This past week featured what might be a first in the history of superhero comics.  On two separate covers from the same publisher, a supervillain appeared posited to eat a superhero.  On the cover of Ant-Man #3, Taskmaster is seen trying to do away with Scott Lang simply by eating him, a solution that not many consider when facing off against the diminutive hero.  On the cover of Silver Surfer #10, Galactus is seen to be in the process of eating the Silver Surfer, though he is shown to be putting up more of a fight than Ant-Man.

While this is a bit of an oddity, it is with good reason that it stands as an oddity.  Heroes generally have pretty amazing powers, either the godlike heroes from DC or the generally more down-to-earth heroes from Marvel, but among these amazing powers the powers of super-eating rarely come up.  My knowledge of Marvel is not as strong as with DC, but even at DC I can think of only two semi-prominent characters that can eat as a power.  In the 1980s and early 1990s, Chunk acted as a villain and later as a friend to the Wally West Flash.  Though evidently a dedicated eater based on his physique, his power was not strictly super eating, rather he could open a pocket dimension through his mouth.  Another character is Matter Eater Lad, who can bite through and consume anything, even if it should otherwise be fatal to him.  On a grander scale at Marvel, Galactus can be considered to be an eater of sorts, even if the eating is more figurative than literal, and this his inclusion in this strange comic trend is not surprising.

Regardless of how often a supervillain decides to bite into a hero, it is something which is rarely seen on a cover, even going so far in both of these cases to seem to be a complete consumption of the heroes.  The incidence of this on two covers in one week from the same company is certainly an anomaly but also highlight the strange place of eating in the realm of superpowers.