The Wasp: A Girl Joins the Ant Hill
With the premiere of Ant-Man and The Wasp happening today, it never hurts to examine the source material for the heroes of today. We’ve already seen when Hank Pym premiered as a cautionary tale, and when he turned that horror story into a Superhero origin. Now, we turn to Pym’s partner in crime fighting, Janet Van Dyne--the Wasp!
We wind our clocks back to June of 1963. Thor was fighting the Radioactive Man for the first time, the Fantastic Four fought the Mad Thinker and his Awesome Android, and Spider-Man has just fought the Vulture in his second issue last month because most of Marvel's releases were still bimonthly. Somehow, it almost feels like someone on this comic wanted to go beyond what anyone else had done for a villain so far. You see, the foe this month is the Creature from Kosmos!
Plotted by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, this is peak Silver Age Marvel madness. H.E. Huntley provides the words for the issue, while Don Heck inked over Kirby’s pencils, making for a wonderful combination of creators. And with another origin involving Hank Pym, another retcon is born!
Despite being a formula poured over a person beforehand, Pym’s shrinking formula is now a gas. It’s a ton more convenient, and allows almost everyone in the future to completely ignore the original formula. However, Hank has another retcon for us: his…wife?
That’s right, Hank was once married to Maria Trovaya, a Hungarian refugee from the Communist Soviet Union during the Cold War. Apparently, she and Hank have had the awesome idea of returning to Hungary to see her childhood haunts during their honeymoon.
In the Soviet Union.
During the early 1960s.
As you might guess, this ends horribly. Maria is kidnapped, then stuffed into the proverbial fridge by being killed off panel. Hank swears he’ll make the dirty communists pay...
...but then just wanders back to the States. And then decides to become Ant-Man, since his original origin wasn’t good enough.
Hank Pym wasn't even a year into his time as a character. This is insane.
Yep. Our third retcon of the issue, and we’re not even five pages into the story! Now it’s the death of his never-before-seen wife who pushed Hank into crime fighting. This is pretty much the literal definition of “women in refrigerators,” despite coming out 31 years prior to Green Lantern’s girlfriend becoming the incident this was named for. This wife will, sadly, mostly be forgotten about during most of Hank’s time as a character, but does have an interesting legacy: The most recent person to don the mantle of the Wasp, Nadia Van Dyne, is actually the daughter of Henry and Maria.
The flashbacks come to an end, though, as Hank has visitors at his laboratory: Vernon Van Dyne and his daughter, Janet! Vernon has randomly dragged his uninterested daughter to Pym’s place to discuss using gamma rays to discover life on other worlds. Hank finds it awesome, but it’s outside his field of study. Instead, he spends all the time of this meeting ogling Janet and being kinda creepy.
Yes. Henry Pym just noticed that “a child” looks just like his dead wife, and that makes him wish he was with her. It should be said that Janet is actually an adult here, which raises all sorts of odd questions.
That night, Janet goes out to party, while her father probes the mysteries of the universe. Luckily for Janet, this is also the night that her father makes contact with life from outside the solar system.
And then dies, because the unnamed creature is an escaped convict from the planet Kosmos, who decides to kill all witnesses. Janet comes home to see her father’s corpse, and decides to call the closest authority figure she can: Hank Pym!
No. Seriously. Hank doesn’t even believe her, though I would have figured that it was because she’s calling him and not the police. He is eventually convinced, but not by Janet. By the ants in his lab.
Again, I am not making this up.
So, Hank sets up a catapult for himself to launch himself across the city, and lands at the Van Dyne lab. Because he’s a scientist, Hank immediately deduces that an alien killed Jan’s father, and Jan vows revenge against the alien who killed him. Ironically, I suppose this makes it the first time a man has been tossed into the refrigerator to inspire a female hero.
Asking her, as Ant-Man, to go to Hank’s house, Hank reveals his secret identity to Janet when she arrives. Taking advantage of her distressed mental state, Hank recruits Janet to become his new crime fighting partner, the Wasp!
But first, experimental surgery on an emotionally distraught person whose father died mere hours ago!
Hank Pym, you are a jerk. Sure, she can now shrink at will, but that makes her pop antennae and wings out of her body. And she can shoot energy blasts. Surely, nothing bad can come of this.
Luckily, Hank has also, disturbingly, previously made a new costume for Janet to wear, already in her measurements. Why this isn’t commented on is probably due to this being the early 1960s, but is still creepy. There’s no time to talk, though, because the Creature from Kosmos is rampaging through town! There is, however, enough time for Janet to confess her love to Hank Pym, having spent all of maybe an hour with him.
Hank rebukes this love by once more claiming Janet is but a child. Yeah, needless to say, both Janet and Hank have a truckload of issues to work through.
They try to attack the creature alongside the military, but everyone proves useless against the unfathomable. Really, it’s like one of those old monster movie creatures stumbled out into the Marvel comics, and it’s kinda cool. It is, however, ruined when it takes Hank all of three seconds to figure out how to kill it: with a gun!
But Ant-Man is too small to carry this modern rifle. So, rather than just take a taxi or shrink the gun down and take it with him, Hank does the best thing ever.
Please remember, this man is a genius. Ignore the fact that it will likely take days for these ants to drag this gun from uptown New York to Wall Street, the monster’s current location. Hank Pym just knows better than us.
Luckily, somehow, it works, and they make it in time to shoot the horrifying monster. Hank Pym shoots the rifle while still tiny, which simply must be seen.
It works, and the horrifying monster dissolves into nothingness and death. Unfortunately for the attempts to remain a solo male act by Hank, Janet isn’t about to leave.
Janet and Hank would go on to form the Avengers alongside the Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor. In fact, Jan has become quite the figure in the Avengers comics, often joining Tony Stark in providing private funding when the team isn’t directly employed by the US Government.
Janet, unlike Hank, wouldn’t change identities at all. Indeed, she is still the Wasp, though did go through a brief time where she was a Wasp-person. You see, it turns out Hank mucked with her DNA in this story, and was one of the many changes made to the Avengers during the early 1990s. It was the 90s, where even possibly cool ideas were strapped with guns, pouches, and given horrible anatomies and stories.
As for the Wasp of the movies, Hope Van Dyne is a bit different. Her source character comes from an alternate universe where her relationship with her parents and the heroes of the Marvel Universe soured. Instead of being a heroic successor to the Wasp, Hope became known as the villainous Red Queen. Alongside her twin brother Big Man, they fought as part of the Revengers, a next-generation Anti-Avengers team.
Comics are weird.
