X-Men: The Trial of Magneto
X-MEN: THE TRIAL OF MAGNETO #1-5
Writer: Leah Williams
Artist: Lucas Werneck with David Messina (#3-4)
Colourist: Edgar Delgado
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller
Editor: Jake Thomas (#1-3) & Jordan White (#2-5)
I know, I know. The backlog is building up. This series finished ages ago. We’ll get through them.
So: Trial of Magneto came out at an odd time for the X-books, not quite in the post-Hickman era, but certainly transitioning there. In one sense, it’s an extra arc for X-Factor… but that book ended with a rushed cancellation, and in the end, X-Factor’s role in Trial of Magneto is mostly procedural. Perhaps that’s inherent in the concept. This isn’t really an X-Factor story. Maybe as originally conceived it had more to do with them – there’s a germ in the published version of a focus on Polaris as the Other Daughter. But at its core, it’s the Scarlet Witch’s story.
But then… why is it called Trial of Magneto? In fact, why is it called X-Men: Trial of Magneto, since it’s not really an X-Men story either? You can ask that too. But mainly: Magneto?
One obvious answer is that they didn’t want to spoil the plot – and the end of “Hellfire Gala” – by promoting it as a Scarlet Witch story. That’s doubtless part of it. The first issue was solicited with a modified version of the cover, to avoid showing her as the body. Still, though – the trial of Magneto? Is there a trial? He’s a suspect, sure, but she comes back from the dead halfway through the plot, so there’s never a trial. The final issue casts around to try to justify the title, but the whole thing reeks a bit of changed plans.
Let’s step back. What actually happens in this book? Wanda is found dead; X-Factor investigate, because that’s their job. The Quiet Council won’t resurrect her, but she effectively resurrects herself anyway (with the memories of an early point in her career) and shows up just as the Avengers have arrived to collect her body. Rachel and Jean show young Wanda all the appalling things she did later in her life. She goes crazy and a bunch of random kaiju attack the island. This is where you can feel things going off the rails. I suppose on some level it’s a parody of the sort of arbitrary nonsense Wanda has become associated with? If you’re feeling charitable?
Meanwhile, present day Wanda is in a weird limbo dimension, where she eventually confronts her older self. Old Wanda tells present day Wanda that she needs to stop feeling guilty for everything she’s done. She comes to terms with herself, or something, which fully restores her and makes the monsters vanish. Toad is sentenced to the Pit for Wanda’s murder, but in fact the whole thing was a scheme by Wanda and Magneto to create a magical link between Wanda and resurrection. This allows Wanda to magically add all the mutants of the past to Cerebro’s archives, clearing the way for their resurrection. And in that two-paragraph plot synopsis, I mentioned the title character once.
The art is fine; Werneck is more of a character artist, and while some of the earlier action sequences work, the kaiju sequences don’t have the scale and impact that was presumably intended. They feel a bit cursory, to be honest. But the limbo segments with Wanda are much better, particularly in the more dreamlike and abstract segments with spreading flowers. The modified data pages work well too, keeping the standard X-books format but with a sense of something a bit more mysterious going on. On the whole, Werneck does his job and sells the human side of it all.
Whether the story can really deliver on that is another matter. When you get down to it, it’s a lot of extended fight scenes in the real world – a lot – coupled with Wanda coming to terms with her past and forgiving herself. It’s obviously another attempt to rehab Wanda from “Avengers Disassembled”, and it’s not the first time. “Avengers Disassembled” was a bad story on its own merits – it’s barely a story at all, really, just a big action sequence – but its main legacy was to do immeasurable damage to Wanda, a character that people actually wanted to use. Writers have been trying to rehab her ever since. Maybe you could argue it opened the way to “Decimation”, but that wasn’t very good either. WandaVision doesn’t need “Avengers Disassembled”; it draws mainly on John Byrne’s Avengers West Coast stories, which didn’t do the character any favours either, but at least left her viable.
