Avengers West Coast
Now things start to get really confused. Scarlet Witch and Vision find themselves back with the Avengers, specifically the West Coast branch, and creator John Byrne wants to rewrite everything we know about them.
Vision Quest, West Coast Avengers #42-45, by John Byrne (1989).
One day, Wanda awakens to find Vision missing. It will turn out to be the fallout from his attempt to conquer Earth.
She finds him in a secret government facility, dismantled. A scene with definite echoes in the show.
This creator really wants to tear apart everything we know about Wanda and Vision, so it’s also revealed Vision is not made from the body of the Human Torch. To prove the point, Byrne brings back the original Human Torch. (Avengers West Coast #50, Byrne, 1989)
Visions is rebuilt as “cloudy vision”, but his mind, his personalty, his memories… all wiped.
His emotional responses are broken.
Perhaps Wonder Man’s brain patterns could have fixed part of the problem, but Wonder Man wasn’t willing to let his brain be copied into a machine again. Wanda was not understanding.
Wonder Man’s reasoning is a wee bit skeevy. Turns out he’s always been in love with Wanda. Makes sense. She married a man with a copy of his mind. Now, he sees a possible chance with her… if he’s the only guy walking around with his mind. (West Coast Avengers #47, Byrne, 1989)
While all the drama with Vision’s changes are happening, Wanda’s twins keep seeming to blink in and out of existence.
Agatha Harkness returns (from the dead, in fact) to help wanda make sense of this. (Avengers West Coast #51-52, Byrne, 1989)
Wanda’s children were never real. They were basically a complex illusion she had created with her powers.
In fact, we learn she had made them out of lost shards of the essence of Mephisto, Marvel’s version of the devil. He reabsorbs the lost fragments of himself, and her children are gone forever.
Agatha decides it will be a mercy to let Wanda forget the children ever existed.
She has now lost her husband and children and goes a little crazy. For the first time, we see hints that Wanda has greater powers than ever before, power to reshape reality itself. (Avengers West Coast #55, Byrne, 1990)
All of this is echoed in the show in many ways. Only the order is somewhat different. In the show, she loses everything so creates a fantastic suburban life. In the comics, she builds the suburban life, then loses everything, then goes crazy.
The plot about Wanda’s deterioration got basically dropped when writers changed and editorial had other ideas. My friend Brian Cronin talks about the behind the scenes here.
Chaos
Let’s fast forward some. The emotionless Vision goes back to the New York Avengers and eventually gets his old colorful body back, and begins a long, slow journey toward emotional restoration. Also, turns out he actually is the Human Torch. Meanwhile, Wanda begins a romantic relationship with Wonder Man. Wonder Man dies again, then comes back again, this time with the help of Wanda’s magic.
Wanda again seeks out the guidance of Agatha Harkness, who describes what she is tapping into as “chaos-magick”. (Avengers #10, Kurt Busiek & Pérez, 1998)
This brings us to Avengers #500-503 (Brian Michael Bendis & David Finch, 2004), one of the worst Avengers stories ever, but quite relevant to the proceedings. Here, a writer finally picks up the long-forgotten plot about Scarlet Witch going crazy after losing her children.
Forgotten by the comics, I mean, as it had been 15 years. Not forgotten by us, as it was just a few paragraphs ago.
Her powers have grown. She recreates her lost children…
…and sends hordes of facsimiles of Avengers villains to attack the team. This is a tradition of anniversary issues for Marvel and was basically the plot of Avengers #400. Brian talks about the crazy pattern here.
Over the course of events, Ant-Man, Vision, and Hawkeye are all killed and the Avengers disband.
The story does offer this cool look at Wanda over the decades.
Young Avengers
In the absence of the Avengers, teen heroes emerge to take their place: Iron Lad, Asgardian, Hulkling, and Patriot… soon joined by Stature (daughter of Ant-Man) and a new Hawkeye, as well as a Vision reborn in a more youthful state. (Young Avengers #1-12, Allan Heinberg, Jim Cheung, & Andrea Di Vito, 2005-06)
Asgardian is Billy Kaplan. At first, Asgardian seems to have electrical powers like Thor, but it’s soon revealed he can do a variety of magical things, and he starts calling himself Wiccan. Notice the costume and compare to Billy’s Halloween costume from the television show.
