Tag: Wasp

Kirby Kurtain Kall

Though August is over and it’s now Sept. 1st, I have an estab­lished tra­di­tion of tak­ing all my Kir­by Trib­ute Month images and putting them togeth­er into one big poster image. This year is no different.

Though I drew them all and know each image well by this point, I get a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive when I com­bine them after the fact like this, apprais­ing the work I did from an over­all view.

This is now the fourth year that I’ve done Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, and it’s inter­est­ing to see how much more detailed and involved these small illus­tra­tions have become each year. That’s noth­ing to do with the prompts them­selves (though those can cre­ate their own chal­lenges). It’s more to do with feel­ing the need to move beyond just straight por­traits, to come up with some­thing that feels like there’s a sto­ry to it.

That’s about all there is to say. I always learn some­thing when I do these, so hope­ful­ly you’ve enjoyed this year’s journey.

“What’s This Buzzing around Me?”

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!