it is ON

[nonners]

 One (very large) page. Massive spoilers for Avengers Children's Crusade #5

!



Why oh why must these issues come out so slowly?

Comments

[crabby_lioness]

THE WITCH IS BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now it's time to see how much the Avengers have learned in the past 6 years, and how well they can grovel.

[nonners]

I am SO excited about this, seriously. :D :D

[neuhallidae]

SCOTT. OH MY GOD, IS THAT SCOTT? (I swear to fucking God if he gets re-killed by the end of this, there will be blood.)

[nonners]

The guy I think you're talking about (in the red?) is Antman back from the dead.

[perletwo]

Vision looks like somebody hit him over the head with a two-by-four.

[shadowpsykie]

i'm sure he's conflicted... LOL

[nightauditguy]

Wiccan is probably thinking 'great mom's back, I hope I'm not grounded'

[shadowpsykie]

everytime i see speed, i think of Pietro from the X-men Evolution series :D

[nightauditguy]

Why is Wanda holding her cape like that? Is that the only way she can hover/fly?

[shadowpsykie]

she learned it from Magneto :D

[turtlefu]

Maybe they should just re-title this series;
The Retconning: Retconning the Retcon of the Retconned Retcon.

[crabby_lioness]

Payback is a Witch works better.

[flash_fan]

Those poor Young Avengers are terrified. Psh, I'd be too if I was fighting someone who could just retcon me out of existence. I'd rather fight The Sentry, Silver Age Superman, and Galactus simultaneously.

[crabby_lioness]

Right now they're the only people she likes.

Yes, the Witch is Back....

[capt_satellite]

....stone cold sober, as a matter of fact!

Re: Yes, the Witch is Back....

[crabby_lioness]

I've been waiting for this day since 1992.

[lencannon]

You've made a mistake! She's just going to erase everything.

Which, by the way, reminds me of the pitch I'm going to make one day to Marvel.

It's going to be called Scarlet Witch Team Up and every issue is her and another superhero having misadventures and it is going to end with her getting annoyed with something and going NO MORE (x). As a result, whatever she banished is no longer canon.

So, because of her awful time at the condiment factory, spicy mayo no longer exists.

But don't worry! The last issue she's going to be teamed up with Deadpool and scream NO MORE CROSSOVER and the entire series is out of continuity.

[schala_kid]

Scott Lang is back, that's all I care about!

[auggie18]

This Wanda has been so freaking amazing. She's snarky, she's smart, she doesn't take any guff from anyone!


Words cannot describe my love for his series.

[crabby_lioness]

MOTTO.

[wonderwomanhero]

So this means she's back to normal right? Will she ever go back to 616?

[crabby_lioness]

Absolutely does NOT mean she's back to normal.

Well, let me clarify that. People with repressed memories because they are associated with painful memories tend to have humongous emotional reactions when they get them back. So if she goes ballistic next issue, that will be totally normal for her condition.

[mullon]

Maybe she'll remember that she's a superhero whose been on the Avenger and Defenders, and act like a raitional person.

[crabby_lioness]

Under what circumstances is it rational not to be furious at people who remove all evidence of your dead children, even going so far as to erase your memories?

Like her father, Wanda is quite capable of rationally deciding that somebody needs a smackdown.

[rezonantshine]

Pleaseworkout. Pleaseworkout. Pleaseworkout. X'

[sindra]

[lascoden]

Quick question, when Scott got blown up, did they show or mention anything about a body?

[sinisterlink]

I had to go look it up just now to make sure I was right about this, but there was an issue of Avengers: The Initiative where Cassie is talking to Pym and asks him if it's possible that her dad had managed to shrink super small and avoid being exploded by escaping into the microverse or something like that, since Pym himself had done something similar before. Pym tells her that he scanned the explosion area for Pym particles and didn't find any, which meant that Scott hadn't shrunk or anything like that.

So basically they had no trace of his body and no evidence of him using his powers, which actually fits very well with this whole retcon where they went back in time and snatched him before he gets exploded.

[selke]

So... pretty...

[sinisterlink]

I swear, they better not bring Scott back just to kill him again before this mini is over. I don't think I'd be able to stand even more Cassie angst. Let the girl be happy, darn it!

[blackruzsa]

HEY LOOK IT'S THE EXACT SAME POSES FROM THE FIRST ISSUE. SYMMETRY!!!!
Damn it, why so awesome, Cheung? And I can't believe they brought Scott back. DON'T TAKE IT AWAY, MARVEL. Unless, you know, time paradoxing requires him to die. Then DAMN IT, MARVEL.

[crabby_lioness]

I noticed that too. It's a family thing. :D

[paultmd]

At some point during all of this series is Hawkeye going to speak up and mention how he found Wanda while everybody else was fighting the Civil War?

