Scarlet Witch

• 1. Introduction

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  Jack Kirby considered at least five names before the Scarlet Witch became the Scarlet Witch. Jinx, Witch Woman, The Sorceress, Evil Eye and Miss Witch are all listed on the back of a splash page in The X-Men issue 4. Writer Stan Lee and Kirby settled on something else, and in March 1964 Wanda Django Maximoff debuted in Marvel Comics as a minor villain.

  Few characters of the Silver Age of Comic Books have traveled so far from their starting point. She became a sorceress often cited as one of the most powerful figures in the Marvel Universe. She also sat at the center of major crossovers, including Avengers: Disassembled and House of M.

  Yet her story has been rewritten more often than almost any other. Who her parents are, what her powers really are, and whether she is a mutant at all have each been revised. How did a reluctant villain become one of Marvel's defining heroes? And why did so many writers keep reopening the question of who she truly is?

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• 2. Reluctant Villain

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  In that first story, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants answered to Magneto, and two of its newest recruits wanted nothing to do with his plans for global domination. Wanda and her twin brother Quicksilver were reluctant villains. They mainly hoped for safety from the persecution mutants faced. Wanda herself was drawn as calm and submissive, much like many female characters of the era. Her first costume piled on the red: a bathing suit with straps, opera gloves, short boots, a leotard, a cape and a wimple.

  Lee and Kirby also produced the Avengers, a team built from Marvel's most prominent solo heroes. Then they did something no superhero team had done before. Except for Captain America, every founding member left to pursue individual careers. In their place came former villains who lacked series of their own: the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver from the X-Men, and Hawkeye from Iron Man's adventures in Tales of Suspense. The team became known as "Cap's Kooky Quartet". Superhero teams usually swapped one or two members at a time, so replacing almost an entire roster at once was unheard of.

  Roy Thomas, who followed Lee as Avengers writer, joined him in hinting that other team members were romantically interested in Wanda. The twins eventually left the team after a crossover with the X-Men. The question of where they came from would take decades to answer.

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• 3. The Maximoff Bloodline

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  Commentators have noted Wanda as one of the most prominent Romani characters in mainstream superhero comics, and her family is where that heritage lives. Among the Maximoffs, magical talent appears in generation after generation. Several members called themselves Scarlet Witch or Scarlet Warlock. One Scarlet Warlock had two children. Natalya was a powerful magic-user. Django was a medicine man and storyteller whose latent magic brought his strange puppets to life.

  Natalya's people considered red a color of bad luck, and she loved that. She took the title Scarlet Witch because it implied misfortune for her enemies. Django settled in Serbia with his wife Marya, and their twins Ana and Mateo died young.

  In Serbia, Natalya gave birth to her own twins, Pietro and Wanda Marya Maximoff. According to the Elder God Chthon, he watched Wanda's birth and passed some of his magical energy into her. He hoped to use her as a host one day. While Natalya fought mystical threats, the children stayed with Django and Marya in Novi Pazar.

  Then the Knights of Wundagore attacked the area. Their leader was the geneticist Herbert Wyndham, known as the High Evolutionary. He wanted children whose genetics might produce great power. A local priest handed over the twins to stop the attacks, and they were taken to Mount Wundagore in neighboring Transia. The experiments gave the twins potential that disappointed him. By chance, they also made the twins look like mutants on most tests.

  At Wundagore, a cow named Bova, uplifted into humanoid form by the High Evolutionary, worked as the twins' nurse. The retired hero the Whizzer, Robert Frank, arrived with his pregnant wife, Miss America, whose name was Madeline Joyce Frank. She went into labor, and both mother and baby died. Hoping to ease the husband's grief, Bova told him the twins were his children. He left without adopting them.

  Natalya attacked Wundagore to reclaim her children and fought the High Evolutionary's forces to a standstill. She was killed by the twins' father. The High Evolutionary then handed the twins to Django and Marya, who wrongly believed his forces had killed her.

  Before their tenth birthday, Pietro showed superhuman speed and Wanda cast minor hexes that moved or levitated objects. Rumors reached locals who were prejudiced against the Roma. After Django stole bread to feed his family, the locals attacked the tribe and burned its homes. Marya was inside the Maximoff wagon when it was set on fire, and Django was beaten. The twins fled, believing both were dead. Marya survived with severe burns and scarring. Django, grieving yet more lost children, lost his grip on reality and decided Wanda and Pietro were his own Ana and Mateo.

