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.

Where Monsters Dwell #29: Ozamm the Terrible

Where Monsters Dwell #29 reprints "Ozamm the Terrible," a filler story from Tales to Astonish #39. Tales to Astonish #39 featured Ant-Man. So this is the first one of these Silver Age monster reprints that I've been working through in Where Monsters Dwell that originally appeared alongside Marvel's new line of superheroes.

Where Monsters Dwell #29, with a publication date of July 1974, features new cover art by the great Larry Lieber, Stan Lee's little brother, famous for penciling the daily Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strip. Lieber also scripted "Ozamm the Terrible," which had a publication date of January 1963. Stan Lee provided the plot; Don Heck, the art.

"Ozamm the Terrible" tells the story of a nefarious alien, Ozamm, with the head of a piranha and the body of a mountain gorilla, who comes to New York City to assert total domination over the dwellers of the metropolis. This is a standard storyline for Silver Age outer-space alien monsters. What is different is the backstory of machinist Joe Baxter. The tale begins with Joe being laid off due to automation at the factory where he works.

The last forty years of woe for the working class can be boiled down to its inability to share in the productivity gains made from the introduction of new technology. The promise of the 20th century -- i.e., the workerless factory -- was that the working class would share in these gains and be able to reduce the number of hours worked while maintaining the wages and benefits. In fact the opposite has occurred; people are working more for less. (For a study of how the idea of the workerless factory went from a utopian to a dystopian concept, see Jeremy Rifkin's excellent The End of Work, published in 1995.)

Jobs flow overseas because machines can be boxed up and shipped across the border; Detroit goes bankrupt; the mighty Boeing Machinists are in danger of losing their defined benefit pension plan. Who could have conceived of such things forty years ago?

Lee/Lieber end the story on a happy note. Joe Baxter saves the day by realizing that the source of Ozamm's power resides in electrical generation equipment in the alien's flying saucer; he is rewarded with his old job back by a newly appreciative boss, who says,

He is worth a hundred machines! Any human being is! Let's hope we've learned that lesson for good now!

Capitalism is not so ethical.