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Avengers West Coast

Wasp, Janet van Dyne – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting guide and reading order for Marvel’s Wasp – Janet van Dyne – in omnibus, hardcover, trade paperback, and digital comics. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated April 2023 with titles scheduled for release through July 2023.

Janet van Dyne is one of Marvel’s first female superheroes, a founding member of The Avengers. and the first Marvel heroine to lead her own solo stories in the Silver Age!

She is the most under-used out of all of Marvel’s iconic Silver Age women, in part because she spent so long being tied closely with Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man (and also her ex-husband). The Wasp in Avengers (1998) #71

Janet debuted as The Wasp in March 1963 as Pym’s co-star in anthology title Tales To Astonish. Her debut is both a creaky artifact of the times and a solid blueprint for her enduring personality.

On one hand, you have widower Hank Pym becoming immediately obsessed with Janet because she resembles his deceased wife, even though Janet is “no more than a child.”

Yikes!

On the other hand, Janet’s headstrong and fiercely-loyal streak is established from her earliest panels. She prefers a companion who is “the adventurous type” rather than spend time with “dull, intellectual book worms.” She also leaps at the chance to avenge her father, proving she herself is also of the adventurous type.

At first, Janet comes off as the most well-rounded of all Marvel woman of the early 60s, all of whom were saddled with a secret lust for their leading man. She strikes out on her own mission in her second appearance and repeatedly shrugs off Hanks’ attempts to infantilize her. Janet is often the driver of action, she reprimands Hank for giving her orders, and her sighs of “Oh, Ant-Man! What do we do next?” often come off as subtle sarcasm.

Hank and Janet were drafted into Stan Lee & Jack Kirby’s Avengers alongside other anthology title hit characters Iron Man, Thor, and Hulk – to which they famously added Captain America in issue #4. Janet was immediately minimized in this cast of men, getting none of the moments of bravery and wit she continued to show off in Tales To Astonish. There, just after the debut of The Avengers, she received her own run of solo features from Tales to Astonish (1959) #51-58.

As Scarlet Witch and Black Widow were pulled into the Avengers line-up, Janet felt increasingly sidelined (though she is notable for being an early friend to Hawkeye). She marries in issue #60 and leaves the team for her honeymoon in issue #75. It takes until her return to the team without Hank in issues #150-151 for her to start to have her own plots while in the title

That lead to both the nadir and the early climax of Jan’s reading order. Issue #213 features the oft-referenced moment of domestic violence where a manic, costumed Hank strikes Janet while in civilian clothes, giving her a black eye. Yet, the story is not merely one of Janet being a prop for Hank’s downfall. He is promptly kicked off the team, and in issue #217 Janet proposes herself as the chairman of the Avengers – which Iron Man, Cap, and Thor support unanimously.

Janet’s years as the chair of The Avengers include some of her best moments on the team. They are also the origin of her long-lasting friendship with She-Hulk. From that point forward, Janet always receives some amount of deference whenever she is on an Avengers roster – it continues long after she passes down leadership to Vision (and later to Monica Rambeau, via Cap).

The remainder of the 80s and 90s aren’t a productive time for quality Wasp stories, though they helped cement her status as a fashion designer and socialite. She joined Avengers West Coast, but took a backseat there to the ongoing Scarlet Witch drama. Janet briefly bounced back into the main Avengers squad in the mid-90s, only to be subjected to an inexplicable mutation into an actual wasp-girl (in keeping with the character design trends in the period).

Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s back-to-basics Avengers relaunch in 1998 finally saw Janet put to good use in a modern book where she had room to exist as a character without needing to be a leader. She was a recurring member of cast for over half a decade, until Brian Bendis disassembled the Avengers in 2004. Bendis picked Janet back up for his Mighty Avengers run in 2007, but despite her being a founding member she isn’t seen much outside of the climax of his Secret Invasion – which removed her from storytelling for several years.

Wasp made her return just after Avengers vs. X-Men, which positioned her as one of the classic Avengers to anchor the new Uncanny Avengers squad that combined Avengers and X-Men on a single team. Her initial run with the team during Marvel Now in 2013-2015 is unremarkable; she gets more to do in All-New All-Different Marvel in 2015-2016.

