She is the daughter of Henry "Ant-Man" Pym. She has taken on the legacy of Pym's former partner, Janet Van Dyne. She was raised in the Red Room, the Russian espionage school that gave us the Black Widow.

And, according to Jeremy Whitley ("Princeless"), who will be writing the new "Unstoppable Wasp" series for Marvel Comics, she's a bit of all of them. Well, with the addition of her actual mother, an obscure character named Maria Trovaya, who was once married to Hank Pym.

"She looks a little like her mother, Maria," Whitley said. "Her real resemblance to Hank is in the way she thinks. She's obsessive and can't let go of things she can't fix or figure out. Unlike Hank, she's much more optimistic. I think she is, in a lot of ways, the perfect blend between Hank and her stepmother Janet Van Dyne, the original Wasp."

Hank Pym, of course, is the super-genius who discovered how to shrink himself and talk to ants back in 1962. This being comics, he put on a costume and fought crime as Ant-Man. Janet Van Dyne was his fiancée, a flighty millionaire heiress.

She became the Wasp in 1963, when Pym gave her the power to shrink, bioengineered insect wings and a weapon called "the Wasp's sting." Pym and Van Dyne were once married, but that partnership, along with their superhero one, has long since dissolved. Currently Pym is "dead" — nobody believes he really is, even in the comics — and Janet is semiretired.

Which opens the door for the new Wasp, Nadia Pym. She is a new character and a callback to those early days of Ant-Man and the Wasp. See, way back in 1963, Pym revealed to Van Dyne that he had been married before. His first wife, Maria, was the daughter of a Hungarian scientist who had defected from the Communist Bloc. The scientist was killed in a suspicious accident, and Maria was kidnapped by foreign agents. Pym, and comics readers, never saw her again.

But, as it turned out, Maria was pregnant when she was kidnapped. And while she is long since dead, her daughter, Nadia, is alive. And that leads directly to "Unstoppable Wasp" No. 1, out in January, written by Whitley and drawn by Elsa Charretier.

"I've loved the character of Nadia since I read her first appearance," Whitley said. "She has a sense of intelligence and optimism that I just love." There's plenty to work with, given Nadia's origin. She's already a tougher opponent than the original Wasp. Nadia's armored, with stronger wings and weapons. And there's that whole Red Room thing.

"Nadia was being trained to be an assassin from a very young age, so she's bound to have a certain amount of toughness built in," Whitley said. "In that respect, she has something that neither Janet nor Hank ever had, and that is hand-to-hand combat skills. And she's a pretty good blend of their mental and emotional strengths."

But as Natalya Romanova can tell you, it's not easy being raised as a spy and assassin. Fortunately, the original Wasp, an accomplished socialite from way back, is on hand to help out.

"The big thing that she's missing, that Janet has in spades, is social know-how," Whitley said. "Nadia has never had a social life. She's never had friends. She doesn't know how she's supposed to move about the world."