Quicksilver (Marvel Comics)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Quicksilver, the Marvel Comics speedster whose real name is Pietro Django Maximoff, first appeared in The X-Men #4, dated March 1964. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created him. He can move and think at extreme speeds, and that second half of the description is what writers keep returning to.

  Across the 60 years since his debut, creators have asked what it costs a mind to outrun everyone around it. Other questions trail him too. Who were his parents, and did the answer ever stay fixed? Why did two different film studios each field their own version of him? And why do so many readers argue that a missing piece of his background matters more than his speed?

  28346793

• 2. A Reluctant Villain

  ›

  Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants gave Quicksilver his first role, as an antagonist to the X-Men, standing beside his twin sister, the Scarlet Witch. Even then, the twins were drawn as reluctant participants rather than committed villains.

  In that debut issue he asks, "Why should we love homo sapiens??" He goes on to say that humans hate and fear mutants because of their superior power. Scholars note that such themes were present in the early Lee and Kirby run. They did not fully take root in the X-Men franchise until the mid-1970s, when a more diverse international cast arrived.

  By issue #20, both Kirby and Lee had left The X-Men. Scholar Joseph Darowski argues that their work still made Quicksilver one of the few early characters to engage directly with the social tensions that later defined the franchise.

  Three traits showed up in those first issues and kept returning for decades: a volatile temper, fierce protectiveness toward his sister, and friction with authority.

  The Avengers #16, from May 1965, moved the twins onto the team's second generation, alongside Captain America and Hawkeye. In that lineup Pietro clashed with his teammates and believed that he should be the one leading.

  Despite that prominent spot, Marvel treated him as an afterthought in the early 1970s. A 1972 internal memo, later made public by comics historian Sean Howe, ranked the company's characters by importance. Quicksilver was the only superhero on the entire list to receive the lowest rating, "not as important." The only others to get it were two western characters, Ringo Kid and Western Ghost Rider, and a background figure, The Watcher.

  Within a few years, a new writer would hand the twins a very different past.

  282931627

• 3. Romani Roots

  ›

  Whizzer and Miss America, two American superheroes, were the first parents Marvel gave to Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. That origin was abandoned when The Avengers #181-187, published in 1978-79, offered something more substantial. Writer David Michelinie introduced Django Maximoff, who describes himself as the shaman of a nomadic Romani tribe in Central Europe.

  Django recounts mob attacks on the camp and discrimination that made steady work impossible. Those pressures forced him to steal to survive. The twins were lost during a pogrom.

  In the character's biography as it later settled, Django and his wife Marya raised the twins as their own. When the children's powers appeared, the local community persecuted them as demons. Magneto, recruiting for his Brotherhood during their wandering through Central Europe, found them. He had saved Wanda's life from an anti-mutant mob, and the twins swore loyalty to him out of gratitude.

  Academic analysis calls the 1978-79 arc more humanizing than earlier Marvel comics with Roma-coded characters. It introduces systemic racism and psychological trauma alongside the familiar "Gypsy" imagery. Yet it still leans on stereotypes, and at points it implies that the victims' own unlawful behaviour was partly to blame for the violence against them.

  The arc is credited with starting a wave of Romani-coded superheroes in American comics. Romani activists and organizations have named Pietro and Wanda, along with Doctor Doom and Magneto, as figures who gave Roma youth a sense of identification and empowerment.

  Writers have engaged with this heritage inconsistently. The most explicit attempt came in 2018, when Saladin Ahmed and artist Eric Nguyen launched Quicksilver: No Surrender, a five-issue miniseries spun out of the Avengers: No Surrender storyline. Ahmed called Pietro's Romani background one of the most neglected parts of the character. He wanted to dig into where Pietro came from and how his community was treated. He also pointed to Pietro's working-class origins, and to the tension between that poverty and his eventual standing as an Avenger.

  Pietro's marriage, meanwhile, tied him to an entirely different community: the Inhuman Royal Family.

  3889909123

• 4. Marriage and Madness

  ›

  In The Avengers #127, writer Steve Englehart and artists Sal Buscema and Joe Staton staged an odd announcement. Gorgon of the Inhumans arrived to ask the Avengers why they had not been preparing for Quicksilver's wedding, which was news to them.

  Pietro had met his bride, Crystal of the Inhumans, after a Sentinel wounded him on a mission and she nursed him back to health. That angered her former boyfriend, the Human Torch. The ceremony itself played out in Fantastic Four #150, by writer Gerry Conway and penciler Rich Buckler. Maximus the Mad had engineered a crisis with his ally Omega, who turned out to be Ultron-7. Franklin Richards woke from a long coma and defeated the conspirators. Then the wedding went ahead, with Black Bolt walking Crystal down the aisle.

