Vision and the Scarlet Witch Primer
It is hard to picture a time when the Avengers weren’t very popular. Sure, the team book did pretty well on its own and most of the founding members had prosperous solo titles as well. However, for characters who weren’t Thor, or Iron Man, or Captain America, getting them their own solo series was easier said than done. With the growing popularity of comic books in the 1980s, Marvel began putting out many limited series and one-shots that focused on specific characters from various team books. I suppose it was a way to test the waters to see if readers would be interested in a regular on-going series featuring that character.
When it came to characters who primarily had their home in the pages of the Avengers, getting a limited series was a tough sell. There weren’t many of them in this decade. Hawkeye got one, Wonder Man and Captain Marvel both had one-shots that appeared in this decade. However, these didn’t land an ongoing series. More successful was West Coast Avengers which started off as a four issue mini-series and proved popular enough to get its own series that ran well into the 1990s. It seemed Marvel didn’t think that solo Avenger books — other than the big three — didn’t have enough weight to carry themselves. At least that’s the feeling I get when, near the end of the decade, they put out Solo Avengers/Avengers Spotlight, which featured one or two solo stories. I’ll get into those two series elsewhere, today I want to talk about Vision and the Scarlet Witch.
This title impossibly had two limited series. While the first one was the standard 4 issue fare by Bill Mantlo that was quite common at the time, the second volume, by Steve Englehart, ran for 12 issues. Which — as it will become clear as I go on — pretty impressive. I would really like to know how Englehart sold this idea to Jim Shooter. Shooter, from what I read online, used to have some problematic ideas about female superheroes and I am absolutely astonished that Steve Englehart was able to pitch a 12 issue series that followed the Scarlet Witch going through a full term pregnancy that didn’t end in a miscarriage. The story was written in a way that each issue equaled one month of pregnancy. It was light on action and huge on human drama, not to mention being focused on expecting parents, albeit very unconventional ones.
But let’s rewind a bit though and talk about the first limited series. Published in late 1982 and early 1983, the series follows the events of Avengers #211, where the Vision and Scarlet Witch decide to take a leave of absence from the team to work on their relationship. Before this point, the pair had been long standing members of the Avengers for about 2 decades worth of publications. Even after they got married in Giant-Size Avengers #4, their lives were always intertwined with the Avengers. They didn’t have much of a life outside of the team.
Written by Bill Mantlo and with art by Rick Leonardi, the first Vision and the Scarlet Witch limited series acted more as housecleaning for the Scarlet Witch’s rather complex chronology. After the first issue, which features Vizh and Wanda moving into their new home and fighting the Samhain, the living embodiment of Halloween, Mantlo and Leonardi got to work cleaning up the mess surrounding Wanda’s past.
See, by this point, there were conflicting stories about the Scarlet Witch’s origins and birth parents. In Giant-Size Avengers #1, it was established that she and her brother (Quicksilver) were the children of the Whizzer and Miss America, two American heroes who were active during World War II. Later, in Avengers #185-187, Pietro and Wanda met a man named Django Maximoff who insisted that he was their father. The two pair then investigated their past and discovered that Django raised them as orphans and it was hinted that they might have been related to Magneto, their old leader in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.
Before we get into that a little deeper into that, I want to talk about the 3rd issue of this series. It features a story where the Grim Reaper goes after Wonder Man and the Vision. It’s all a very complicated situation so here’s the TL;DR version: Wonder Man and the Grim Reaper are biological sibilings. When Wondy, aka Simon Williams, got his powers he died for a while and came back to life. In the time in-between the Vision was created using a copy of Wonder Man’s brain patterns. In this story, the Reaper wants to figure out which version of “Simon Williams” is his true brother. This is something that gets explored further in the 2nd volume.
Back to Wanda: Issues #2 and 4 of this series focuses on cleaning up Wanda’s origins. It reveals that Wanda and her brother were the children of Magneto and his wife Magda. Both Magda and Miss America both gave birth at the High Evolutionary’s Citadel of Science. While Magda went off to die in the snow in order to protect her children from their father, Miss America and her unborn child both died. Wanda and Pietro were then given to a distraught Whizzer and presented as his own children but he took off without them. During all these revelations, the Whizzer dies of a heart attack and Magneto learns the true origins of his children. It’s…. fine.. I mean, it does a retcon (as much as I hate this word, this is what it is) the right way in my opinion — explain how both versions of a conflicting story by actually interconnecting them together — but there are just some weird tonal changes. Particularly, in issue #4 when Magneto tries to murder Bova the Cow-Woman and Modred and then is all caring grandfather to his granddaughter, Luna.
The moment also convinces Magneto to soften his harsh anti-human ideals since his son (a mutant) and daughter-in-law (an Inhuman) gave birth to an ordinary human child.
The funny thing is, this all gets undone and later revelations toss so many implications to the wind — what I’d call a bad retcon — when they went back and changed Wanda and Pietro’s origins again.
To understand how this came about, we need to dive into the exciting world of movie licensing rights. See the comic book collectors market caused a huge boom in comic books in the 1990s that quickly crashed putting a lot of companies in financial jeopardy, including Marvel Comics, who even filed for bankruptcy to stay in business. In order to keep going, the company sold off the movie rights to a number of their most popular franchises, one of them being the X-Men franchise to 20th Century Fox. Now, the agreement with Fox was that they had full access to not just the X-Men, but every mutant character in the Marvel Universe. This posed a problem when Marvel started their own Cinematic Universe in the late 2000s after they became owned by Disney.
