Way back in early July of 1967, the rest of my family went out on some sort of day trip, leaving me home alone. I got the idea that it would be great fun to get a new model done, start to finish, before the folks got back. With this tight time line, I had to think small, so I came up with The Wasp from Marvel comics.

I started with a spectator from a set of 1/32 scale Plasticville racing car figures made by Bachmann. In order to duplicate the Wasp’s skin tight outfit, I had to remove the clothing from the Bachmann woman. As this was pretty snug to begin with, carving and sanding were limited to the collar and cuffs on the blouse and edges of the shorts and shoes. The belt was fine and left alone. For the wings, I used a pencil to make deep impressions in a piece of heavily textured cardboard to represent the veins. Then I used my Mattel Vac-U-Form to suck a piece of heated clear acetate over the paper form. Trimmed to shape, the wings were inserted into slots cut into the figure’s back.

Originally, I didn’t have the Wasp on a base. I had her sitting on the top edge of a nameplate from Revell’s Phantom model kit on which I had used rub off lettering for the name change. The presentation changed over the years, ending with my standardized round base. The overturned chess piece, a pawn, gives scale to the figure and makes a statement (positive, I hope) about Ms. Van Dyne’s status.

It’s frightening to realize that, not only that I created this figure 48 years ago, but that I still have an unaltered duplicate figure and nameplate in my collection!

Figure created in 1967, base completed in 1992.