This story is obviously intended to draw a line under all that and declare Wanda officially rehabbed. There’s a certain logic to it – she atones for M-Day by allowing millions of earlier mutants to be resurrected. Maybe it’ll work this time. Let’s hope so. At any rate, the weight of a wider continuity agenda hangs heavily over this story, and it undercuts the efforts to persuade us we’re seeing something profound about magic, or even about Wanda.
There’s a big problem with the resurrection pay-off, too. The X-office seem to be under the impression that they’ve clearly established that Cerebro’s records only went back to Some Point After Giant-Size X-Men #1, which they absolutely haven’t. Quite the opposite, they’ve previously shown Vulcan with Petra and Sway, who both died before that point. Apparently that was a dialogue error – they were meant to be Vulcan hallucinating – and it’s just about possible to read the dialogue in X-Men #8 that way if you assume that by “you guys” Havok means whoever Vulcan was drinking with last night, rather than the two girls in the same panel as him. But the point is that the X-books had never established that the resurrection cut-off was that late, and they had very strongly implied that it went back at least as far as Giant-Size #1.
Hell, we’ve had the Changeling in at least one crowd scene, and he died in the Silver Age. But Petra and Sway were front and centre in a main title, and their whole thing is that they died off panel in Giant-Size #1. There’s literally nothing else to them. So… what we’re getting here is a revelation that the X-Men can now do something we all thought they could do already. And that’s just weird.
It’s not an awful miniseries, and hopefully it does manage to make Wanda’s rehab stick this time. But it’s underwhelming at best. It sets itself up to be something deeper and turns out to be mainly a continuity fix.
It’s kind of like in X of Swords, where Cyclops announces we have to reform the X-Men, a year into the Krakoan era, when no one had ever mentioned the X-Men were disbanded, and multiple teams were running around doing generic superhero things while wearing X-symbols.
It was pointed out that Thunderbird could not be resurrected and that was slightly after Giant Size #1.
I was convinced that Petra and Sway must be a hallucination on Vulcan’s part. It’s hard to read the scene otherwise. Others pointed out to me that characters other than Vulcan say Petra and Sway. Hickman admitted it was a mistake.
We did see Changeling in a crowd scene, but there may be a way to explain why Changeling could still be alive when he died in the “1960s”.
It would be helpful if Hickman had time to explain these discrepancies, but I took it that Xavier’s using Cerebro to record minds started sometime after Thunderbird’s death.
Hickman also made a mistake on “Inferno” when he had Destiny refer to Moira as “Dr. MacTaggert” in a flashback scene to Life Three. Of course, Moira never had the surname MacTaggert until the current life. That made a confusing scene almost impenetrable to understand.
Hickman wants to create these intricate plots filled with mysteries which feed in to each other, but then he can be sloppy with his writing.
The most confusing part (and there are many confusing parts, like how characters constantly appear and disappear between issues) is that Wanda’s Waiting Room apparently acts as an “alternative to the Crucible.” But the reasoning given for the Crucible was to avoid mass suicide from depowered mutants and a bloating of the resurrection queue, which needed ten years just to bring back Genosha. Is the Waiting Room just a sanitized euthanasia clinic? If so, how does it act as an alternative when getting moved ahead in the queue is a policy decision, an exception made for Crucible?
Also, why is Wanda’s backup so “very, very old”, to quote Professor X? Even if we presume they coded a specific anti-Maximoff exception to the backing-up after the retcon, her last backup should date to Uncanny Avengers, not West Coast Avengers. [Do we get generous and blame Onslaught erasing backups in Onslaught Revelation? Because I’m 99% sure that’s not what was meant.]
And there’s also a general editorial ****-up: The Darkhold event (published after but written well before – it was originally meant to be published early in 2020, but covid…), and which has – in the Alpha issue – an explicit “This Takes Place before Trial of Magneto #1” editorial note. In the Omega issue, it ends with Wanda binding Chthon to her soul, and outright saying “Kill me and he’s free.”
And then we have Trial of Magneto, where she plans to commit suicide as part of an overcomplicated plan.
Uhhhh….
Also, what happened to Toad? it’s especially ridiculous since the Sabretooth series seems to indicate Doug has access to the minds of the people in the Pit, so he should know immediately that Toad is innocent.