  Orphaned, the twins wandered Transia for years. Pietro grew almost obsessively protective and called Wanda his "little sister" because she was 13 minutes younger. Her hex power sharpened until she could instantly bring bad luck to enemies. In their late teens she used it to save a child, and locals accused her of witchcraft and tried to burn her at the stake.

  The mutant terrorist Magneto had heard reports of the twins and arrived in time to rescue her. They told him their powers had emerged naturally, so he concluded they were mutants, and later scans seemed to show the X-gene. He declared that they owed him a debt and made them the first recruits of his original Brotherhood. Pietro chose the code name Quicksilver, and Wanda became the Scarlet Witch. At first the name seemed to come from an accusation shouted by someone hoping to see her burn. Wanda later said it simply came to her when she first realized she had powers, a sign she was inheriting her mother's abilities.

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• 4. Rewriting Her Parents

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  Giant-Size Avengers #1, published in August 1974, announced that Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were the children of the Golden Age heroes Whizzer and Miss America. Roy Thomas was a fan of Golden Age heroes and often found ways to fold them into modern stories. The idea lasted until 1979, when Wanda learned that Bob Frank and Madeline Joyce were not her and Pietro's parents.

  In 1982-83, the four-issue limited series The Vision and the Scarlet Witch, by writer Bill Mantlo and penciler Rick Leonardi, made Magneto the twins' father. Within the story, Bova said a pregnant woman named Magda had come to Wundagore, fleeing a vengeful husband with superhuman abilities. Magneto, whose wife Magda had once fled from him, found Bova and concluded the twins were his. After Pietro's daughter Luna was born, he told both twins the truth. They were uneasy but accepted it.

  That relationship stood for 32 years. Then the 2014 AXIS crossover revealed that Magneto was not her biological father. In 2015, Uncanny Avengers (Vol. 2) #4 went further and declared that she and Pietro were not mutants at all. They were humans who had received superhuman genetics through the High Evolutionary's experiments. In Wanda's case, his tampering made her more powerful in magic than she would otherwise have been.

  The twist appeared during a legal dispute between Marvel Studios and 20th Century Fox over film rights. Fox held a license for the X-Men, related characters and most Marvel characters designated as mutants. Marvel Studios, meanwhile, was about to introduce Wanda and Pietro in the 2015 film Avengers: Age of Ultron.

  Elizabeth Olsen portrays Wanda Maximoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and that film was her live-action debut. She went on to appear in Captain America: Civil War in 2016, Avengers: Infinity War in 2018 and Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Her most prominent appearances came in the Disney+ series WandaVision in 2021 and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022.

  Back in comics, the character received her own ongoing solo series from late 2015 to 2017, written by James Robinson. Wanda investigated supernatural threats, with the ghost of Agatha Harkness at her side. In issues #3 and #4, a journey along the Witch's Road, a dimensional path outside normal space and time, let her meet the spirit of her true mother. Natalya Maximoff also used the name Scarlet Witch. Wanda learned that her adopted parents were really her aunt and uncle, and that her bloodline held many magic-users who chose to identify with scarlet. She noticed that powerful sorcerers often favor complex colors over basic or primary ones.

  Agatha's ghost confirmed she had known all along that Wanda was neither a mutant nor Magneto's child. She had stayed silent so she would not steer Wanda down the wrong path. In the series' finale, Natalya sacrificed her spirit to help save magic from a demonic manifestation of chaos. Before she vanished, she revealed that the High Evolutionary had not killed her. The twins' father had. She disappeared before naming him.

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• 5. Android Husband

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  Roy Thomas chose Wanda and the android Vision for a romance for a practical reason. Both appeared only in the Avengers comic and had no solo adventures, so their relationship drama could not interfere with stories in other publications. Thomas also thought it would help the series develop its characters. Their first kiss came during the Kree-Skrull War arc. He added Hawkeye to a love triangle, until the archer realized the two were truly in love.

  Vision was a synthezoid, built from a copy of the original Human Torch. His personality programming drew partly on the brainwaves of Wonder Man, which let him develop his own mind and emotions. He feared he was a soulless machine who could not love a human. Quicksilver objected, convinced that a robot could not feel genuine love. Hawkeye resented the romance because he cared for Wanda himself. The rest of the team came around.

