Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett muses on the return of the Wasp, the Marvel #1 promotion, and Popeye with Barney Google.
 
A few weeks ago I wrote about how the servers crashed during the "Marvel #1" big digital comics sale that had the publisher offering 700 of their #1 issues for free (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Success of Failure?").  I pronounced the promotion as mostly a failure, mostly because I was all grumpy that I didn't get the digital comics I wanted.  But it has to be deemed at least some sort of success since they finally did schedule a do-over of the event, though with some serious restrictions (unfortunately you had until Tuesday night at 11:59 p.m. to sign up for it).
 
And, for the record, I finally got to download the comics I wanted, and that’s really the important thing, isn't it?  Because getting those free copies of recent Marvel NOW! titles convinced me to become a regular reader of them, and while that’s just anecdotal evidence, if it could happen to me we pretty much have to assume the same thing happened to hundreds of other people.
 
The big surprise to come out of this promotion for me was learning that even at my advanced age there's still part of me that really, really likes a good superhero team comic book, and these are really good.  Not to mention that All-New-X-Men, Uncanny Avengers, Young Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy are all excellent examples of good jumping on points, providing new readers with updated versions of classic characters.  In short, they do everything that DC's "New 52" titles were supposed to do and are frequently much better comics.
 
[Click for larger view]
Speaking of Uncanny Avengers, in case you missed it the Internet was temporarily atwitter because in #5, the latest issue, during a press conference Alex Summers, a.k.a. Havoc, declared that he no longer self-identified as a "mutant," citing it as a divisive term.  But what didn't make much news was the fact that Janet Van Dyke a.k.a. The Wasp was alive again.  For those who likewise didn't get the memo she apparently returned in the pages of Avengers #32.  And for the record she actually had not been dead at all, not even temporarily.  For once I'll take seriously the sanctity of the spoiler and keep to myself the dodge Brian Michael Bendis came up with to explain her return, which not only didn't I see coming but which didn't make me want to cry "foul."  Now if he only had something similar planned for Tony Stark's chauffeur Happy Hogan...
 
I'll happily confess I was one of those comic book guys who never appreciated the character until she was gone, but I've gone on record as having seen the light (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--The Most Unlikely Hero of Them All!").  While growing up I might have thought of her as a joke, in hindsight it's kind of hard to look at her origin and not see her as (and I really hate using this horribly overused and devalued term) a total badass.  You think that Batman is tough because he avenged his parents' death?  When Jan's father was killed by a Lee/Kirby-type monster from another dimension, she went after it without a second thought and this was back when she didn't even have her signature "Wasp sting."  Back then she fought crime armed with only a pin; that's right, a pin.  Now that's what I call hardcore.
 
Artist Michael Lee Lunsford recently got a lot of Internet attention for his series of drawings of "Fully Dressed Superheroines" which according to The Huffington Post asks the question, "Ever wondered what superheroines would look like if they were dressed a bit more like their male counterparts?"  Well, The Wasp always fought crime fully dressed and while she might have been aggressively girly and delusionally entitled she never doubted for a moment that she deserved a chair at the big round table with the capital 'A' on it.  So now that she's finally back Marvel could do a whole lot worse than to hire Grace Randolph, writer of the Marvel HER-oes mini-series (the woman who declared her a "kick-ass Tinker Belle") to do an on-going Wasp series.
 
Finally, while I haven't been getting IDW Publishing's Popeye on a regular basis, I've always enjoyed the issues I have read, and was actively looking forward to getting #12.  The issue featuring a team-up (or should that be a crossover?) with Barney Google (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Here Comes Brain Boy!").  Well I've finally read it and it is, quite simply, the single best comic I've read all year; if it weren't also the final issue in the series, right now I'd be hoping they would do an issue guest co-starring Mutt & Jeff...
 
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.