I really like Leah Williams so was disappointed that this wasn’t more X-factor and that it didn’t make sense. Besides what Leah Williams said to confirm it, this whole series wreaked of editorial mandate and edits. For what it ended up actually doing, it should’ve been 3 issues at most.
“it ends with Wanda binding Chthon to her soul”
I’d just read the incredibly bloated Secret Empire (2017) for the first time, and this was her entire deal there too.
@SanityOrMadness: Wasn’t the Darkhold series a bit inconsistent on that? Wanda makes it sound like she’s holding Chthon in and has absorbed him completely at different moments. Maybe the threat that killing her would release him was a feint for Doom? He is the only she says that too, no?
Also, how many stories have now underlined that Wanda is forgiven/is sorry?
-All of v1 of Uncanny Avengers
-Some of Axis
-Avengers: Children’s Crusade
-Wanda’s solo series
-Empyre: X-men
-The Trial of Magneto
I’m doubting this one will stick since the others haven’t. This will be her “Hank Pym slapping Janet” moment (despite other male heroes having done the same in various fits of madness) until a company-wide crossover just outright undoes it or undoes her role in it.
Michael> Also, what happened to Toad? it’s especially ridiculous since the Sabretooth series seems to indicate Doug has access to the minds of the people in the Pit, so he should know immediately that Toad is innocent.
I’m fairly certain that Toad (along with Orphan-Maker and Nanny) will show up in Sabretooth, it’s just that the book hasn’t caught up to that point yet.
My theory as of now is that Sabretooth, the five exiled mutants in Sabretooth 1, Toad, Orphan-Maker and Nanny will eventually team up as the Exiles by the end of that mini-series, leading to the launch of a Victor LaValle Exiles ongoing later this year. He has alluded to working on the Sabretooth sequel in interviews. It’s a bit like how Way of X put together a team and Legion of X is the implementation of that team.
“how many stories have now underlined that Wanda is forgiven/is sorry?”
Also Avengers vs X-Men.
Regarding Wanda in general, I heard (as in someone who reviews comics for a news website told me this) that Marvel is planning to launch a Scarlet Witch ongoing series later this year to pick up where ToM / Darkhold ended. It’s not officially an X-book, and more X-book adjacent which is why it was not part of the initial ‘Destiny of X’ line-up announcement.
This makes sense to me, as there is a new Clea-led Strange book launching in March and America Chavez is joining the new Thunderbolts book launching in May. All part of an effort to ride the Doctor Strange 2 popularity wave, I suppose. (I fully expect some of the stuff from the recent America solo to be undone, by the way.)
I don’t know any more than that about this potential solo but if I were to speculate, the writers who might be interested in a project like this are Steve Orlando, Leah Williams and Kelly Thompson.
Michael> And there’s also a general editorial ****-up: The Darkhold event (published after but written well before – it was originally meant to be published early in 2020, but covid…), and which has – in the Alpha issue – an explicit “This Takes Place before Trial of Magneto #1” editorial note. In the Omega issue, it ends with Wanda binding Chthon to her soul, and outright saying “Kill me and he’s free.”
And then we have Trial of Magneto, where she plans to commit suicide as part of an overcomplicated plan.
I know editorial put that note in there at the last minute so as to not spoil the outcome of ToM, but does that statement really hold true in-story?
In Darkhold, Victorious was wearing her Doom face mask which she only started to do after Doom’s wedding as a ‘self-inflicted punishment’. But during that wedding, Johnny’s powers got blown up (he can’t switch back to human form anymore) and yet during the Gala, Johnny was fine and wasn’t on fire.
My interpretation of the timeline goes like this:
The Hellfire Gala – the Fantastic Four (with a normal Johnny) attend the Gala, Wanda and Magneto hatch a plot, Wanda kills herself as part of that plot
The Trial of Magneto – a few days after the Gala, Wanda resurrects herself and completes the spell
The Bride of Doom – Johnny Storm turned into an unstable human star, Victorious starts wearing the face mask
Darkhold – Doctor Doom (and a masked Victorious) go to steal the Darkhold, Wanda possesses Chthon
There could be some other things that contradict this version of events, but none come to mind right now.