  The pair married in Giant-Size Avengers #4, in June 1975, at the end of the Celestial Madonna arc. Quicksilver still objected, and some members of the public were angry, believing that neither a mutant nor an android could legally marry. The couple took leave from the team and moved to a suburban house in Leonia, New Jersey. Prejudiced neighbors burned it down, and they returned to Avengers Mansion.

  Then the alien computer ISAAC took over Vision's personality, and he seized control of international computer and security systems in a bid for global domination. Restored to his own mind, Vision emerged with a stronger sense of identity. He decided he was not a copy of Wonder Man but more like a twin. The US government insisted on confining and studying him, claiming that as an Avenger he had to follow its orders. Wanda and Vision quit the team and bought another home in Leonia.

  The marriage came apart in the late 1980s. Governments feared Vision might misuse what he had learned while controlling those systems. In John Byrne's controversial "Vision Quest" storyline, operatives kidnapped and dismantled him, wiping out his personality. He was rebuilt with chalk-white skin and mostly restored memories, but no emotions.

  Wanda asked Wonder Man to lend his brainwaves, but he refused. He had secret feelings for her and disliked copying his emotions into someone else. Seeking help elsewhere, she was corrupted by a parasitic life form called That Which Endures and turned on the Avengers. Later she was brainwashed into becoming a "Bride of Set" during the crossover Atlantis Attacks. She was left catatonic.

  Vision decided he could not help her and returned to the New York team. Wonder Man offered his brainwaves again, and Vision refused, since he regarded himself as a separate person. The marriage was annulled.

  Years later, Vision regained his emotions and his full emotional ties to his old memories. He hid this from Wanda. By then she was in a relationship with Wonder Man, and she told Vision that a reunion might have been possible earlier had he not lied. She then had a copy of her own brain patterns made and gave it to him. One day, she suggested, he could build a friend or partner who understood him but was not an exact copy of her, just as he and Wonder Man were similar but not identical.

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• 6. Twin Sons

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  After the second Leonia house, Vision told Wanda he wanted a family. He hoped her magic could make it possible, but she doubted it. Then the residents of New Salem kidnapped the couple and admitted they had killed Agatha Harkness. A magical ceremony toppled the town's corrupt leader and released wild energy. Wanda used Agatha's lessons to channel it safely away. Before she finished, Agatha's spirit urged her to use the power while she was still connected to it, and Wanda instinctively used it to make herself pregnant.

  Months later, her old Brotherhood teammate Toad attacked Leonia to claim her as his bride. Finding her eight months pregnant, he was repulsed, and Wanda defeated him. Doctor Strange attended the birth and was surprised when she delivered twins. The boys were named Thomas, for Phineas Thomas Horton, who created the android Human Torch, and William, a nod to Wonder Man's real name, Simon Williams.

  Writer Steve Englehart and penciler Richard Howell told this story in a limited series. Englehart then took over West Coast Avengers, added Vision and Wanda to the team, and the family relocated to Los Angeles.

  John Byrne, who later replaced Englehart on the series, unraveled it. Agatha explained that Thomas and William were not real. Wanda had suffered a "hysterical" pregnancy and subconsciously used her magic to create the children. Her magic should only have produced illusions. The boys gained life because she unknowingly gave them pieces of the demon lord Mephisto.

  Mephisto's power had been split into several pieces after a battle with Franklin Richards, son of Reed and Sue Richards of the Fantastic Four. Now Mephisto absorbed the boys' life energies, seemingly erasing them, and left a bond to Wanda's magic and soul. To cut it, Agatha removed Wanda's memory of her children. Vision had suspected the boys were magical projections and tried to discuss it with Wanda, but she refused to listen. Englehart later said he disliked these changes.

  Years later, a teenager named Billy Kaplan joined the Young Avengers, first calling himself Asgardian and then Wiccan. The team met a teenage hero called Speed, whose real name was Tommy Shepherd. Speed looked like Wiccan's twin, except that his hair was silver. Billy correctly concluded they were the reincarnated twins of Wanda and Vision.

  Avengers: The Children's Crusade added a twist. Mephisto had lied about what the boys were. They were "lost souls" raised by Wanda and Vision after her magic allowed them to be physically born, only to have their lives taken by Mephisto. How the two souls were reborn as babies in two different families, years before the marriage, the story never explains.

