Character Spotlight: Nadia Van Dyne (Sorta)

I've known about this one for a while, but I brushed it off. I figured people were making guesses without knowing the whole story and that I knew better. But I recently found evidence that I was wrong, so here we are.

Our story starts all the way back in 1998. A very popular issue of What If...? - a series that genreally told alternate outcomes of various Marvel stories - featured a story about Peter Parker's baby if she hadn't disappeared, and she grew up to become Spider-Girl. The issue was SO popular that Marvel soon launched a whole imprint called MC2, short for "Marvel Comics 2", about a new generation of superheroes. Ironically, although set about 15 years in the future, the comics themselves were very old-fashioned in a good way. Mostly one-and-done stories that appealed to all ages and were easily accessible, but also had overarching stories to bring the reader back for more.

After a cameo in A-Next #7 (February 1999), A-Next #12 (July 1999) introduced a character called the Red Queen and her team, the Revengers. The Red Queen, aka Hope Pym, was the leader of the team and the biggest believer in their goal of destroying the Avengers. She and Big Man were the children of Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne.

Almost two decades later in 2015, Ant-Man received his own movie, and a major subplot dealt with Hank Pym's strained relationship with his daughter, Hope Van Dyne. This version of Hope uses her missing mother's name to honor her, and to also distance herself from her father. Hope is upset at Hank for many reasons, one of them being that she has the skills and experience to use the Ant-Man suit but Hank got Scott Lang to use it instead. But instead of going out on her own and becoming Red Queen like the comics version, she becomes the Wasp and got to co-headline the 2018 sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp.

In Free Comic Book Day Civil War II (May 2016), we're introduced to the new Wasp, who is named Nadia Pym. She's Hank's daughter from his first marriage, and she was raised in a Russian secret spy-training organization called the Red Room. She escaped, however, and became the Wasp to honor her stepmother.

At the time she was announced, people made a big deal of her being the Marvel Comics version of Hope Van Dyne. They even pointed out that "Nadia" means "Hope" in Russian. This never felt right to me. For one thing, Hope already has a comics version...Hope. And Nadia is one of the most common Russian names in Western fiction. It's like Natasha, then Boris, then Nadia. Ivan's in there somewhere. But again, IF the name was chosen because it means hope, how do we know it wasn't referring to the Red Queen? After all, only a couple months before in Astonishing Ant-Man #6 (March 2016), Cassie started using her previously-MC2-exclusive identity of Stinger.

So I never featured it. But last week I learned that Mark Waid is on the record as saying that Nadia is inspired by the movie's Hope, so that closes the book on that.