For my Pecha Kucha presentation, I am choosing a panel from the comic book Avengers Vol 1 Issue 213. I was drawn to this artifact because of its stark imagery and profound impact it has on the reader, as well as my interest in comics. I want to study this panel in greater detail due to its infamy in the comic community and its lasting effect in Marvel. Why this panel? It is when the hero Ant-Man hit his heroine wife Wasp.

This comic was produced by Marvel, specifically written by Jim Shooter, in November 1981. This panel in particular, tying into the overall story, was meant to bring more attention to one of Marvel’s more uninteresting characters, Ant-Man, and to bring in more readers in general. Shooter plays off of the morality and ethos of the reader to bring out a strong reaction and want to know what the character will become following the story. Despite the Avengers being more fantasy and sci-fi, this particular comic was more serious, dark, disturbing, making the reader feel like the character was teetering on the borderline of insanity. In the scene, the background is mechanical, dull, and gray, making the reader entirely focused on the actions in the panel rather than absorbing the scenery. The speech bubbles are jagged and contain bolded phrases to signify the shifts in the scene despite it being a still-frame of one part of it. The whole of the panel is jarring, which has drawn me to investigate it more.