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• 7. Hexes and Chaos Magic

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  In 1974, writer Steve Englehart expanded Wanda's powers by having her learn witchcraft from Agatha Harkness. Her original ability had been a vaguely defined hex power that bent probability. Under Englehart she also became more assertive, and the highly protective Quicksilver was removed from the team. Years later, Agatha explained that Wanda could directly access magical energies, which was why she learned sorcery so quickly. The magic she channeled was chaos magic, the same kind Chthon had given her at birth. Agatha added that Wanda's self-doubt, and her worry about living up to others' expectations, had kept her from this power.

  The time villain Immortus offered a different explanation. Roy and Dann Thomas revealed that Wanda's villainy, her surge in power and even the creation of her children had been his manipulations. Immortus had been seen watching the Avengers during some of Byrne's issues. He had discovered that Wanda was a "nexus being", a person who greatly affects timelines. He hoped to use her to warp reality. Wanda came to her senses and gave up her nexus energies. A side effect restored her memory of her children and temporarily took her powers.

  Roy Thomas also wrote the short story "A Study in Scarlet", with art by Al Bigley and Mike DeCarlo, in Avengers West Coast Annual #7 in 1992. Wanda reflects that she is glad the memory-blocking spell lasted only a short time, because she could mourn her children properly. While practicing, she accidentally opens a window into another timeline where she, Vision and the children stayed together. It brings her comfort.

  Afterward Wanda was more serious, eager to atone for turning on the Avengers twice in a short span and endangering reality. When her hexes returned, they were hard to control and weaker than before. She practiced the magic Agatha had taught her. In 1994 Avengers West Coast ended, and several team members reformed under Wanda as Force Works, which ran for only a couple of years.

  Marvel was nearing bankruptcy in 1996 when it relaunched the Avengers and other titles in a new continuity called Heroes Reborn, outsourced to the studios of Image Comics artists. Rob Liefeld wrote the relaunched Avengers and made Wanda a sorceress with no mutant abilities, since that reality had no mutants. After Marvel renegotiated the deal, Liefeld was replaced by writer Walter Simonson and penciler Michael Ryan. The project boosted sales, helped bring Marvel out of bankruptcy, and ended after a year.

  When the Avengers relaunched again under Kurt Busiek and George Perez, Perez gave Wanda a complicated redesign. He added more curls to her hair and a costume with Romani influences. He preferred the challenge but accepted that other artists would find it irksome. Alan Davis later asked to change it because it did not suit his simpler style. Busiek's stories made her a powerful sorceress by tapping chaos magic. He clarified that her true mutant power was to tap into magical energy fields and manipulate them, just as Magneto does with electromagnetic fields.

  A battle with Morgan le Fay pushed that power further. Morgan kidnapped Wanda and used her as a conduit, enhancing her probability powers until she could warp reality to Morgan's wishes. During the fight, Wanda resurrected Wonder Man as an energy being. Afterward she realized she could access magic used by others. Wanda became considered one of the most powerful Avengers, alongside Thor and Carol Danvers. She could not bend reality at will and was not a Sorcerer Supreme, yet even those who carry the Phoenix Force were said to have cause to fear her.

  That settled picture would not last. After the 2004 story Avengers Disassembled, Doctor Strange told her that her real power was to reshape reality and that chaos magic was a lie, because such a force did not exist. This contradicted earlier comics in which Strange himself used chaos magic and "catastrophe magic". Later Marvel stories confirmed that chaos magic is a real force sorcerers can access.

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• 8. Catastrophe and Redemption

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  Marvel wanted a new roster, headquarters and creative direction for the Avengers, and Avengers Disassembled, by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist David Finch, delivered the shock. A remark by the Wasp made Wanda remember her children. She relived the trauma and felt betrayed by the Avengers, both for letting Agatha cloud her memories and for failing to save the boys from Mephisto. Emotionally overwhelmed and suddenly far more powerful, she killed Agatha and altered the minds of She-Hulk and Iron Man. She also created simulations of Ultron and the Kree to attack the team. Characters apparently died and Avengers Mansion was destroyed. Doctor Strange helped stop her, and she fell into a coma. The Avengers disbanded and then reformed as New Avengers.