In any case, Steve Orlando apparently joined the X-Office in January last year, so I can’t imagine that Williams would have been unaware of his plans for Wanda in Darkhold. Whomever is writing the solo will probably address the situation. Chthon was fully redesigned for Darkhold after all, and I can’t imagine that that was just for 1 issue.
The idea that Wanda’s death triggers some kind of elder god to be released and attack earth is potentially interesting, but in this series is just felt random. Paul is being very charitable in calling the kaiju attack a parody of previous random stories. I think there must have been some creative miscommunication behind the scenes.
I wonder at some stage in the planning Wanda’s death was originally meant to trigger an attack by Chthon, but this got lost in translation, and someone had a story notes with “elder god attack” on it and we got random kaiju instead?
It could also have been that Williams wanted to give Wanda agency over her own death, and felt that Wanda’s sacrifice would be undermined if she knew it would release Chthon, so that bit got written out.
It’s kind of ridiculous to have an entire storyline devoted to building in a loophole to a situation which could have avoided any need for such a loophole with just a titch of work when it was introduced.
i.e. why was there an “earliest date” for resurrection to begin with, when all it did was exclude a tiny handful of the earliest characters to die… i.e. Petra, Sway, Thunderbird, Changeling? Why not just say that Cerebro started making backups by Uncanny #1? It’s not like it would have actually affected the Krakoan status quo.
Instead now we have the Waiting Room and Northstar’s mutant daughter and all the others who fell through the cracks because they died too early or before they could manifest as mutants. Which means now they can introduce new, never-before-seen mutants on demand.
As opposed to the 16 million Genoshans who died and are being brought back.
As opposed to the many many Arakkoans who have just been introduced.
As opposed to any Morlocks who died and have come back.
As opposed to any random mutants who were there all along, like Somnus.
I guess the real strength of the idea is as a “permanent offshore backup” that can never be touched or sabotaged by nonmutants until it totally is by some psychic entity or whatever in a few years time because the Shadow King totally isn’t a threat, right?
And I also don’t get the Waiting Room as an alternative to the Crucible. Is this basically for people who don’t want to die in the Gladiator Death Arena, but don’t want to hang around powerless, so they pop off into the astral plane and take a number until they can be served? Do they get higher priority than currently dead people, but lower than people who die in the Crucible?
My vision of Resurrection Queue Priority:
-All named characters important to the plot
-Anyone the writers like
-All other previously named characters (i.e. original Hellions, Xavier’s Academy students…)
-Random background mutants as needed for plot or just background filler
-Everyone else (Genoshans, Morlocks, cannon fodder, civilians)
-That one character no one likes. You know the one.
That explains how we got that random exploding Genoshan mutant in the Empyre tie-in, who somehow won the “early resurrection” lottery to show up as a plot necessity.
Yeah this was pretty much a mess, I feel bad Leah Williams got stuck with it.
It seems like the task was “Fix Wanda again and get rid of the Crucible.”
Are they going to resurrect a dead mutant from before the Roman Empire and be like “hey you’re alive again have fun out there.’
————–
Also there was a thread on Reddit about Williams saying that all the Genoshan mutants have already been resurrected, which is pretty nuts if that’s the X-office company line.
I did the math.
16 million mutants died on Genosha alone.
If they can bring back a mutant an hour, that’s 16 million hours.
If they worked 24 hours a day that’s 666,666.67 days.
Or 1, 826 years.
If they can bring back a mutant a minute, that’s 16 million minutes.
Or 11,111.1 days.
Or 30ish years.
So they must be cranking them out by the second.
It took Jesus three days to come back.
That’s insane.
They’ve been on Krakoa for like three months.
The mutants are a million times more advanced than the Asgardians. Or Galactus.
Plus where do they all live?
The Other Michael-The reason that Cerebro couldn’t record the minds of mutants prior to a certain date is that they needed the logic diamonds from the Shi’ar to make it work and the X-Men didn’t meet the Shi’ar until Claremont’s run.
