Profile: Jocasta

Jocasta
First appearance: Avengers #162, 1978. Originally built by Ultron to be his robotic bride, during which time he unsuccessfully tried to subject the Wasp to a brain-drain in his secret HQ in Nassau County, New York so that her thought patterns would animate those of his mechanical bride, Jocasta developed an independent mind of her own, and became a regular member of the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

Current status: since then, she appears to have been sent to the scrap heap.

Was subjected to the following acts of discrimination: in Marvel Two-In-One #92-93, while battling her own creator, Ultron, alongside the Thing and Machine Man, she was destroyed. In Avengers Annual #17, she was rebuilt, only to be demolished once again.

What’s wrong with how this was done? A weak way to get rid of even a mechanical maiden, and her being repaired in the Avengers Annual #17 just so that she could be blown to smithereens again was appalling.

In Iron Man Annual #11, her head, of all things, was given to Madam Menace, supposedly for repairing, but it appears that she never tried to rebuild her, or anything else.

(There was a Machine Man miniseries once that had Madam Menace rebuilding Jocasta in an alternative future world, but again, they avoided any genuine attempt to bring her back, ditto the possibilities of character development. Considering that they pulled it off so well with the Vision, himself a machine, one would have to think they could do something similar with Jocasta, but, as in quite a few other cases, female character/story development was avoided.)