Writer Jeremy Whitley and artist Elsa Charretier, the creative team behind ‘The Unstoppable Wasp,’ have a great new idea for the letters page of each issue. The goal is to feature real life female scientists. Before I go into detail, if you aren’t familiar with the comic let me brush you up on it. The character is Nadia Pym, Hank Pym’s daughter. She has her father’s brilliance, grew up in The Red Room which gives her what should be an entirely cold and calculating view on life, and yet is a non-stop happy inventor who just wants to make the world a better place.
Her goal in the comic is to have the “smartest humans on Earth” list revisited to be more inclusive to women and is trying to form a team of women called Agents of G.I.R.L. to not only do just that but also follow her goal of making the world a better place.
From the comic’s viewpoint, the creative team came up with the idea to showcase actual female scientists. According to Whitley:
“I have to credit our amazing artist Elsa with the original idea. I had been kicking around that I wanted to do some outreach to STEM and women in science and she came up with an idea. She would draw headshots, and we’d do a little profile on female scientists. Her original plan was to post these on Twitter or Tumblr, but ever since I started working on UNSTOPPABLE WASP, I’d wanted to do a letters page. I love letters pages, and as engaging as Nadia is as a character, I thought it would be perfect. Elsa’s idea of profiling female scientists from our audience was exactly what I was looking for.”
With the theme so fitting Pym’s character it seemed to gel with the comic and better yet:
UNSTOPPABLE WASP is all about young female super scientists setting out to change the world. It made perfect sense to us to highlight female scientists who really are shaping our future. We already knew several women who fit this description and were comics readers, so the idea of sharing their awesome work with the rest of our audience seemed like something that had to happen. We look forward to learning about more amazing comics loving lady scientists as we open up to submissions and hopefully a few of [our] younger readers may even find something that interests them as well as the expert that they can ask about it.
Marvel has for years now been striving to be one of the most inclusive comic publishers, and a simple spotlight like this can go a long way for current comic reads. I’m thrilled at what Whitley and Charretier are doing here.
Are you happy to see that ‘The Unstoppable Wasp’ is encouraging science as a field for women everywhere? Share your thoughts below!
Source: Marvel
Stuart Conover is an author, blogger, and all around geek. When not busy being a father and husband he tries to spend as much time as possible immersed in comic books, science fiction, and horror! Would you like to know more? Follow him on Twitter!