  The couple had a daughter, Luna. Pietro's relationship with Wanda cooled in these years, because he disapproved when she married the Vision. That rift opened a distance between the twins that would take years to close.

  Englehart, by his own account, was never a fan of Quicksilver as a hero and felt the character suited villainy better. He engineered a long heel turn that ran through Vision and the Scarlet Witch, two Avengers annuals and West Coast Avengers. Driven to instability by Crystal's infidelity, Pietro framed the Avengers for treason and tried to murder former allies. In the story as told, Maximus used technology to make him psychotic before the Vision brought him back to reason.

  Other writers untangled the damage. Jo Duffy's X-Factor Annual #2 established that Maximus the Mad had psychically driven Pietro to villainy. A later Fantastic Four Annual confirmed that he had been neurologically restored, which let him return to heroic status.

  That restoration cleared the way for one of the most psychologically searching runs the character ever had.

  100842439

• 5. Living at Speed

  ›

  Mach 10 is roughly the upper limit that writers set for Quicksilver after exposing him to the High Evolutionary's Isotope E. The same exposure explained why friction, oxygen deprivation and kinetic impact do not hurt him. Typically he moves at speeds that at times exceed the speed of sound and, in some stories, approach the speed of light. His fast metabolism heals him quickly. He can raise cyclone-force winds, run up vertical surfaces and cross water. Writers also give his mind a matching pace, with photographic short-term memory and reflexes beyond those of other superpowered characters.

  Rankings reflect that reputation. Screen Rant, CBR and Collider have each placed him among the fastest speedsters in comics, with positions ranging from third to tenth. His standing in general character lists is more modest. IGN put him 23rd among X-Men in 2006 and 44th among Avengers in 2012, and the A.V. Club ranked him 71st among Marvel characters overall in 2022.

  In Marvel vs. DC #2, scripted by Peter David, Quicksilver fights the Flash and loses after hesitating to press an advantage against his weakened opponent. In JLA/Avengers he becomes fascinated with the Speed Force and rivals the Flash, hoping to steal his powers.

  Peter David returned to the character in the first volume of X-Factor, which ran from 1991 to 1993. He sought out Pietro on purpose, seeing a man with a justified arrogance and a natural talent for friction inside a team. Other writers, such as Mark Gruenwald in D.P. 7 and the creative teams on The Flash, treated superspeed as a physical phenomenon. David cared about the mental side. A mind running faster than the world around it, he argued, would feel "very superior... and very impatient with everyone."

  The uniform became a symbol of Pietro's doubt. He refused to wear X-Factor's costume, and the press remarked on it in issue #72. He arrived at the Washington D.C. headquarters in a collapse, fearing a fatal loss of power, but the condition was later shown to be stress-related. By issue #87, a therapy session made the point explicit: Pietro needed to slow down and focus on what really mattered. David also showed him practicing deliberate slow-motion exercises.

  The run took a darker turn when Luna was kidnapped to Genosha. Pietro resigned from the team, and a joint X-Men and Avengers rescue nearly ended with Exodus killing him. He recovered among the Avengers and briefly reconciled with Crystal, then learned of her relationship with the Black Knight.

  Quicksilver then starred in his own series, which began in November 1997 and ran for 13 issues. Writer Tom Peyer created it, and John Ostrander later took over the scripting. Both made Pietro the reluctant leader of the Knights of Wundagore, an elite group of the High Evolutionary's genetically altered New Men. Putting a headstrong, impatient man in charge of people who needed sustained commitment gave the book a depth that reviewers of the time noticed.

  Philosopher Mark D. White offers another lens, drawn from Aristotelian ethics. A truly virtuous person takes real pleasure in doing right, while a continent person does right but finds it a burden and may stumble under pressure. By this reading Pietro is continent, which accounts for his pattern of abandoning or betraying the Avengers when things get extreme.

  Saladin Ahmed then rewrote the explanation. Drawing on his own experience of anxiety, he portrayed Pietro's abrasiveness not as contempt but as fear, in a man for whom the world felt overwhelming.

  4445101327

• 6. Rock Bottom

  ›

  Pietro was the main instigator of the 2005 "House of M" event. He exploited his sister's dissociative mental state and her grief over her lost children, pressing Wanda to reshape the world into one where mutants were the dominant species. He framed it as an act of family love and warned her that refusing would cost her life.

