The Wasp was a screwball comedy heroine in a superhero comic. I always liked her.
“I’ve always said that one of Stan (Lee)’s great strengths was, he made you like his characters, so that you cared about them, and in many ways, Don (Heck) was the artistic equivalent,” observed Marvel writer Steve Englehart. “Ant-Man/Giant-Man and the Wasp hardly ever had a great story, but I was totally drawn into their relationship, and that was down to Don.”
The Wasp was introduced in Tales to Astonish 44 (June 1963), Ant-Man’s 10th costumed adventure.
“The bulk of the story centered on (Henry) Pym’s encounter with a prospective new love interest, a young socialite named Janet Van Dyne who suffered a horrible loss of her own when her scientist father was killed by a creature from the planet Kosmos,” wrote comics historian John Wells in American Comic Book Chronicles.
“Moved by Janet’s intense desire for revenge, Henry Pym confided that he was the Ant-Man and endowed her with a variation on his own shrinking formula that allowed her to sprout wings and fly by his side as the Wasp. ‘Ant-Man seemed to need a shot in the arm,’ Lee conceded.”
Adding a female partner was an excellent idea for expanding the character’s appeal (it had worked for Hawkman). And once Hank became Giant-Man, Jan could continue to showcase the advantages of tiny superheroics, and the contrast was dramatically useful.
I think Jan had the best-developed personality of any of the early Marvel women — vivacious, flirty and cheerful, ostentatiously obsessed with fashion, all camouflage for her inner seriousness. And she was initially drawn by Don Heck, a veteran of romance comics who had a flair for depicting attractive women.
With her pretense of man-hungry airheadness, Jan was the one early Marvel heroine who had a real and engaging personality. Sue Storm and Jean Grey seemed dull as dishrags compared to her.
“I’ve always regarded the Wasp as a bit like Nora Charles, playing the part of the flirt in a tongue-in-cheek way,” wrote David Allen Jones.
I do think Stan had The Thin Man in mind with Hank and Jan.
“The Wasp was a fashion maven, like Stan’s wife,” noted Sam Kujava. “That is why she came off bolder and brassier than the other Marvel women.”
Her underlying seriousness was underlined when she became leader of the Avengers — she was, after all, a founding member.
“There were hints of that even at the first, as when she tried to sacrifice herself to save Hank’s life,” Paul Zuckerman said. “And unlike some other Marvel females, her characterization was distinctive.”
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