Creation Story
Wanda Maximoff is Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Silver Age Brotherhood of Mutants member. X-Men #4 (March 1964) introduces her with her twin brother Pietro (Quicksilver), Toad, and Mastermind as Magneto’s expanded Brotherhood roster. Wanda’s hex-power framework was distinct from her brother’s speed: she could affect probability, causing things to go wrong for her opponents. Lee and Kirby designed her as ambivalent toward Magneto’s mutant-supremacist ideology, looking for an exit from the Brotherhood from her introduction.
The Avengers #16 (May 1965) moves Wanda and Pietro to the Avengers as part of Captain America’s Kooky Quartet (Cap, Hawkeye, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch). The Avengers tenure has been Wanda’s primary team affiliation across decades of subsequent comics, with the Brotherhood appearing as an origin rather than ongoing affiliation.
The reality-warper era
Wanda’s powers expanded substantially across the 1970s and 1980s. The Chaos Magic framework, introduced during her Vision-era marriage and developed across decades, repositioned her from a hex-power Avenger into one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel Universe. Two events crystallize the modern Scarlet Witch:
Avengers Disassembled (Avengers #500, August 2004) by Brian Michael Bendis. Wanda’s mental break following the deaths of her twin children kills several Avengers (Vision, Hawkeye, Ant-Man) and disbands the team. The arc reframes Wanda from heroine to existential threat.
House of M #1 (August 2005) by Bendis and Olivier Coipel. Wanda rewrites reality into a mutant-dominant world. When the alternate reality is unwound, her words “no more mutants” depower most of the worldwide mutant population. The Decimation framework dominates X-Men publishing for the next decade.
The MCU era
Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda debuted in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) and was the lead of the WandaVision Disney+ series (2021). The series adapted the Vision-marriage and twin-children framework from the John Byrne and Tom King runs and reset the character’s cultural visibility at scale. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) had Olsen play Wanda as the film’s primary antagonist, drawing from the House of M and Darkhold storylines.
Collector context
X-Men #4 is the Scarlet Witch Silver Age key. See the Quicksilver and Magneto pages for pricing context. The compounded multi-debut weight makes the book substantially more valuable than most Silver Age second-tier keys.
Secondary keys: The Avengers #16 (joins Avengers). The Avengers #500 (Disassembled). House of M #1 (2005). Scarlet Witch #1 (1994 first solo) and Scarlet Witch #1 (2015 first ongoing).
