This is now day 11 of this year’s Jack Kirby Tribute Month, curated by Howard Simpson. The prompt for today is Janet van Dyne, AKA the Wasp!
She first showed up Tales to Astonish #44, as part of the Ant-Man strip. Henry Pym sets her up with the same shrinking powers and the like that he had been using as Ant-Man. Pym’s first appearance in Tales to Astonish #27 was more like a holdover from the earlier monster stories Marvel/Atlas had been doing in the ’50s. But in issue #35, they brought him back, apparently thinking it was time to turn him into a superhero.
A little while after Janet van Dyne partners up with him as the Wasp, Pym discovers he can use his tech not just to shrink, but to also go the other direction and become large. He renames himself Giant Man in Tales to Astonish #49.
Since the Wasp and Giant Man were around from very early days, when the time came for Marvel to team up their characters as The Avengers (more or less Marvel’s equivalent of the Justice League), they were in on that team from the start. In fact, the Wasp is the one who comes up with the new team’s name!
Janet van Dyne as a character was a little different from most of the Marvel women of that period. She had a bit of a playfulness and a sense of fun to her that most of them didn’t usually display. Which probably also served to lighten up Hank Pym a little bit.
You get a twofer here. I wanted to show a reduced-size Wasp in flight, and thought it might also be fun to show a bit of Giant Man in the background, since they’re a team.
It should be said that while this is her original outfit, she became known over the years for changing her costume often, out of a sense of style and fashion. Though if I’m not mistaken, this was the only uniform Kirby ever drew her in.
That’s my take on the Wasp! I hope you enjoyed it, and that you’re interested enough to swing by tomorrow to see who’s next!
This is my favorite character rendering so far. I like this outfit, the little antenna on top makes me think of the Googie style in architecture and fashion. On the Wasp’s costume issue, Kirby did do some variations, changing the shoulders and giving her a different head dress, but the color palette stayed the same, so I guess its how technical you want to get. Compare her costume from the first five issues of the Avengers to the one in issues 10 to 15, when Jack was still doing layouts.
I couldn’t help it but I looked up the Marvel books published in 1965 and of the Super hero books, Jack drew or did layouts for six of the eight books. I don’t know if he did any interiors on the Romance or Western books. I know I don’t need to tell you, but that is a lot of output.
Glad you like it. Yeah, I know there were variations on her costume. I saw one (I think it was earlier) where the belt was a bit different. I chose to stick with my reference, which I think was from an early Avengers issue. I don’t have a lot of that material, but thankfully I had some (I think it was in Marvel Collectors’ Item Classics, or one of those other early reprint books).
You are correct about Jack’s output. In addition to his own pencils (and storytelling/pacing), he was doing layouts for a whole lot of other artists there for a bit. A number of artists who would later become mainstays of Marvel’s second wave got their start penciling from Jack’s layouts. John Buscema, for example. Even John Romita did some of it, working over Jack’s Captain America layouts for an installment of Tales of Suspense.
I don’t know that any other artist could have done all that. Jack was one of the fastest ever. I would hope he got paid for all those layouts, but I have no knowledge of how they worked that if they did. The thinking was apparently that they wanted all these books to have similar dynamics to what Jack brought to his work, and having artists start off with his layouts was a way to achieve that, plus hopefully have them figure out how to do it themselves. “Training wheels,” so to speak. Some artists they tried out couldn’t figure it out, while others did.
Later in the ’60s, it seems Jack’s schedule lightened up, and he was able to focus his attention on basically just FF and Thor.
Yea, both. Even before I read the text, I noticed the contrast between the Giant Man eye and the Wasp’s head. I too like the atomic age costuming chosen for the Wasp by Jack and repeated by you in today’s image. Keep simple tooning alive.
Yeah, the simplicity of this design is really appealing, and you realize it even more when drawing it for yourself. While lots of detail can be fun (see Kirby’s multiple Odin costume designs from his Journey into Mystery/Thor run), generally when you have a lead character you’re portraying multiple times over the course of a story, bold and simple are best.