Or has that been brought up at some point since it happened already?

[crabby_lioness]

Next issue, although there was evidence in issue 3 he actually found a Doombot.

I think Hank must have found the real Wanda though.

[stubbleupdate]

Just in time for the Fear Itself: Hysteria one-shot

[tsunamiwombat]

So does this mean she's not marrying Dr. Doom now? :(

No, I wouldn't think so

[jazzypom]

He also withheld info from her, and would have killed Billy if she hadn't interceded on Billy's behalf.

[notactuallyauser]

There's one thing I don't quite get regarding Wanda/Billy/Tommy and the sliding timeline. They are old enough that they are supposed to have been born before the Avengers were founded, right? It's not like they were born on the day that Mephisto took Wanda's children? Their parents must have had their own reasons for calling them William and Thomas, even. So did their parents' lives get retroactively or messed with by Mephisto (who did this to Peter, we know), or Wanda (just like House of M), or by some other party?

"You've Got To Pick Up Every Stitch...The Rabbits Running In The Ditch..."

[misterbug]

"You've Got To Pick Up EVERY Stitch...OH NO...Must Be The..."

[tahngarth.livejournal.com]

Why no "Edit post" button? Gah.

Anyway. While I was very fond of Wanda as a character when I was younger (Avengers West Coast was one of my favorite team comics), there is very little that you can logically do with her now, without instiuting massive retcons.

Don't get me wrong. It's not her fault. The problem lies with two people, two writers, in fact. John Byrne and Brian Michael Bendis. I shall explain.

John Byrne was -the- Marvel superstar of the 1980's. When he came to a book, the angels cried out in a heavenly chorus, sales rocketed and readers flocked to it. His run on Avengers West Coast had the highest sales the title ever saw (during all of its title changes as well). However, Byrne had an axe to grind with the AWC cast, namely he hated the idea that Scarlet Witch and the Vision were married and had children. His thoughts were that a "machine" (disregarding various ideas about how the Vision is constructed) should not be allowed to be with a human woman, much less have kids with her. Byrne thus set up a Gambit to annul the marriage, a BONG if you so will. He began with dismantling the Vision and erasing his personality, so he became a much more emotionless blank slate. Then he "revealed" (IE retconned) that the two children that the couple had had were actually not children at all, but essentially figments of Wanda's mind, given reality by two fragments of Mephisto's soul. Prior to this storyline, which dominated most of Byrne's run on AWC, Wanda had always been a superhero in good standing and mentally stable. Byrne, however, quickly reduced her first to a fugue state of total apathy, then to be kidnapped by Magneto and turned "evil" by him. After Magneto's defeat, Byrne departed, his work done. His run always made me feel uncomfortable, because this was around the time when I started to notice that he came onto a book with specific goals in mind, and then proceeded to steamroller over characters standing in the way of that. On AWC, he pretty much destroyed the Scarlet Witch and Vision as characters, and reduced Tigra to a literal cat (and in fact even forgot about her subplot, making her vanish between pages... Poor Tigra, everyone hates you). While turning Wanda evil is not an inherently poor idea, doing it in this particular way was unfortunate, since it made the character a victim, not a protagonist. Wanda didn't make any choices, she had choices made -for- her, and that trend would come back in modern times. More below.

After Byrne, the next writer to take on the mess he left in AWC was legendary Marvel scribe Roy Thomas, who created vision in the first place and began the storyline where Wanda was attracted to him (though he was not the one to canonize their relationship, that was Steve Englehart, much later. Englehart always loved odd couples, preferrably of different species). Thomas jumped on a title foundering because of the massive retcons and personality changes Byrne had done. He began working on the Wanda situation by revealing that her turn to evil, and in fact the events leading up to it, had been masterminded by Immortus, who had already shown interest in Wanda much earlier. Immortus wanted to control Scarlet Witch because of her unique status as a nexus-being, and at the end of that arc, she was freed from the various influences on her, and went back to what I would call her "real" personality (IE the one where she isn't simply a weak-willed milksop). Thomas put her back on the team, and over the next few years there were a lot of stories which showed Wanda dealing with the fallout of the loss of her marriage and children. By the time Avengers West Coast ended in the early 90's, and around the time of the Scarlet Witch mini-series, the event seemed to be firmly in the past. Scarlet Witch faced down Master Pandemonium and her memories of his erasure of her children, and came out triumphant. Tony Stark even picked her to lead the short-lived Force Works team, after the Avengers stopped funding the West Coast branch. Wanda would return to the main Avengers team after this, then go through Heroes Reborn, and then come back in Heroes Return, in the classic run by Kurt Busiek and George Perez.