I assumed that the resurrections wouldn’t be possible for mutants who died before Xavier had access to Shi’ar tech/ soul diamonds. That error regarding the Deadly Genesis characters muddied the waters something fierce. Anyway, all the mutants who didn’t have back-ups or whatever are in the Waiting Room.
So, what about the heavens and hells that have been established in the Marvel Universe? Do they just let souls back out? I doubt we’ll get an answer, but I’m a bit confused about how this set-up works.
Also, if they wanted to redeem Wanda, they should have had a story called something like, “The Redemption of the Scarlet Witch” IN THE MAIN AVENGERS TITLE. Make readers pay attention, make it “count” to readers in a way that spin-offs don’t.
If they had to try to fix her character in an event book, AvX should have ended with her and Hope reversing the Decimation then going one step further. Use the Phoenix force to bring back Genoshan mutants or something. They had all their writers on that series, someone could have come up with something that would stick.
“This is where you can feel things going off the rails. I suppose on some level it’s a parody of the sort of arbitrary nonsense Wanda has become associated with? If you’re feeling charitable?”
Some years ago, I was speaking with a writer at SDCC and asked him about mini he’d done focused on Batman’s rogue’s gallery. His response was pretty much that he was glad someone had enjoyed the series, since he’d had a terrible time writing it. He’d been trying to write a character study in psychological horror, and his editor had kept insisting on dropping fight scenes with Batman into the story. Why? Because people expect to see Batman punching people in a Batman comic, that’s why.
That’s what the sudden appearance of kaiju in ToM reminded me of – a shoehorned fight scene only there because comics are about superheroes punching things. And given that we know there was marketing and editorial interference (also why the mini was called “Trial of Magneto” to start with) and Williams is much more interested in character work than punch-ups, I’m giving Williams the benefit of the doubt and putting that at the feet of editorial too. What a mess. X-Factor deserved better than this.
“Because people expect to see Batman punching people in a Batman comic, that’s why.”
I’m aware that there is, allegedly, an audience for primarily this sort of the thing – it seems to be why a lot of conservatives love superheroes but take away no moral, anti-fascist messages from any of the stories.
And I immediately thought of Tom King’s Batman run, and how there would be some issues with no fighting, just Batman and Catwoman on a double date, or Kite Man lamenting his origin, or Poison Ivy talking about how she already took over the world.
And then, interspersed, there would be issue-long fight scenes with unrelated narration boxes over the panels.
I wonder how well the latter type of issue did with readers of various types.
I wish there was a way to gauge this sort of thing.
I mean, you can sort of gauge this with movies. You can look at audience satisfaction for Man of Steel, for example.
There just aren’t, you know, superhero movies devoid of punching and entirely focused on drama, with which to contrast dumb Zack Snyder material.
I agree that NS is right, Wanda as crazy is the new Henry Pym wife beater. Every time someone tries to redeem the character looks in to the reasons for their breakdown someone else comes along and undoes it. Or worse still an alternate universe retells the story in the worse and most hateful way possible as with Ultimates. Wanda is in a worse situation as Hank had years of build up from his first break down and a well constructed fall of yellow jacket story. Wanda just went crazy.
@Ben: Simple, they just had Rogue dupe the Five *and* Madrox and she knocked all of Genosha out in an afternoon. (Where’s my No-Prize?)
Poor Toad. You storm someone’s Thanksgiving in a battle suit you constructed after you were accidentally made super intelligent by an alien force, and they never let you forget it.
Happens to me all the time, @Person of Con.
Changeling, I think is likely the exception to the cutoff simply because of the fact that he was impersonating Xavier, including using Cerebro. For that to happen, Cerebro had to have interfaced with his mind, thus they were able to find the very, VERY old record of his memories in it.
That’s my theory on why Changeling is back.
There was a plot point recently (in Marauders?) circa Hellfire Gala about Sebastian Shaw wanting to travel in time to obtain recordings of a former mutant lover of his.
