Unstoppable Wasp #2 Review

If Tony Stark won’t go looking for the female scientists of tomorrow, Nadia Pym will have to do it herself! Unless yesterday has something to say about it in Unstoppable Wasp #2. Is it good?

Unstoppable Wasp #2 (Marvel Comics)

To the unstoppable Wasp, SCIENCE is more important than CITIZENSHIP! The lawyer will have to wait; there are recruits to gather and robots to build!

And rodent kaiju to deter! With the help of the smartest person on Earth! But who could be behind such a heinous act of super-science? Someone from the old, familiar places?

Is It Good?

Unstoppable Wasp #2 opens with a positively delightful sequence of the startled teen rummaging through research papers and food wrappers to find a ringing phone — not HER phone, but a weird one with a handle and a stretchy cord. Jeremy Whitley writes laugh-out-loud-funny monologue for the Red Room escapee, and artist Elsa Charretier further emphasizes Nadia’s character with carefully chosen closeups and objects of interest. The rest of the story is equally crisp, and the antagonist revealed at issue’s end is set up subtly enough throughout the previous pages that it actually is something of a surprise, and not an overt insult to the reader’s intelligence.

But there is one major sticking point in Unstoppable Wasp #2, one that wouldn’t be so if this were just a generic, “ra-ra, you can do anything you want” kind of book. When so much is made of Nadia being a girl scientist, to the point of including interviews with living, breathing scientists in the book’s back matter, the science in the story itself should be explained a little better. Or at least referenced — direction finding and static electricity phone-chargers are pretty interesting things, ones that budding scientists would presumably want to know more about. The constant conflation of science and technology is an additional annoyance, although that one’s pretty ubiquitous, so maybe you can’t fault Whitley for not reinventing the wheel within a 20-page confine.

Charretier’s art is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was in Unstoppable Wasp #1, lending great perspective and sense of motion during a street-hockey game, and nailing the storytelling on the giant rat fight. Megan Wilson’s colors are more vibrant now, too, making the pop art truly pop while still being gritty enough to harken back to the old pulps of Hank Pym’s time.

Unstoppable Wasp #2 is a suitable follow-up to the stellar debut issue, as it better explains Nadia’s need to search out more girls like her. Whitley continues to define and strengthen Pym’s character while Charretier and Wilson perfect their cute yet crunchy imagery. Outside the actual story, the science in this science-heavy book could be presented a little better, but the professional interviews in the back partially make up for that.