  When Magneto learned what Pietro had done, he killed his son in a rage. Reality was restored and Pietro resurrected when Wanda retaliated by stripping 98% of mutants of their powers. Pietro lost his own as well.

  The Son of M miniseries, from 2006, was written by David Hine with art by Roy Allan Martinez. Desperate for his abilities, Pietro secretly exposed himself to the Inhuman Terrigen Mist and embedded Terrigen crystals in his body. The result was a set of time-jumping powers, along with the ability to restore powers to depowered mutants. The process was typically fatal to those who received it. Crystal, furious, declared their marriage over. Rictor eventually removed the crystals, leaving Pietro powerless until his speed inexplicably and spontaneously returned.

  Peter David, who later wrote Pietro in X-Factor: The Quick and the Dead and in All-New X-Factor, said he wanted to take the character to "absolute rock bottom" before exploring what remained.

  The path back was winding. The Elder God Chthon, his spirit trapped in the Darkhold, controlled Pietro until the Avengers freed him. He first refused a place on Hank Pym's Mighty Avengers, then accepted on learning that the Scarlet Witch had joined, only to discover that she was Loki in disguise. He left the team. Later a Skrull impostor was blamed for his past crimes, which publicly cleared him, but Luna lost respect for him over the lie.

  Avengers Academy ran from issue #1 in August 2010 to issue #39 in January 2013, and Pietro was in its supporting cast. He joined the teaching staff partly to distance himself from his father's legacy. There he bonded with the student Finesse, who knew he had never really been replaced by a Skrull and used that knowledge as leverage to make him train her the way Magneto once trained him. He eventually made a public confession of his past actions and reconciled with Luna.

  All-New X-Factor, launched in 2014 as part of the second Marvel NOW! wave, gave him a new home. Havok had quietly sent him to spy on Polaris and protect her, and Pietro stayed even after Havok called the mission complete, leaving only when Polaris found out. Peter David's handling earned a 2014 @ssie award from Ain't It Cool News.

  That same year, one issue would reopen the question of who his father was.

  5354125573

• 7. Parentage Rewritten

  ›

  In December 2014, Avengers and X-Men: Axis #7, by Rick Remender and Adam Kubert, delivered a shock. A spell cast by the Scarlet Witch, who had been inverted to villainy by a spell from Doctor Doom, revealed that Magneto was not the biological father of Wanda or Pietro.

  Uncanny Avengers #4, from May 2015, by Remender and artist Daniel Acuña, went further. The twins were not mutants at all but ordinary children whose powers the High Evolutionary had artificially induced through experimentation. A later encounter with him on Counter-Earth named them as Anna and Mateo, the long-deceased children of Django and Marya Maximoff.

  The timing drew attention. Avengers: Age of Ultron arrived in 2015 with twins who likewise lacked mutant origins and any link to Magneto, a character whose film rights then belonged to 20th Century Fox. Commentators speculated that the comics were being aligned with the film franchise.

  Comics commentators criticized the change heavily, and many called for it to be reversed. They argued that the twins' status as Magneto's mutant children was central to who they were. Others observed that the characters had been effectively stripped of their Roma identity. Persecution and trauma shaped their stories in ways that a simple change of parentage did not resolve.

  For most of his history, the opposite had held true. Robert Frank, a World War II hero, once believed he was the twins' father, but Bova, a genetically engineered being at Mount Wundagore, told them Django was their true father. Later, Magneto forced the revelation that he was their biological father, a claim both twins rejected. The mutant-father framing also recast the Brotherhood years in a darker light, since the twins had joined out of obligation rather than conviction.

  The family fallout kept going. During the second Civil War, Pietro and Wanda clashed over which side to back and had a bitter falling out. They reconciled after defeating a physical manifestation of Chaos together, and Pietro briefly met his biological mother Natalya before she sacrificed herself. When the Scarlet Witch was apparently murdered at the Hellfire Gala, Pietro arrived on Krakoa and attacked Magneto in a rage. Northstar restrained him just short of killing Magneto. Pietro then grieved by drinking with Toad and other former Brotherhood members in Wanda's honor.

  On the 14th of February 2024, the characters' 60th anniversary, writer Steve Orlando and artist Lorenzo Tammetta launched Scarlet Witch & Quicksilver, a four-issue miniseries. It pits the twins against the Wizard and his Frightful Four Hundred. A letter containing Magneto's last wishes adds strain, because Wanda has shown more willingness to move on from the past than Pietro, whom Magneto killed after "House of M." Orlando casts Wanda as magic and Pietro as science. He describes the pair as siblings who each know exactly how to provoke the other, with Tammetta's art giving superspeed what Orlando called a hyperkinetic energy.

