peppermonster:

scarletwitching:

Avengers Vol. 1 #21 by Stan Lee & Don Heck

People love to drag out that bottom right panel like it’s an embarrassing photo of their dad with a mullet and a Members Only jacket. “Haha look at this old thing! Old things are so cringe-worthy, amirite?” It’s treated as irrefutable proof that Silver Age Wanda was a melodramatic waif and her characterization was All About Dicks™.

That’s ridiculous for a few reasons:

1. Wanda’s thoughts there (and her feelings for Steve in general) are not over the top.
2. It’s usually accompanied by an assumption that Silver Age melodrama only affected the women, which is very, very wrong. It was Steve, after all, who proposed to Sharon shortly after meeting her.
3. The context.

It’s that last one that really matters. Wanda knocked Hawkeye down over a minor slight that wasn’t even directed at her, and Steve responded by saying, “Hey, I told you not to beat people up all the time.”

Wanda thinking that Steve is “so gentle” looks different when you put it next to a panel of her being decidedly not gentle.

What people don’t get is that Stan Lee’s Wanda had violent powers and was a-okay with using them any time she was mildly annoyed. What they especially don’t get is that she was drawn to Steve, in part, because he wasn’t like that. He didn’t physically fight any time he felt like it (or at least, he tried not to). He had restraint that she didn’t. He was gentle in a way that she wasn’t. She was attracted to him, a guy who was a lot less powerful than her, because he had feminine qualities she didn’t see in herself.

All of the silver-age women are cringe worthy. Like, it’s just a product of their time. They all got substantial character development and rewrites. Look at Jean Grey. Her Marvel Girl was soooo painful to read. She evolved past that. I kinda like reading the old stuff just to laugh.

This is easier to do if it’s a character Marvel’s permitted a fair amount of development and rewrites over the years, but less so if it’s a character Marvel doesn’t provide with many/any opportunities. If it’s a character given tons of promotion and modern stories, a person can easily say “Yeah, the old stuff was bad, but they were all treated that way and the modern stuff is what they should really be judged by.”

Characters not given tons of promotion or many modern stories, however, seem to get judged as bad characters in and of themselves. This leads to readers, editors, etc insisting the character has nothing to offer and shouldn’t be used – that they “don’t deserve” to be part of big events they have a huge stake in, or “don’t deserve” to interact with “better” characters that got the opportunities they didn’t.

What I’m trying to get at in all of this is, characters like Steve and Wanda have the benefit of having many spotlights shone on them so people know what aspects of old comics are accurate representations of who they are and which should be ignored, and how to interpret certain scenes. Other characters don’t get that luxury, so pages, panels and events from the silver age become huge obstacles to their development and use.

Because we know Wanda from recent comics and promotion, we know she can be dangerous and rough. But if the silver age comics were most of what we had to go on, we might see these scenes, and Wanda, very differently.