Uncanny Avengers #18.NOW + Uncanny Avengers #20

One thing capitalism has not been able to stifle over the last fifty years is a movement towards gender equality.

While war ravages seemingly every part of the planet (there are more displaced persons since any time going back to WWII) and wealth is concentrated more and more in the hands of a very few (the 1% -- but really, the top tenth of the 1%), and while racism still roils the body politic and corruption in both big business and government remains an endemic part of society, women have made colossal strides in my lifetime.

Of course, debilitating sexism still exists. It is still definitely a man's world. And what will become of women if Wahhabism as practiced by Islamic State and Boko Haram continues to spread?

Women only earn 78 cents on the dollar to men in the United States today. But in business, politics, and the arts, women do everything -- occupy the same commanding heights -- that men do, just not in numbers as robust.

To see this transformation in the role of women over the last fifty years all one need do is look at the Marvel character the Wasp, Janet van Dyne. Introduced in Tales to Astonish #44 (June 1963) as a romantic interest of and sidekick to Henry Pym's Ant-Man, Janet van Dyne is basically eye candy in a pill box hat.

The Wasp, the original female Avenger, I always thought of as a brunette version of Sue Storm, a.k.a., Invisible Girl; both, as depicted by Jack Kirby and Don Heck, are fine pieces of Park Avenue trim whose superhero identities -- insect smallness and invisibility -- accentuate patriarchal stereotypes of women as insignificant, passive and powerless, a conceptualization of the feminine that would make any misogynist happy. In the superhero yarns from the early 1960s, if either Janet or Sue were to save the day in the last panels of the comic book it is usually owing to the fact of being overlooked by the power-gorged super-villain. Stan Lee's moral might be summarized as something like, "See, now and then it comes in handy to be diminutive and invisible."

But that is not the Janet van Dyne of today. I have been spending the last few weekends dipping into accumulated issues of Rick Remender's Uncanny Avengers. And what struck me, besides Daniel Acuña's amazing art, is how forceful, strong, physical, alive the Wasp is. Is there a term for feminine virility? "Fertility" doesn't really do it since fertility connotes a certain passivity, a receptacle for insemination.

Whatever female virility is, Remender and Acuña bring it to life with Janet van Dyne in the pages of Uncanny Avengers #18.NOW and Uncanny Avengers #20. In Uncanny Avengers #18.NOW the Wasp takes out both the Blob and Magneto; in Uncanny Avengers #20, she delivers a bloody-mouth beat down to Kang the Conqueror.

Below you will find more scans than usual. Daniel Acuña's illustration of a free-falling fight on Planet X between Blob, Havoc, Wasp and Magneto is so compelling I couldn't resist. And Janet van Dyne's assault on Kang from Uncanny Avengers #20 cannot be omitted.