Much like her on-again-off-again romantic interest, Vision, Wanda Maximoff AKA Scarlet Witch has been rocketed into the pop culture mainstream by her prominent role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe–and that spotlight is only going to get brighter now that she’s making her way to her very own show. WandaVision is headed for Disney+ in January 2021 and, with any luck, it will both help clear up some of the loose ends in Wanda’s MCU story and establish her moving forward as she goes on to feature in more films, like Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Let’s dive into Scarlet Witch’s comic book origins.
On the big screen, Wanda’s story has been relatively streamlined. She, like Vision, was introduced in Avengers: Age of Ultron as a Sarkovian refugee along with her brother, Pietro AKA Quicksilver, who had been subjected to human experimentation by HYDRA with the Mind Stone. It’s not entirely clear how the experiments actually worked or why they gave the twins the powers they wound up with, but Wanda came out of the HYDRA facility with the ability to telekinetically move objects and manipulate people’s minds.
Over in the comics, Wanda’s history is considerably more complicated and strange, but full of themes and motifs you’ll likely find very familiar as an MCU fan. Introduced in X-Men #4 back in 1964, Wanda and Pietro were first cast as members of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, though neither of them were completely bought-into Magneto’s ideologies. But they didn’t stay exclusive to X-Men titles, or villains, for very long.