  Magneto arrived and took her away. Quicksilver, learning that the Avengers and X-Men were contemplating killing his sister, convinced her to create a world where everyone's heart's desire came true. In that House of M reality, mutants were not persecuted, and Wanda, Pietro and Magneto ruled. Several heroes regained their memories and fought to restore reality. When Magneto discovered the world was false, he murdered Quicksilver, and Wanda immediately resurrected her brother. Enraged, she declared "No more mutants." Her power caused M-Day, in which most of Earth's mutants lost their X-gene and powers. Magneto and Quicksilver were among them, though both later had their powers restored.

  Wanda took refuge in Transia and blocked her own memory of her identity. Beast and a resurrected Hawkeye each found her there, confirmed she remembered nothing, and left. Doctor Doom then took her to Latveria. Avengers: The Children's Crusade, published in 2010-2012, found her amnesiac there and engaged to him. It revealed that she had first asked Doom to help resurrect her sons. He steered her toward the Life Force, a mystical energy source. Her attempts to tap it increased her power a hundredfold, drove her into a maddened state and caused the events of Disassembled.

  Once her memories returned, guilt over attacking her friends and family overwhelmed Wanda, and Wiccan consoled her. When she asked Doom to undo M-Day, he stole the Life Force power for himself. Wanda and Wiccan took it back and defeated him. Doom, who had grown to love her, claimed she would not have attacked the Avengers had he not manipulated her. The story leaves it unclear whether he was lying. Wanda exiled herself, believing she could not blame outside forces entirely.

  During Avengers vs. X-Men, Ms. Marvel and Spider-Woman offered her an official return. Inside Avengers Mansion, a rebuilt Vision angrily blamed her for manipulating and killing him, and the team deferred to him. Wanda left in tears. Soon afterward she saved the Avengers from a corrupt, Phoenix Force-empowered Cyclops. With the young mutant Hope Summers, she drove the Phoenix from Earth by saying "No more Phoenix", which restored mutant powers across the planet. Many mutants still hated and feared her. Later, Captain America invited her onto the Avengers Unity Squad as a chance at atonement. After the AXIS crisis, when she was upset by new revelations, Vision reached out with compassion rather than judgment, beginning a new friendship.

  On Krakoa, the mutant nation founded by Magneto, Charles Xavier and their allies, Wanda was named the second most dangerous enemy to mutantkind. The removal of the X-gene had caused 986,420 deaths. The top enemy was Bolivar Trask, whose Sentinel robots had caused 16,521,618 deaths and counting. Magneto's former follower Exodus called her "the Great Pretender", because she was neither Magneto's daughter nor a mutant. Meanwhile Wanda taught at the Strange Academy, a school founded by Doctor Strange for young magic users from many worlds.

  In the Empyre storyline, flashbacks showed that Wanda had spent a year gathering arcane artifacts to atone for the deaths of 16 million mutants on the island Genosha, killed years earlier by Cassandra Nova. She did this against Strange's advice and without knowing Krakoa already had resurrection protocols. Her spell raised the dead as zombies. Strange countered it, warned it would take roughly 30 days to wear off, and walled off Genosha. The X-Men who investigated never learned the Scarlet Witch was responsible.

  In 2021, Magneto invited Wanda to the first Hellfire Gala. Ashamed of M-Day, she declined, then agreed to meet him privately and share a dance after he promised to ease tensions with Krakoa. Soon afterward, her son Speed found her seemingly dead. Magneto became a prime suspect, and the Avengers invaded Krakoa. The resurrection protocols revived her from a backup recorded before Avengers Disassembled, so she woke without memories of recent years. As others restored her mind, guilt overwhelmed her and she conjured monsters. On the astral plane, her murderer self confronted a vision of an older Wanda. The three Wandas stopped the monsters and merged into a fully restored Wanda. She now knew at least one possible future in which she would grow old and wise.

  The truth emerged later. Wanda had worked with the mutants Polaris, Legion and Proteus to expand the resurrection protocols, but that required her physical death. With Magneto's help she arranged her own death, disguised by magic to look like a murder. Her plan created a pocket dimension called the Waiting Room, which allowed all mutants to be resurrected, including those never copied into Cerebro. It added twenty million mutants to the queue, including everyone who died on Genosha. Exodus gave her a new title, "The Redeemer", and Wanda began telling her story to Krakoa's children so they could learn from her mistakes. Writer Leah Williams described her aim as an "empathy engine", a story about healing and catharsis told as a Wanda sympathiser. In September 2022, Marvel announced a new Scarlet Witch solo series continuing from those events, and it premiered in January 2023.

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