Now completely decoupled from Hank Pym, Janet finally began to see more use as a guest star with interesting plots of her own. She adopts her step-daughter Nadia in a pair of delightful, all-ages Unstoppable Wasp series, and is a partner and equal to Tony Stark in Tony Stark: Iron Man, as well as an occasional Avenger. And, finally, in January 2023, Janet van Dyne got her own solo series!

[Read more…] about Wasp, Janet van Dyne – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

New for Patrons: Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne

January 30, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

My newest guide for Patreon supporters of Crushing Krisis is for one of the longest-running women of Marvel. In fact, while researching this guide I realized she may be the first Silver Age female Marvel hero to merit her own series of solo anthology stories! She’s also the first woman with a lengthy stint as a team leader at Marvel. All of that makes it absolutely wild that she has never had her own solo series until this month!!! Find all of those Marvel milestone moments in my brand new Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne!

Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne
This guide is now available to the public thanks to the astonishing support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis!

I won’t lie – getting this Guide to Wasp done was a battle, even though I got a very early start on it!

That’s because Janet van Dyne has appeared in a staggering 1,296 Marvel comics as of this month, which includes 1,295 comics that were not her own comic.

Building a guide for a character who has mostly appeared in their own series is always more straight-forward than building one for a perennial team member and guest star – even if that character has many series like Wolverine. That’s because their series established their prevailing narrative. Even if Wolverine made three times as many guest appearances in a period compared to his number of solo issues, it will be the solo issues that establish his character arc at that time.

Janet van Dyne has never had that privilege. For a character who is about to celebrate her 60th anniversary, her major character moments are relatively few and far between. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: Avengers, Avengers West Coast, Brian Bendis, Gerry Duggan, Janet van Dyne, Jeremy Whitley, Marvel Comics, New Comic Book Guide, Roger Stern, Secret Invasion, Unstoppable Wasp, Wasp

Crushing Comics S01E038 – The dangers of loving canon + Avengers West Coast (& Mockingbird)

December 13, 2017 by krisis

After I deliver a rousing monologue on the utter meaninglessness of canon in comics I unwrap a pair of books that helped the Avengers franchise branch out – the Avengers West Coast omnibuses (which brings me back to the flexibility of canon when it comes to Mockingbird)!

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 38 features Avengers West Coast Omnibus Volumes 1 and 2, covered in the Guide to Avengers West Coast.

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: Avengers West Coast, canon, Collected Editions, Crushing Comics, Marvel Comics, Mockingbird, Omnibus

The Definitive Scarlet Witch Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive Scarlet Witch issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for comic books, omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated September 2023 with titles scheduled for release through May 2024.

Wanda Maximoff is The Scarlet Witch – one of the most powerful mutants in Marvel’s universe, and the sometimes daughter of Magneto. She is able to alter reality at her whim with blasts of pure chaos, causing anything from a wall suddenly crumble down upon a villain to an alteration to the fabric of our universe.

Variant cover of Scarlet Witch (2016) #4

Scarlet Witch is one of Marvel’s earliest reformed villains and one of their most dedicated heroes. She forms a link between the X-Men and Avengers franchises that has been in place since 1965.

For the prior year, Wanda and her brother Quicksilver had appeared together as members of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants since their debut in X-Men (1963) #4. However, in May of 1965 the mutant twins shocked both Marvel’s characters and their readers by applying for membership with Captain America’s reformed Avengers in Avengers (19630 #16.

While Quicksilver has come and gone from The Avengers since then, Scarlet Witch has remained a mainstay of the team. Her initial membership ran for a nearly-continuous 20 years before she spun off into a year-long maxi series with her beau The Vision in 1985, which depicted their unusual romance and eventual home life. Wanda even gave birth to a pair of twins.

After that domestic interlude, Wanda returned to active Avengers membership with the West Coast Avengers. Under the pen of John Byrne, she had her own “Dark Phoenix” period, turning on her teammates. However, she quickly returned to heroism and broke away from The Avengers with her other teammates to form the more proactive Force Works in 1994, lead by Iron Man (but not before briefly headlining her own limited series).

A subsequent return to The Avengers was short-lived, as the results of Onslaught shunted Wanda and her teammates into a pocket universe in 1996 before they returned in a new flagship title in 1998. Scarlet Witch was a founding member and an ongoing anchor of the team.

