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New Mangaverse # 3
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Beast and Wolverine are not the only X-Men who have been offered membership to the Avengers. Other than Iceman and Archangel, even Dazzler was asked twice, but declined the offer both times. [Avengers (1st series) #211, 221] - Submitted by Quicksilver
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 | | | | MAGNETO / MAXIMOFF FAMILY TREE | | | |
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| | Author : Monolith and Peter Luzifer | Last Modified : Sept 3, 2007 |
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(click on the image to see a bigger version of it)
Magnus, the man who would be Magneto, was a resident at Auschwitz during World War II. His parents and his sister were killed by the Nazis during their stay, leaving him the sole survivor of their family. [Uncanny X-Men #150]
One day, he struck down a guard who was assaulting another prisoner, a woman named Magda. The two of them escaped from the concentration camp and the Nazis, starting a new life for themselves. They were married and had a daughter, named Anya. Tragically, however, Anya was killed years later in a fire, while the secret police held Magnus back from rescuing her. He lashed out with his newly discovered magnetic powers, killing the crowd. Magda was horrified at his actions, and fled from his presence, both of them unaware at the time that she was pregnant. [Classic X-Men #12]
Magda soon chanced upon Mount Wundagore, where she met the evolved cow-woman Bova, who mid-wifed her twins, Wanda and Pietro. [Avengers (1st series) #186] Magda fled into the night shortly after the twins were born, never to be seen again. Though a gravesite for her was shown in X-Men Unlimited (1st series) #2, neither Magneto, Bova, nor anyone else has claimed to have actually found her body. It may simply be a ceremonial marker of her passing.
Another couple had arrived at Wundagore within days of Magda giving birth: Robert and Madelyne Joyce Frank, the 1940's crime-fighters Whizzer and Miss America, who were also expecting a baby. When Madelyne and her baby died in childbirth, Bova tried to assuage Robert's pain by presenting Wanda and Pietro as his own children. Frank couldn't handle his wife's death, and ran off into the night leaving the twins he believed to be his own in Bova's care. [Giant-Size Avengers #1] Not sure what to do next, Bova presented the twins to her master, the High Evolutionary, and he took them down into the countryside, giving them to a Romany couple named Django and Marya Maximoff, who had recently lost their own children, Mateo and Ana. The Maximoffs raised Wanda and Pietro as their own, but when raiders attacked their camp and set fire to the caravan, the young twins ran off into the night, believing their parents had died in the fire. This trauma created a block in their memories, so that years later the pair would not remember much of anything from before the fire. [Avengers (1st series) #182, 186].
Wanda and Pietro grew of age, and were ironically found and recruited by Magneto into his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants as Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, with all involved unaware of their relationship. Upon hearing the Whizzer's tale of his wife's death in Giant-Size Avengers #1, the Scarlet Witch concluded that he must be her father, and she and her brother began calling themselves Wanda and Pietro Frank. The twins learned most of the truth much later at Wundagore, when they met Bova who told them the tale of Magda and her unnamed but dangerous husband [Avengers (1st series) #187].
The two did not learn their father's identity for quite some time, but comic readers were treated to a scene of Magneto mourning the loss of his beloved Magda one month later in Uncanny X-Men #125. Years later, Magneto would track Magda's path to Wundagore and force the truth out of Bova; he then came to his children and revealed their relation to one another in Vision & the Scarlet Witch (1st series) #4.
In addition to Wanda and Pietro, Magnus came to have another daughter. At some point, he slept with a woman who would bear his child, a girl who grew up calling herself Lorna Dane. Adopted by a normal couple, Lorna grew of age unaware of her family history until Mesmero and his Demi-Men captured her in the name of Magneto, activated her magnetic powers, and claimed she was the Master of Magnetism's daughter. Iceman did some research, however, and found newspaper files and documentation proving that Lorna's true parents were killed in a plane crash, and she was then adopted by her father's sister and her husband...the Danes. Since the Magneto working with Mesmero turned out to be a robotic doppelganger anyway, Lorna accepted that Magneto was not her father. [Uncanny X-Men #49-52]
Years later, she ended up learning that they actually were related, by comparing her blood sample to Magneto's. She also uncovered evidence that the plane crash that supposedly killed her birth parents had been highly magnetized. [Uncanny X-Men #430-431] The implication made here seems to be that Magneto left Lorna's mother and she found another man to love her and her child. Magneto returned, possibly because he didn't know about the child, and caused their plane to crash. Lorna was then adopted by her first adopted father's sister and her family.
