Avengers Disassembled

The definitive Scarlet Witch issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for comic books, omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated May 2024 with titles scheduled for release through October 2024.

Wanda Maximoff is The Scarlet Witch – one of the most powerful mutants in Marvel’s universe, and the sometimes daughter of Magneto. She is able to alter reality at her whim with blasts of pure chaos, causing anything from a wall suddenly crumble down upon a villain to an alteration to the fabric of our universe.

Scarlet Witch is one of Marvel’s earliest reformed villains and one of their most dedicated heroes. She forms a link between the X-Men and Avengers franchises that has been in place since 1965.

For the prior year, Wanda and her brother Quicksilver had appeared together as members of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants since their debut in X-Men (1963) #4. However, in May of 1965 the mutant twins shocked both Marvel’s characters and their readers by applying for membership with Captain America’s reformed Avengers in Avengers (19630 #16.

While Quicksilver has come and gone from The Avengers since then, Scarlet Witch has remained a mainstay of the team. Her initial membership ran for a nearly-continuous 20 years before she spun off into a year-long maxi series with her beau The Vision in 1985, which depicted their unusual romance and eventual home life. Wanda even gave birth to a pair of twins.

After that domestic interlude, Wanda returned to active Avengers membership with the West Coast Avengers. Under the pen of John Byrne, she had her own “Dark Phoenix” period, turning on her teammates. However, she quickly returned to heroism and broke away from The Avengers with her other teammates to form the more proactive Force Works in 1994, lead by Iron Man (but not before briefly headlining her own limited series).

A subsequent return to The Avengers was short-lived, as the results of Onslaught shunted Wanda and her teammates into a pocket universe in 1996 before they returned in a new flagship title in 1998. Scarlet Witch was a founding member and an ongoing anchor of the team.

Everything changed in 2004, when red-hot writer Brian Michael Bendis was given free reign to rebuild the flagging Avengers franchise. His answer was a four-issue arc called “Avengers Disassembled,” which would both elevate and irrevocably alter Scarlet Witch’s profile in the Marvel Universe. It’s follow-up, the X-Men and Avengers crossover House of M, would emphasize Wanda as the link between the two teams and also prove her to be one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

After that climax, five whole years passed with only the scantest hints of Wanda’s continued existence. She returned in Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, which both addressed her absence and resolved her seeming connection to a pair of Young Avengers – Wiccan and Speed – who closely resembled Wanda and her brother.

With Scarlet Witch back in action, she was a natural choice to anchor a “Unity” team of Avengers and X-Men in Uncanny Avengers in 2012 to welcome the Marvel Now era. A second volume of that book called into question her long-established link to Magneto (which many fans took as a rebuke of FOX being able to use Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in their X-Men movies). Then, after Secret Wars, she starred in her own ongoing series for the first time in 2016 before making a return to Uncanny Avengers in 2017.

[Read more…] about Scarlet Witch – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order