When it came to the first Avengers film, writer Joss Whedon wanted to use Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch really, really, badly. The only problem was that in the comics they were mutants and thus part of the X-Men deal with 20th Century Fox. I’m not sure of the details and quite frankly, I’m not going to go digging through the internet to look it up, but from what I understand Marvel and Fox made a compromise. Since Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were just as tied to the X-Men as they were the Avengers, they both agreed on being able to use them for their respective movie franchises. The caveat being that they couldn’t be mutants in the MCU. I also think there was a one-for-one trade off as well, where one studio would feature one of the siblings more prominently over the other, hence why the X-Men films featured Quicksilver and had Wanda as a little girl who appeared in one scene, and in the Avengers: Age of Ultron, Pietro is killed off so the focus can be on Wanda.
Anyway, this also came at a time when Marvel was both trying to align their comics to better match the films as well as bury the properties that they did not have the movie rights to. This led to Uncanny Avengers (vol. 2) which was a five issue series with the sole purpose of changing the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver’s origins again, revealing that they aren’t mutants at all. Yeah, their DNA was diddled by the High Evolutionary, but they are for sure not mutants.
The funny thing is that this was all a lot of work for nothing since four years after Age of Ultron came out, Disney bought 20th Century Fox. If they had just been more patient they could have saved themselves a lot of headaches, let me explain….
In rushing this new origin out the door, writer Rick Remender forgot one important issue: Prior to this change, the story was always that Magneto’s wife Magda went up to Wundagore Mountain to give birth because she was pregnant and then wandered out into the snow after giving birth where she presumably died. So if Wanda and Pietro are not the children of Magneto and Magda, what happened to Magda? What happened to her unborn child/children? Magda leaving Magneto while pregnant is an integral part of Magneto’s backstory. I hope that some writer will eventually get around to explaining that one sometime in the future. Personally, I’d like to see a story where Magneto’s real children come out of hiding or whatever and go after Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver for “stealing” their heritage. That would make a very interesting story, but I digress. I am throwing this idea out into the ether of the Internet in the hopes that perhaps it inspires someone at Marvel to tell that story, someone please indulge me.
The second volume of Vision and the Scarlet Witch was done by Steve Englehart and artist Richard Howell. As I’ve said, the primary purpose of this 12 issue limited series is that it has Vizh and Wanda take their marriage to its next logical progression: starting a family. Englehart was the man who wanted to tell that story because he was the one who penned the tale in Giant-Size Avengers #4, where the couple finally tied the knot.
I’m not going to go at length about this series because, as I said, it’s slow paced and more focused on the drama around having children. It’s about relationships. There’s a sub-plot where Quicksilver’s wife has an affair that eventually tanks their marriage because he’s a neglectful idiot who is also as crazy as he is fast.
It was a milestone because Vizh and Wanda were being positioned to be the new parents in the Marvel Universe. It was a big deal. There was only one successful super-family in the Marvel Universe: The Fantastic Four. Everyone else who got pregnant during this time either had a miscarriage, or the baby was instantly disposed of. This was the great tragedy of this story: This series ends with Wanda giving birth to twins. There was no follow up series for Wanda and the Vision after this. They were dumped back into an Avengers book (West Coast Avengers in this instance) where their children were revealed to be soul fragments of Mephisto, the literal devil, and killed off. Then they mind wiped the Vision so he wasn’t DTF with Wanda anymore and their marriage was a long miserable experience for the next decade and a half.
The argument goes that writers just didn’t know what to do with babies in stories and it was just easier getting rid of them than write interesting stories about parenthood. It just goes to show that using the devil to undo a plotline is fucking dumb and writers didn’t learn a lesson from it. (looking at you JMS and Joe Quesada)
Years later, this baby death gets undone when Brian Michael Bendis went on to do Young Avengers, where he had Billy and Tommy Maximoff reincarnated. But here’s the issue with that: When they pop up again, they are teenagers. The writers didn’t want to go through the motions of having these kids grow up and frankly killing them off and having them reincarnated 20 years later was both incredibly lazy and exceptionally complicated at the same time. I suppose if there is any take away from all of this, looking at these stories nearly 40 years later, is that at least comic book writers are a lot more diverse than they were back in the 1980s. Babies in stories aren’t seen as an impediment. The current runs of Spider-Woman has her juggling being a superhero and a mother quite well. Fantastic Four has been allowing Franklin Richards to finally grow up after decades of him being stuck as a kid and nobody really knew how fucking old he was because some artists drew still drew him like he was five years old for a decade.
Anyway, what’s most impressive about Vision and the Scarlet Witch is how this once forgettable run of limited series had many of its major plot developments used on the Disney+ series Wandavision. It’s a testament to the fact that, regardless of how old or seemingly unimportant a story is, it can still find relevance. As long as Marvel Studios is mining every possible plotline for their next original series or big Hollywood blockbuster, these old tales find new importance. Yeah, they’re mining things to churn out product to sell to us, but it also gives these tales a second life, gives them meaning, makes them matter again. It says a lot that you can find tradepaper backs and digital editions of Vision and the Scarlet Witch where there are countless other Avengers related stories (mostly from the 90s) that you can only find in a back issue bin. You can’t find the entire run of Solo Avengers or Avengers West Coast, but god damn it, you can find every issue of Vision and the Scarlet Witch.