The team is soon joined by Tommy Shepherd, known as Speed.
Billy and Tommy. A witch and a speedster. Coincidence? No.
House of M
Wanda’s instability continues and she finally uses her now super-charged powers to rewrite all reality and creates a world where mutants dominate the world in a series called House of M (Bendis & Olivier Coipel, 2005-06).
If you squint, you can take the Wanda-rewriting-reality story from House of M combined with the Wanda-and-Vision-living-in-suburbs story from the Vision and Scarlet Witch series, and mix them together with TV sitcom tropes to get Wandavision. With a dash of the Vision Quest story where the government steals Vision’s body and paints him white.
Vision
In 2007, I was a disillusioned 26-year old tired of superheroes and stopped reading Marvel comics regularly. So what happens next will mostly have to come from others. I think maybe Wanda was revealed to not actually be Magneto’s daughter somehow? I dunno. I stopped keeping up.
I do still peek in on the occasional Marvel book. In 2016, Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta gave us a Vision series in which Vision attempts to build himself a happy suburban life with a robotic wife and robotic children. Things go badly. This was likely also an inspiration for the TV series. (Vision #1, cover by Michael Del Mundo, 2016)
Vision even makes a dog for his family named Sparky. (Vision #6, King & Walta, 2016)
We won’t dwell on where the dog’s brain patterns came from. We look at this gruesome scene only in an attempt to understand that scene in the show where there were dog bones next to Grim Reaper’s helmet. Told you to just read to the end.
Of course, we’d be quite remiss if we didn’t also note this exchange between Vision and Vision from Avengers #6 (Mark Waid & Michael Del Mundo, 2017)
So who’s Jimmy Woo?
Jimmy Woo is one of the oldest Marvel characters introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Jimmy was an FBI agent tasked with hunting down the master criminal Yellow Claw. (Yellow Claw #1, cover by Joe Maneely, 1956)
In What If…? #9 (Don Glut, Thoms, & Alan Kupperberg, 1978), a series which tells us stories of the Marvel Universe that did not happen, we see an Avengers team form in the 1950s. Jimmy Woo allies with the Human Robot, Gorilla Man, Venus, 3-D Man, and Marvel Boy to battle the Yellow Claw.
The 1950s Avengers re-formed later in life, calling themselves the Agents of Atlas (Jeff Parker & Leonard Kirk, 2006-07).
And Monica Rambeau?
Monica Rambeau is one of my all-time favorite superheroes and you should absolutely read comics about her.
It’s perhaps worth noting Marvel had another Captain Marvel before her, the Kree hero Mar-Vell. (Marvel Super-Heroes #12, Thomas & Colan, 1967)
He died. It’s a rough business they’re in. (Marvel Graphic Novel #1, Jim Starlin, 1982)
Monica assumed the name Captain Marvel when an accident gave her the ability to turn herself into different forms of energy. At first, she didn’t know another hero used to have the name; Captain America gave her his blessing to keep it. (Amazing Spider-Man Annual 16, Stern & John Romita Jr., 1982)
She joins the Avengers and becomes the heart of the book for a while, evolving over the years from the rookie on the team to finally being selected the leader of the Avengers. (Avengers #279, Stern & J. Buscema, 1987)
Darcy?
Darcy is not from the comics. She was introduced in the Thor film.
What is SWORD?
SWORD stands for Sentient World Observation and Response Department and was introduced in Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon and John Cassady. A counterpart to SHIELD, SWORD focused on extraterrestrial threats. (Astonishing X-Men #6, 2004)
In the show the acronym was reworked, notably changing “World” to “Weapon”.
Click to Page 5 to see what comics we recommend to fans of Wandavision.
