One of the founding members of the
Avengers was a woman, even though she was too small to see.
That was an inadvertent ironic
comment on the status of women in the early 1960s (note that over in Marvel’s
original team superhero title, The
Fantastic Four, the founding female member was invisible).
But women were gaining ground,
little by little, even in comic books aimed primarily at boys. In the 1940s,
Superman had been followed by Wonder Woman and Batman by Black Cat. Captain
Marvel and Hawkman gained distaff heroic companions in Mary Marvel and
Hawkgirl. The trend continued into the 1950s and 1960s with Batwoman,
Supergirl, a new Hawkgirl, Fly Girl and the Wasp.
She was Janet van Dyne, a seemingly
flighty, flirtatious heiress who became the crime-fighting partner and romantic
companion of Henry Pym, Ant-Man, beginning in Tales to Astonish 44 (1963). The feature was then only a
half-dozen issues old, and the story gave us our first real background on Pym
as well. It turned out he’d been married to a woman who’d murdered by communist
agents, and was nursing a lonely, broken heart. Not a story Janet van Dyne
could resist, as it turned out.
Permitting Pym to alter her
genetic structure so she could grow wings when she shrank, the Wasp joined
Ant-Man’s fight to destroy an extraterrestrial giant gas monster that had been
unleashed on New York City after killing her scientist father.
Although the Wasp’s ongoing
portrayal as slightly ditsy and man-hungry might be seen as sexist, it actually
made the character more vivid than other rather bland females in comics at the
time. In any case, it was all later revealed as a pose when she became an
effective leader of the Avengers.
Janet had an appealing and
distinctive joie de vivre, and was almost impossible to dislike. There was at
least one male with whom she wasn’t about to flirt, however — Spider-Man. Their
instantaneous mutual antipathy was attributed to the natural enmity between
spiders and wasps.
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