It led to other plot points of a different nature, but there is no MU reason why it would not be possible to use the same idea to bring back Changeling – or any other mutant really.
Or you could simply rule that while preparing to impersonate Xavier he was subjected to some precursor to the recordings. Yes, Xavier would not have access to the Shiar data crystals at that point in time. But if they are indeed data storage devices it should be possible to substitute them with something else. It may not be practical simply because it requires too many resources to be done thousands or millions of times, while still having been done to Changeling specifically.
Also, we have seen that the current system records brain patterns automatically at certain points in time once any given mutant is within a certain radius of detection. Changeling may have subjected himself to something less convenient, perhaps some souped-up form of EEG and perhaps for the very reason that Aaron suggests right above.
The bottom line is that sometimes an exception is just that, an exception. It does not have to invalidate the general rule.
I just noticed that I am still rather confused about how the hardware works.
Cerebro used to be capable of detecting mutants at significant distances, at least between cities. Portable units were also sometimes used – Storm used one to search for Angel in the story that introduced the Morlocks (Uncanny #167 or #169 IIRC), and Reed Richards jury-rigged a makeshift one in Marvel Team-Up #100 in order to locate Karma.
But whatever is happening now is considerably different and I am not sure that the rules are clear and coherent. I have no idea of where the brain patterns databases actually are; I would assume that the current Cerebros make deeper scans, obtain a lot more data, and relay that data often to some sort of database built on the Shiar crystals. But the stories seem to imply that somehow the Cerebros are more difficult to build and replace than the databases, and I just don’t see how.
I am a fan of the theory that Leah Williams doesn’t realize Wanda’s actual boyfriend Jericho Drumm exists as a character but it’s more likely that editorial mandated Vision appearing so they could do WandaVision teases. Still, it’s surprising for a Scarlet Witch comic that allegedly focuses on her major relationships how much is left out or simply ignored for the sake of big names. Most egregious is Quicksilver disappearing after issue 2, of course, but Jericho’s palpable absence, the infantilized Wanda take as seen previously in Empyre and this bizarre take on her relationship with the twins read as if it’s largely coming from a combination of fanon and an attempt to find the most recognizable Avengers characters to use.
When you think about it, the limitations of Cerebro coupled with the early scarcity of mutants led to some weirdness for the first few decades.
It used to be that a mutant popped up, and Xavier went running to recruit, even if it turned out to be someone like the Blob. And then a mutant popped up and both Xavier and Hellfire went running to recruit, like Kitty or Dazzler. Cerebro went “ping!” and away then went.
But then we learn about the Morlocks, a community of HUNDREDS of mutants rejecting the surface world.
And in other stories, we keep learning about mutants all over the world, grown people who’ve had their powers for years, and well…
Point is, it’s hard to take the idea of the mutants arm race seriously when we go from “gotta catch em all, no matter how shitty” to “gonna pick up a six-pack of mutants at the store.” Did Cerebro just not register all of these mutants who were supposedly around and active? Did Xavier start picking and choosing to get only the non-shitty ones, like when it came time to pick the Giant-Size team? I know we’ve seen stories where so-and-so is like “Xavier came to recruit me and I said no” and we get retcons like Amelia Voght, Forgetmenot, or Sage who are backfilled into the early days…
There’s just a few inconsistencies, is what I’m saying.
My personal headcanon for that is that the radiation stuff from the Silver Age X-Men — namely, that the mutant gene was popping up in people with a connection to nuclear research — was actually relevant and that the increase in global superhuman activity, the Thanos-snaps and the Ragnaroks and Galactus visits and timeline changes and what-have-you was activating the X-gene at a fairly rapid rate.
“We did see Changeling in a crowd scene, but there may be a way to explain why Changeling could still be alive when he died in the “1960s”.”
Excalibur: The Possession. Changeling’s ghost came back and did, uh, stuff. It wasn’t a very good story, and Alan Davis pointedly retconned large chunks of it when he returned to Excalibur, but I guess Cerebro can record ghost brains or whatever.