Busiek has always been notable for the fact that, while he loves the old silver and golden age stories, he also understands and respects the modern ones. As such, he kept writing Wanda in her "true" personality, as a strong, confident Avenger with some leadership ability. He also paired her up with Wonder Man, something that had been percolating over years in the AWC book due to the revelation that Vision's original personality was based on Simon Williams. The main point is that the "dead children" angle of it had been dealt with, slowly and painfully, but it was -done- and Wanda was a much better character for it. In fact, her portrayal under Busiek is probably my favorite one ever. In the process of it, Busiek had also explained that Immortus' gambit against Vision and Wanda had been in order to stop their children from reaching maturity, which he believed would further mankind's expansion to become a galactic empire, which would in turn threaten the timeline of his masters, the Time-Keepers. While Wanda didn't appear much in Avengers Forever, it did a decent job of patching over the damage done by the Byrne run, and mitigating some of the fallout. Which of course meant that disaster would strike, and it did so in the form of Disassembled, and Brian Michael Bendis.

Bendis chose to ignore the 2 decades or so of personality growth Wanda had had in between the end of the Byrne run and the beginning of his story, and chose to return to the notion that Scarlet Witch was a barely-controlled volatile powderkeg, her enormous powers making her a planetary threat. In a -stellar- display of getting -everyone's- personalities wrong, he had her freak out in Disassembled and start killing her teammates, and destroying the world. The fact that Bendis had this insitagted by having Wasp make some horribly offensive remarks to the woman who was probably her closest female friend among the Avengers only makes it worse. Bendis has admitted that he generally does not pay attention to what happens in books he "does not like", and as we have seen, that includes a huge amount of comics. As such, he was perfectly fine with returning Scarlet Witch to be the milksop, easily influenced character, who acts much more like a plot device than a real person. House of M compounded this, continuing her portrayal as helpless to stop her own madness, and volatile to the extreme. The fact that we skipped over -twenty- years of continuity for this only makes me feel more apprehensive. Oh, and to continue the parade of ludicrousness that Bendis used to try to explain his plots, he had Doctor strange proclaim "there's no such thing as chaos magic", despite himself using chaos magic. On several occasions. In books far removed from anything to do with Scarlet Witch. Whups! And of course, M-Day is for some reason seen as a genocidal event worse than anything else, making the Scarlet Witch a bigger threat than anyone (depending on the writer). I find it almost cute in its silliness that the Avengers feel like they have to put Wanda down when they have Wolverine as a member, who killed more people than she did in M-day during the "Enemy of the State" storyline alone.

Which leads us to today. Heineberg once again muddled the waters with his idea that Teddy and Thomas are Wanda's children, recreated in new forms. It is chronologically impossible that they could have been born and grown to teenagers in the time since Byrne's AWC, so we can only assume that they already existed and were "infused" with the power of Wanda's children. Or somesuch. Actually, my favorite theory by far for Young Avengers is that the entire story arc would end with them discovering they have nothing to do with Scarlet Witch at all, and find that they don't have to search for their parents - they already found them in the people who raised them. It would be kind of heartwarming and cozy, but that's probably just me being weird. The fact is, any way of bringing Wanda back now without explaining away some of the crazy retcons that Bendis and his followers inflicted on her will be problematic at best. It will only -ever- work out for her character if the "bitch is crazy because of dead babies" angle is dropped, buried and forgotten permanently, but like Hank Pym's one-time slap, it seems unlikely.

If I were writing comics (and I'm not, nor am I likely to), I think there's an easy enough "out" to rescue Scarlet Witch from the immense baggage of bad storytelling around her. Way back during the Scarlet Witch miniseries (circa 1993), Wanda fought a creature called the Lore, a psionic entity that moved from reality to reality, killing the nexus-being of each world and stealing their body, gaining further strength from every soul it absorbed. I would postulate that when Wanda thought she destroyed the Lore, a fragment of it actually latched itself into her own mind, lying dormant for years until it had grown enough in strength. It then possessed Wanda, making her a helpless onlooker as the Lore pretended to be her and wrecked reality with her powers. Not the most elegant solution, I know, but I believe this is the sort of story necessary to make Wanda a useable character again. Otherwise she will just languish as a "crazy plot device" and menace permanently.

I have a faint hope she will be "fixed" at the end of this, but my more realistic side tells me she will just be back to be "whacky Wanda", mindless, or dead.

[crabby_lioness]

There is nothing "whacky" about Heinburg's Wanda. She's the most rational person in the story. Granted, that's probably because everyone else is afraid of her, but....

Wanda's reaction in Avengers:Dissed is totally in line with repressed grief. She may or may not have remembered her dead children, but we never saw her grieve for them. Thus, it was appropriate. Bendis has many faults as a writer, but that is not one of them.