  Outside the comics, the question of whether Pietro was Magneto's son once set two film studios against each other.

  1718192021

• 8. Beyond the Page

  ›

  In 1994, Marvel licensed the filming rights to the X-Men and related concepts, such as mutants, to 20th Century Fox. The deal followed an animated X-Men series on Fox Kids, which had convinced producer Lauren Shuler Donner of the franchise's commercial appeal. Years later, Marvel began its own Marvel Cinematic Universe, built on characters no other studio held.

  Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch landed in the middle of a rights dispute. Fox cited their status as mutants and children of Magneto, while Marvel cited their closer editorial ties to the Avengers. The studios agreed that each could use the pair, provided Fox did not call them Avengers and Marvel did not call them mutants or Magneto's children. Disney's later acquisition of 21st Century Fox, and the transfer of all X-Men characters to Marvel Studios, made the arrangement moot.

  In May 2013, director Bryan Singer announced that Evan Peters had been cast as the character, renamed Peter Maximoff, in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Costume designer Louise Mingenbach dressed Peters in 1981-inspired clothing, even though the film's 1973 scenes drew heavily on 1970s styles. That choice conveyed the character's irreverence for any particular time and place.

  To show his speed, Singer filmed all of the character's scenes at 3,600 frames per second. The visual effects studio Rising Sun Pictures built the central kitchen sequence, in which Maximoff disarms a room of security guards. The team made a LIDAR scan of the set and rebuilt it digitally with computer-generated props in near-microscopic detail, because the sequence used 3D photography. Peters and a stunt double were filmed in harness and on a treadmill in front of a chroma key screen, and only Peters' legs were digitally replaced. The sequence contained just 29 effects shots, yet it took nearly seven months and a team of 70 artists. It won two Visual Effects Society Awards at the 13th annual ceremony.

  Peters returned in X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), Deadpool 2 (2018) and Dark Phoenix (2019). In Apocalypse, Maximoff is revealed as Lehnsherr's son and has a central part in the climactic battle. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times called the film's mansion evacuation sequence "a beautiful, funny, exciting, altogether magical sequence." Peters earned a Teen Choice Award nomination as Choice Scene Stealer for it. In Dark Phoenix, set in 1992, Maximoff is a full member of the X-Men, and Peters said he had matured and focused on using his abilities for others.

  Aaron Taylor-Johnson played the Marvel Cinematic Universe version. He first appeared with Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda in a mid-credits scene of Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014, then in leading roles in Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015. The twins join Hydra to avenge their parents, who were killed by Tony Stark's weapons, and are given powers by the Mind Stone. They briefly side with Ultron, then defect to the Avengers, and Pietro dies saving Hawkeye and a small child. Producer Kevin Feige has said there are no plans for Pietro to appear in future films.

  WandaVision nodded to him anyway. Gabriel Gurevich played Pietro as a child in flashbacks, while Peters played Ralph Bohner, a Westview resident brainwashed by Agatha Harkness to impersonate Pietro until Monica Rambeau freed him.

  Neither franchise kept his Romani heritage. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe the twins are citizens of the fictional nation of Sokovia, with no mention of a minority background, and the Fox films say nothing about it either. Scholars described the first as turning the twins into generic Eastern Europeans and called it a missed opportunity to give Jewish and Romani characters a significant role in a major Marvel film. They noted that the studio rights situation, which kept filmmakers from calling the pair mutants or Magneto's children, partly explains the change.

  Several animated series have used him. Len Carlson voiced him in The Marvel Super Heroes, and Richard Ian Cox voiced a teenage Brotherhood member in X-Men: Evolution. In Wolverine and the X-Men he is voiced by Mark Hildreth as leader of the Brotherhood of Mutants. Video games began with Captain America and The Avengers in 1991, and he is playable in Marvel: Future Fight.

  Alternate versions run wide. Earth-2149 has a zombified Quicksilver in Marvel Zombies, and Marvel 1602 offers Petros, an assistant within the Spanish Catholic Church. X-Men Noir gives him the name Peter Magnus, a detective and former college track runner. The Ultimate Marvel Pietro Lensherr reaches Mach 10 as a teenager, and writer Jeph Loeb's choice to make his bond with Wanda explicitly incestuous in Ultimates 3 drew criticism as an ill-conceived escalation.

  In Seanan McGuire's novel What If... Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker Were Siblings?, one more variant appears: Pietro von Doom, adopted by Doctor Doom, who gave him and Wanda their powers.

  8992198287