Who are the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver?

Two of the most venerable institutions in the Marvel Universe, the Avengers and the X-Men, have teamed up and squabbled for decades in print. However, if you’re looking for an on-screen team-up, you’re out of luck due to each property being owned by a different movie studio so the franchises stay in separate universes. The two characters who bridge both worlds are Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, two twin mutants who have been stalwart members of the Avengers for decades.

You’ve seen Quicksilver in X-Men: Days of Future Past as the speedster, identified only as Peter, who helped Wolverine break into the Pentagon. You’ve seen both Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch as “the twins” post-credits in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. They are apparently captives of Baron von Strucker, an ex-Nazi with a comics history with Professor X and Magneto, which the Avengers movies will never mention since they cannot acknowledge the existence of mutants.

The Maximoff twins were born in the fictional Eastern European country of Transia and raised by the Roma Papa Django Maximoff. Magneto recruited them into his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and they fought the X-Men in its earliest days in the ‘60s. However, the twins’ days as villains didn’t last long and they soon joined the Avengers as two of the team’s earliest recruits. Pietro was sort of on and off the team for awhile, marrying Crystal, a member of the royal family of the Inhumans, with whom he had a daughter, Luna. Wanda has been a near-constant member of the Avengers since the ‘60s with her husband, the synthezoid Vision. Whenever the team reorganized its membership, they usually saved a spot for Wanda.

The identity of the Maximoffs’ birth parents was a matter of speculation for years. For awhile, they believed their parents to be the Golden Age heroes the Whizzer (another speedster) and Miss America (who looked just like the Scarlet Witch). However, in the late ‘70s, Marvel planted the seed that they were Magneto’s children. They telegraphed this in subtle scenes in two different comics in the same month. In the Avengers, the Scarlet Witch learned her birth father had terrible powers, like Magneto. In the X-Men, Magneto revealed that his late wife looked just like Wanda. So sharp readers could put two and two together and figure out the parentage.

A few years later, the family confronted the truth of their relationship and … didn’t become a big, happy family. (Wanda and Pietro also have a half-sister, Polaris, the magnetic-powered daughter of Magneto.) Although Magneto started as a mutant terrorist, Chris Claremont made great efforts to humanize him, retconning him to be a Holocaust survivor and having him realize the error of his brutal methods in Marvel’s greatest redemption story. But after years of violently promoting mutant interests, it was hard for his children to trust him.

Anyway, the Scarlet Witch went on to have twins, Tommy and Billy. She conceived by magical means as the Vision had an artificial body and could not impregnate her. A few years later, she and the Vision later separated after his personality was erased and he had no emotions tied to her. Then the two children were revealed to be not real but two pieces of the shattered soul of the demon Mephisto. When Mephisto reclaimed the two pieces of his soul, the children ceased to exist. Writer John Byrne rationalized that the two children could not exist since the Scarlet Witch’s hex powers, while considerable (she is one of the few Avengers who can damage the adamantium robot Ultron), were not great enough for her to create life from thin air. The witch Agatha Harkness erased all memory of the children from Wanda’s memory, judging it kinder that she never have to mourn them.

So it went for about 15 years, with Wanda having no memory of Tommy and Billy. In the “Avengers Disassembled” story, writer Brian Michael Bendis had the Scarlet Witch suddenly remember having children and go mad with grief. At the time, she had an unexplained surge in power, which led to a dangerous situation. Normally Wanda could create quasi-magical “hex spheres” with unpredictable effects like causing a gun to jam or a wall to collapse. However, she had become a reality warper and created chaos for the Avengers, destroying her ex-husband the Vision, and killing Hawkeye, Ant-Man and the Jack of Hearts.

In the aftermath, Professor X tried to heal Wanda’s mind as she was suicidal with guilt and still had no control over her powers. As the Avengers and X-Men approached to subdue her, Quicksilver feared that they would kill his sister. In the House of M story, he convinced her to create an artificial reality in which the heroes all got their heart’s desire. The heroes rebelled against the Scarlet Witch playing god. Wanda, realizing how messed up the situation was, uttered the infamous phrase “No more mutants,” stripping most of the world’s mutants of their powers and killing some of them. After that, she disappeared to live life in Transia with no memory or powers.

These developments broke my heart and drove me from comics for a few years because the Scarlet Witch was always one of my favorite characters. I liked her combination of mysterious powers and vulnerability, as well as her quest to lead a traditional life while super-heroing. I could have dealt with her death because they could have just resurrected her. But these stories disgraced Wanda, made the reader look back with distrust on her long history of heroism, and made some of the Avengers hate her. It was especially unfortunate since some earlier writers made an effort to move her out of the shadows of her brother and husband and give her more self-confidence as an Avenger. It’s also another example of the unfortunate comics trope of “women go crazy and evil when they get too much power.”

The Scarlet Witch has since found some redemption in recent years with the revelation that her actions were (I believe) due to the manipulation of Doctor Doom. Her two children even returned in reincarnated form. She rejoined an Avengers team but recently died. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Next week we investigate Nick Fury’s malleable race.