(There’s also Necrosha and Chaos War, but apparently Cerebro couldn’t record the minds of those resurrected mutants, maybe because a wizard did it. And no one really wants to remember Chaos War, since it featured Moira MacTaggert coming back to life and oh wait shit…)
@Ceries
And then there’s how Wiccan and Speed come off kinda ooc which also hurts the relationships angle.
Are we getting a Secret X-Men post?
I need to complain about Marrow.
I’ll review Secret X-Men at some point. It’s in the queue.
Thanks Paul, no rush!
Wanda being the twins’ mom is weird because not only did she not raise them, they already have parents.
It’s deeply stupid.
The Magneto/Maximoff clan is close to catching up with the Summers family in overcomplicated nonsense.
The Magneto/Maximoff clan is close to catching up with the Summers family in overcomplicated nonsense.
I mean, the Magneto/Maximoff family were way ahead of the Summerses in that respect as of the Magneto parentage reveal circa late 1979.
As of Avengers (1963 series) #187, Wanda had no fewer than two sets of fake parents, ties to the High Evolutionary and Chthon, intermarriages with the Inhumans on Pietro’s side, and a marriage to someone with the android body of the Golden Age Human Torch with the mind of Wonder Man. And the fake parents included two obscure Golden Age Timely/Atlas heroes, their radioactive mutant son, and then an additional adoptive Roma father who was tied to a minor Iron Man and Spider-Woman villain and linked to a meta origin for the Puppet Master from Fantastic Four. And then there’s the cow-woman nanny who takes custody of failed 1970s horror character Mordred the Mystic, who in turn wants to see Wanda possessed by his demonic master Chthon.
1979!
As of Avengers (1963 series) #187, Wanda had no fewer than two sets of fake parents, ties to the High Evolutionary and Chthon, intermarriages with the Inhumans on Pietro’s side, and a marriage to someone with the android body of the Golden Age Human Torch with the mind of Wonder Man. And the fake parents included two obscure Golden Age Timely/Atlas heroes, their radioactive mutant son, and then an additional adoptive Roma father who was tied to a minor Iron Man and Spider-Woman villain and linked to a meta origin for the Puppet Master from Fantastic Four. And then there’s the cow-woman nanny who takes custody of failed 1970s horror character Mordred the Mystic, who in turn wants to see Wanda possessed by his demonic master Chthon.
Epic.
By which I mean the quoted paragraph is epic. Wanda’s history is a convoluted mess.
Oh God, I forgot about the cow nanny.
Her name is Bova, and I didn’t have to look it up.
I think I need help….
As far as I can recall, I’ve seen Bova in one panel—a Byrne drawing based on Magneto’s memories, probably in WCA.
Yet even I knew her name.
I mean, it’s not the kind of thing you forget because of the sheer WTFery.
I remember being a very, very confused ~10-year old when Bova made an appearance in X-Men TAS.
I was scanning through WCA to see if I could find the dimly remembered panel, but I was unsuccessful.
I did, however, encounter the first appearance of Dinah Soar, of the GLA.
Even in 1990 Marvel (Byrne) was using bad puns for names.
Yeah I think that TAS episode really threw me for a loop.
There are great pun names in comics (Force of July!), but Dinah Soar is not one of them. “Dinah Soar” should have been named “Terra Soar” because PTEROSAURS WERE NOT DINOSAURS!!!!! While I’m on the subject, SAURON SHOULDN’T HAVE BOTH A CREST AND A LONG TAIL, NO PTEROSAUR HAD THAT COMBINATION!!!! PTEROSAURS DIDN’T HAVE BATLIKE WINGS EITHER!!!! NEAL ADAMS WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!?!?!?!?!?
***
Ah, I feel much better now.
Let’s cut Adams some slack. When he designed Sauron Pluto was still a planet. We’ve learned so much since then.
On the other hand, Adams has a whole website devoted to debunking plate tectonics and arguing for the “expanding Earth theory.” (Google it).
So maybe he doesn’t deserve any slack.
Weirdly some scientists* believe certain Pterosaurs could breath fire and drain the life from people.
*Scientists I made up.
I keep wondering if Bova nursed the twins.
I’ll leave now.