Everything changed in 2004, when red-hot writer Brian Michael Bendis was given free reign to rebuild the flagging Avengers franchise. His answer was a four-issue arc called “Avengers Disassembled,” which would both elevate and irrevocably alter Scarlet Witch’s profile in the Marvel Universe. It’s follow-up, the X-Men and Avengers crossover House of M, would emphasize Wanda as the link between the two teams and also prove her to be one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

After that climax, five whole years passed with only the scantest hints of Wanda’s continued existence. She returned in Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, which both addressed her absence and resolved her seeming connection to a pair of Young Avengers – Wiccan and Speed – who closely resembled Wanda and her brother.

With Scarlet Witch back in action, she was a natural choice to anchor a “Unity” team of Avengers and X-Men in Uncanny Avengers in 2012 to welcome the Marvel Now era. A second volume of that book called into question her long-established link to Magneto (which many fans took as a rebuke of FOX being able to use Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in their X-Men movies). Then, after Secret Wars, she starred in her own ongoing series for the first time in 2016 before making a return to Uncanny Avengers in 2017.

[Read more…] about The Definitive Scarlet Witch Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Avengers West Coast by Thomas & Thomas – The #40 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

May 24, 2017 by krisis

Avengers West Coast #97

Completionism is a a crazy impulse. There are hundreds of Avengers issues unrepresented by oversized volumes, but omnibus collectors are super-focused on getting the relatively unheralded back third of Avengers West Coast into an oversize volume to complete their bookshelves.

The funny thing is, I’m not sure all of the voters realize just how strong and cohesive this Roy & Dann Thomas run on Avengers really is.

The Avengers West Coast by Thomas and Thomas Omnibus is the #40 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017 on Tigereyes’s Secret Ballot. Visit the Marvel Masterworks Message Board to view the original posting of results by Tigereyes and head to the Guide to Avengers West Coast to see how you can read this run right now.

Past Ranking: This volume leaps up five spots from #45 in the 2016 survey.

Probable Contents: Avengers West Coast (1989) #63-100, 102, & Annual 5-8, Avengers Annual 19, Darkhawk Annual 1, and Iron Man Annual 13,

That’s 43 issues, which means the book could also include the full Bloodties crossover: Avengers West Coast (1989) #101, The Avengers (1963) #368-369, Uncanny X-Men (1963) #307, & X-Men (1991) #26.

However, that would leave behind 20 issues of five related miniseries – U.S. Agent #1-4 (after #95 & Annual 8), Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective #1-4 (after #97), Spider-Woman #1-4 (after #101), Scarlet Witch #1-4 (after #101), and Hawkeye #1-4 (after #102).

What to do? More on how to reconcile that, below.

Creators: Written by Roy Thomas and Dann Thomas with pencils by Paul Ryan and Dave Ross with Tom Morgan, George Freeman, Herb Trimpe, and Andrew Currie.

Can you read it right now? Mostly. Issue #76-79 and #83-88 remain uncollected (as is the U.S. Agent mini-series), but everything else has been captured. Visit Guide to Avengers West Coast for the full details. Unfortunately, most of this run is not on Marvel Unlimited.

The Details:

Avengers West Coast had gone for years as a forgotten era of Avengers as far as reprints were concerned until Marvel’s Cinematic Universe began focusing strongly on its core cast of Iron Man and Hawkeye, and later Scarlet Witch and Vision.

Suddenly, West Coast reprints were abounding – a set of Marvel Premier Classic hardcovers, corresponding paperback reprints, two omnibuses, half of an Avengers by John Byrne volume, and a handful of trades covering the latter run of the series. The only remaining gaps are #76-79 and #83-88, two stories split by the massive “Galactic Storm” crossover.

Comic books fans are nothing if not obsessive completists, so that makes a final omnibus edition of Avenger West Coast sorely tempting – especially since it’s all co-written by comic book royalty Roy Thomas along with his wife Dann (who was the first woman to ever script an issue of Wonder Woman!) mostly to illustration by a pair of strong pencillers – Paul Ryan through #69 and Dave Ross from #71 through the end of the series. [Read more…] about Avengers West Coast by Thomas & Thomas – The #40 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: Andrew Currie, Avengers, Avengers West Coast, Dann Thomas, Dave Ross, Force Works, George Freeman, Hawkeye, Herb Trimpe, Human Torch, Iron Man, Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus, Paul Ryan, Roy Thomas, Scarlet Witch, Spider-Woman, Tigra, Tom Morgan, U.S. Agent, Ultron, Vision, War Machine, Wonder Man

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