The Four Color Media Monitor

In this latest fluff-coated article on Arcamax, they talk all about a new Wasp named Nadia Pym, who's the daughter of Hank Pym, and here becomes successor to Janet Van Dyne in the miniaturized role of Ant-Man's partner in crimefighting:

She is the daughter of Henry "Ant-Man" Pym. She has taken on the legacy of Pym's former partner, Janet Van Dyne. She was raised in the Red Room, the Russian espionage school that gave us the Black Widow.

And, according to Jeremy Whitley ("Princeless"), who will be writing the new "Unstoppable Wasp" series for Marvel Comics, she's a little bit of all of them. Well, with the addition of her actual mother, an obscure character named Maria Trovaya, who was once married to Hank Pym.

Does this suggest she was raised a commie? I figure the challenging query here is whether she's depicted remaining with the ideology? After all, it's already long apparent how the political minds at Marvel today still think. Oh, and as for Hank and Jan, what do they say?

Pym and Van Dyne were once married, but that partnership, along with their superhero one, has long since dissolved. Currently Pym is "dead" -- nobody believes he really is, even in the comics -- and Jan is semi-retired.

No mention of the hows and whys, of course, or how it was slapdash writing that led to the dissolution in a very galling way. Nor any questions why Hank has to be technically dead.

Which opens the door for the new Wasp, Nadia Pym. She is both a new character, and a callback to those early days of Ant-Man and the Wasp.

See, waaaaaaay back in 1963 Pym revealed to Van Dyne that he had been married before. His first wife, Maria, was the daughter of a Hungarian scientist who had defected from the Communist Bloc. (In those days, Hungary was behind the Iron Curtain.) The scientist was killed in a suspicious accident, and then Maria was kidnapped by foreign (read: Commie) agents. Pym, and comics readers, never saw her again.

But, as it turned out, Maria was pregnant when she was kidnapped. And while she is long since dead, her daughter, Nadia, is alive. Nadia was raised in the Red Room, where the Russians train secret agents like the Black Widow, but she escaped by mastering her father's discoveries. We learned all this in the "Free Comic Book Day 2016: Avengers" one-shot, written by Mark Waid, and in "All-New, All-Different Avengers" #14, co-written by Waid and Whitley.

This confusingly fails to be clear how Maria was murdered by the Hungarian commies at the time, as noted over at Comic Vine. Yet that's probably nothing compared to how the article proceeds to imply a putdown of Janet:

Although there's plenty to work with, given Nadia's origin. She's already a tougher opponent than the original Wasp. Nadia's armored, with stronger wings and weapons. And there's that whole Red Room thing.

"Nadia was being trained to be an assassin from a very young age, so she's bound to have a certain amount of toughness built in," Whitley said. "In that respect, she has something that neither Janet nor Hank ever had, and that is hand-to-hand combat skills. And ... she's a pretty good blend of their mental and emotional strengths."

Oh, how hilarious. So winsome Jan was never good enough, even after Stan Lee and company thought wisely and started depicting her in more combative roles, along with Invisible Girl? That's what this is beginning to sound like. I'm sorry, but armor and weapons don't a talented story make. And as far as I can tell, even the claim neither Janet nor Hank had combat skills is bogus, recalling an early 80s Avengers issue where Janet had to fight off a crook called the Mechano-Marauder, and clocked him hard upside the head. Say, I think I also remember reading some excepts from the first stories where Hank debuted, and he used something like judo skills to ward off a few of the ants menacing him in that early anthill adventure. In fact, I also remember when Hank used a metal dissolving substance to destroy Ultron's body in the Ultron Unlimited storyline from 1999, by ramming his fists into the armor plates with it. How come those don't factor into Whitley's comments here? He doesn't sound like much of a fan of the old so much as he does sound like somebody who's just trying to make his own work sound better in every way at the expense of past veterans. And if that's not enough, poor politics are hinted at too:

Nadia is also technically an illegal immigrant, which Whitley says is "definitely something we're going to touch on" in the first issue. "Nadia, for what it's worth, is not particularly concerned about it, but the adults in her life ... are going to make sure it gets straightened out."

And we don't know what side they're on. For all we know, this could wind up being another of Marvel's anti-conservative attacks, seeing how blatantly political their books of recent have become, hammering everything upon the readers at any given moment they feel like doing it. Supposedly this'll have a bright viewpoint. But if leftist leanings prevail in the script, it's hard to see how it could work properly if they won't leave their politics at the door.

In the end, the time for a successor is long past, as audience numbers have shrunk smaller and faster than even Hank Pym and Janet VanDyne have.

Labels: Avengers, dreadful writers, golden calf of death, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics