Blue Wasp

The months between the announcement and cancellation of Blue Wasp were an emotional roller coaster for me. I was elated that they were doing this costume, and then my hopes are dashed against the rocks of, uh, whatever caused a toy company to not know that they weren’t putting out a product. Toy Biz was a real eclectic genius, you know?

Anyway, Wasp has literally one million costumes that could have been represented, but this one is the best. I first saw it in Avengers v3 #32 (research), of the Busiek/Perez run. The Wasp had been on the team something like two issues, and had been a frequent guest star before that, fighting the Doomsday Man, getting captured by Ultron, etc. Those appearances had set the tone for this character in my eyes: she was underpowered, didn’t seem to contribute much, and in the Ultron arc, was wearing the most hideous thing, that white costume with the one bare leg. So I pretty much pegged Janet Van Dyne as an Aging Skank. That’s cool; there are quite a bit of Aging Skanks in the world, so it’s nice to see them represented in comics.


But then she becomes the team leader after Thor and Cap leave because they don’t like Scientologists (I may be simplifying). And in issue 20, she answers the door in this. The costume looked great! It’s got all these standard Wasp costume elements, but they all look unconventionally great together. I hate to wax poetically about drawings of women, especially since this will be the second time in as many days I’ve been enthusiastic about Specific Fictional Creation Janet Van Dyne. But in this one issue, due to some alchemy of costume elements, the Wasp shot up in my opinion. Maybe she wasn’t so Aging and so Skank, I thought.

So anyway I painted a standard ML15 black Wasp to match the proposed colors. Her hair is Green Stuff, matching the Perez panels as much as I could.

It occurs to me that this is the leader of the Avengers I’m evaluating based on hotness, which could possibly be more feminist. Busiek wrote Wasp like he was Claremont; she was a great leader tactically and strategically; she beat Kang, and Count Nefaria, and she never ran away from meetings bravely hiding tears, or asked Captain America to listen to his heart, or somesuch tired device through which the writer says, “This is a tough woman, ahem, WOMAN.” But the leadership abilities always seem grafted on to me; like it was decided that Wasp would be a great strategist because she sure as hell wasn’t doing anything else. I like the idea that when you’re a superhero for years, you gain uber-competency pretty much by osmosis (Niecenzia explored this in a Gambit issue, with respect to Rogue, and the uber-competent Rogue in Carey’s X-Men right now is awesome, and also Nicenzia ideas go a long way with me). But these Avengers issues with Wasp as the leader always seemed like Busiek had written the script with Captain America in them, then done a find/replace to put Wasp in instead.

In summary, Wasp looks pretty. You know what other costume ruled, was the Bagely designs she wore when she would appear in Thunderbolts. He’d make some black-red-white combination that always worked. But it didn’t show skin like this blue jobby.