even further by making the mask completely sealed off from the rest of the world.

In addition, major computer systems were added to the helmet in much the same way that Iron Man's armor constantly displays a number of screens of information for the user to access. It also has access to multiple fields of vision with the visor, like infrared vision and night vision. A lot of this has been added to the helmet by Scott Lang.

6 KEEP IT UNDER YOUR HAT

While Scott Lang has improved on the helmet over the years, it is important to note that the basic helmet is still the same one that Hank Pym wore all those years ago. Pym did such a great job on the headgear that there was never any need for Lang to rebuild the mask from scratch. He just added to what was already there.

This became painfully evident when Hank Pym, then back in his Giant-Man identity, asked Scott to give him access to his old helmet again. As it turned out, Hank actually hid secret laboratories in all of his helmets and he had forgotten some important documents in the lab that was in Scott's mask.

5 FINE WAY TO BECOME AN AVENGER

As we all know, Scott Lang gained the Ant-Man costume when he stole it from Hank Pym's house. But did you know that Hank's old lab assistant, Rita DiMara, also stole his Yellowjacket costume and refit it for her body and became a member of the Masters of Evil?

However, she could not turn off the Avengers alert Hank built into the costume and she answered a distress signal, becoming a short-lived member of the Avengers. The same thing happened again when Scott could not turn off the Avengers alert in his helmet. His only recourse was to respond to the alert. He found himself joining the Avengers and actually serving with Hank and Janet on the team.

4 MEET...MYRIMIDON?!

After Reed Richards seemingly perished in battle with Doctor Doom in the early 1990s, the rest of the team needed someone to fill in as the science adviser. Ant-Man stepped into the role and soon found himself growing close to the apparently widowed Sue Richards. She did not realize that he had a crush on her.

When he was exposed to some radiation, Scott grew antennae and gained a new personality controlled by an evil mutant ant. He took the name Myrimidon and created a brand-new Ant-Man costume. However, when he began to threaten Sue in his new persona, he realized his mistake and broke free from the mutant ant's control and went back to his normal self.

3 DOOMED IMPROVEMENTS

His return to his normal costume was short-lived. You see, when Reed seemingly "got got" in battle with Doctor Doom, Victor also apparently perished, so Krisoff, the young boy that Doom had imprinted with his own memories in case anything happened to Doom, had to deal with the fact that he was expected to rule in his "father's" place.

He instead decided to start working alongside the Fantastic Four. During this time, he built a special new armor for Ant-Man. Reed Richards, though, returned to life soon after and Ant-Man left the team and we never got to see him use this new armored costume that much since.

2 IN THE ARMY NOW

During "Avengers Disassembled," Scott himself was seemingly perished in battle. During this time period, Hank Pym created a new special suit of Ant-Man armor meant for a soldier to wear into battle called "G.I. Ant-Man." A S.H.I.E.L.D. agent was chosen to wear the new suit. However, S.H.I.E.L.D. was then attacked by a massive Hydra assault.

A low-level S.H.I.E.L.D. agent took over the suit and used it to escape from the attack. He became known as the "Irredeemable" Ant-Man for the creepy ways that he used the armor, like spying on Carol Danvers in the shower. Ultimately, Captain America gave him a second chance as part of the Secret Avengers but Eric perished during his stint with the team.

1 PAGERS WILL MAKE A COMEBACK, RIGHT?

The crossover event known as "Onslaught" saw Hank, in his Giant-Man form, and Janet sacrifice themselves along with the rest of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four to stop the being of evil psionic energy known as Onslaught. Instead of perishing, however, the heroes ended up on an alternate Earth and relived versions of their lives.

They then returned to Earth and Hank went back to being Ant-Man, but with the ability to grow giant-sized, as well. Various parts of his costume could be detached and turned into other functions, like a pager that served also as a tiny jet plane.