Created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in 1963's The X-Men #4, Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet
Witch, has some of the strangest stories in comics.
From her mechanical ex-husband to the many, many retcons of who her father is, here are
things Marvel wants you to forget about the Scarlet Witch.
What even is Chaos Magic?
Scarlet Witch started out as a mutant who had "hex powers," which basically meant that
she could do anything that the writer wanted.
Beyond wearing all red, Wanda Maximoff really wasn't much of a Scarlet Witch at all.
She wasn't even scarlet on her first cover appearance.
She wasn't truly witchy until writer Steve Englehart had her study magic under Agatha
Harkness — an actual witch — in 1974's The Avengers #128.
Later stories would establish that she was gifted at magic because Chthon, the Marvel
universe equivalent to Cthulhu, molded her at birth to be the perfect vessel for his
physical form.
Add in later retcons involving chaos magic and reality warping, and her powers have remained
as ambiguous today as they were when she first appeared.
"Her thing is neuroelectric interfacing telekinesis and mental manipulation."
"He's fast and she's weird."
Who's your daddy?
While Wanda and her brother Pietro are popularly known as the children of Magneto, that hasn't
always been the case.
In 1974's Giant-Size Avengers #1, it's established that they were the children of the Whizzer
and Miss America, superheroes from Marvel's Golden Age.
Wanda learns that, years ago, the Whizzer had brought his pregnant wife to Wundagore
Mountain, where she died after delivering twins.
Notably, this delivery occurred under the watchful eye of the High Evolutionary, a geneticist
obsessed with, as his name suggests, evolution.
Bova, a talking cow woman, delivered Wanda and Pietro.
Because comics are weird.
This would be retconned in 1979's The Avengers #185.
In this version, a pregnant woman named Magda appears at Wundagore Mountain to deliver twins,
Pietro and Wanda.
After she disappears, the High Evolutionary gives them away to a traveling Romani family,
the Maximoffs, who raises them until Wanda and Pietro join Magneto shortly before X-Men
#4.
"When brought to our home by a midwife.
Her name was Bova.
A most wondrous creature, part-human, part-animal."
Seriously, who's your daddy?
Magneto was officially confirmed to be their father in 1983's The Vision and Scarlet Witch
#4, finally answering the lingering question of who Wanda's biological father was.
But that wasn't the end of it.
"We are not your natural parents."
"What are you saying?"
In 2014's AXIS, Wanda discovered that Magneto wasn't actually her father.
Later, she discovered later that she and Pietro weren't actually ever mutants at all, but
regular humans who had been experimented on by the High Evolutionary at birth to create
superpowered siblings.
In this most recent retcon, Wanda's biological family is currently settled to be the Maximoffs.
Coincidentally, that revelation happened right around the time that Twentieth Century Fox
had established that they owned the film rights to both Magneto and "mutants" as a concept
… but there's probably no connection.
Demon babies
For a while, Wanda was married to the "synthozoid" Avenger, Vision.
They even managed to have twins together through Wanda's magic.
Unfortunately, it turned out that while the children technically existed, they only existed
while Wanda was actively thinking of them
The demonic villain Master Pandemonium stole and absorbed the twins, giving him the
unintentionally hilarious visual of a man with babies for arms.
It later turned out that the babies were pieces of the demonic Mephisto's soul that had been
blasted off.
When Wanda wanted children, she unintentionally siphoned off parts of Mephisto's broken souls
to create them.
Agatha Harkness was able to banish Mephisto by erasing Wanda's memory of
ever having children, which, thanks to her subconscious reality warping abilities, meant
that they stopped existing.
Problem solved, right?
Avengers: Disassembled
In the Avengers: Disassembled story arc, Scarlet Witch hits her breaking point after the Wasp
accidently reminds her of her memory-wiped children.
The psychotic break that follows features her going on an incredibly violent rampage
against the Avengers.
Hawkeye doesn't survive, Vision is ripped in half, Agatha Harkness is discovered as
a rotting corpse, and Scarlet Witch herself gets put into the custody of Magneto until
she can get the help she needs.
Which is a whole lot of help.
House of M
Wanda's reality-warping powers and mental break lead to the 2005 Marvel crossover event
House of M, in which Wanda was coerced into rewriting reality so that mutants are the
dominant life form on the planet.
When confronted by the various heroes who remembered the old world, Wanda responds to
the stress and guilt by erasing the mutant genome, turning almost every mutant in the
world into a powerless human.
Talk about lashing out.
Brotherly love
In the alternate reality of The Ultimates comic series, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver's
co-dependent relationship was rewritten to be almost explicitly romantic between the
twins.
Worse, in Ultimates 3, the Wasp even chides Captain America for expressing his judgement
of their romance by telling him that his World War II sense of morality is outdated in this
modern world.
Gross.
To Avengers: Infinity War and beyond
With all the storylines mentioned above, you might be thinking that the Marvel Cinematic
Universe made the right decision to simplify both her origin and her superpowers.
A Scarlet Witch not bound by constant family revelations and a codependent brother has
a lot of story potential.
Still, we'll have to see how that changes as Disney starts to incorporate Twentieth
Century Fox concepts with the planned merger.
Whether that means leaning into the magical angle like Dr. Strange or reincorporating
her into the mutant world, just about anything can happen.
"I can't control their fear.
Only my own."
Well, almost.
It is probably fair to assume that we won't be seeing Bova the bovine midwife or Master
Pandemonium and his baby arms on the big screen anytime soon.
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