Another person claiming relationship to Lorna is the Savage Land priestess of the sun, Zaladane. In Uncanny X-Men #249-250, she kidnaps Lorna and manages to steal her magnetic powers from her, supposedly because they are sisters. In fact, it is more likely that they are adopted sisters, with Zala being the true daughter of the Dane couple who raised Lorna, who for some reason left home and her family when Lorna was recently adopted and too young to remember her older "sister". Genetically, Zaladane would believe she was Lorna's cousin, since she should think that her uncle who died in the plane crash is Lorna's biological father. Since this would mean they aren’t related by blood, though, it's unclear how the power transfer machine would be successful. Another possibility then is that Zala is the firstborn child of Lorna’s mother and they were both adopted by the Danes after the plane crash. To date, however, Zaladane’s role in Lorna’s history has not been addressed since Polaris’s true paternity was revealed.
Unlike Lorna, Wanda and Pietro both got married and had families of their own. After being injured in a battle with the Sentinels, Quicksilver was found by the Inhuman girl Crystal and brought to the Great Refuge where she nursed him back to health. This affection turned to love, and they got married. Years later, they would have a daughter, who would be named Luna after the Inhumans' home on the moon. [Fantastic Four (1st series) #131, 150, 240, 248] Pietro and Crystal's relationship soured, however, as Crystal began to feel he was neglecting her and had an affair with a real estate salesman in New Jersey during the second Vision & the Scarlet Witch series. They have never officially divorced, for Inhuman law is very strict on the preservation of marriage, but except for a brief reconciliation period from around Avengers (1st series) #369-402, they have remained separated ever since. A boy named Tuc who first appeared in Avengers (1st series) #390 was presented as their son from an alternate future, but may simply have been a ruse by Immortus and the Space Phantoms, like many characters seen during the Crossing.
Wanda has fared even worse than her brother in the long run. She came to love the synthetic man called the Vision during their time together in the Avengers, and they were ultimately married by Immortus in Giant-Size Avengers #4. Vision was a synthezoid, originally created in the 1930's by Phineas Thomas Horton as the original Human Torch, and then remodeled into his current appearance in the modern era by Ultron, using the brain wave patterns of the then-dead Avenger Simon Williams, aka Wonder Man, as a basis for his personality. [Avengers (1st series) #57, 135] Overcoming all odds (literally), Wanda would conduct the magic of an entire town of witches in order to make it possible for her to bear the Vision's child. She gave birth to twin sons, named Thomas and William after her husband's creator and the last name of the man his mind was created from. [Vision & the Scarlet Witch (2nd series) #4, 12] Despite some initial resentment, Wanda and Vision were welcomed into the Williams' family, with Wonder Man acting as the children's Uncle Simon and Martha Williams, Simon's mother, accepting Vision as her son and the twins as her grandsons.
Everything started to go wrong for Wanda once Immortus began implementing his lifelong plans for her. Her husband was kidnapped and dismantled by the world's governments in West Coast Avengers #42-45, erasing his memories and capacity for feeling emotion. This act would eventually be recognized as an official ending to their marriage, for the man Wanda loved effectively no longer existed. Even worse, she was also confronted with the fact that her children were not technically real - they were two slivers of the demon-lord Mephisto's then-scattered essence, which she subconsciously gathered with her hex power to give her children souls as they were born. Mephisto reabsorbed these slivers of himself, and then it was as if Thomas and William never existed. [Avengers West Coast #51-52] Kang and Mantis' adopted sons Tobias and Malachi from The Crossing were implied to have been adult versions of Thomas and William, but the revelations from Avengers Forever confirmed they were simply a pair of Space Phantoms, another part of Immortus' vast schemes.
Recently, however, two boys have appeared on the scene who may in fact be reincarnations of the Scarlet Witch's children. Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd are superhuman teenagers who have joined a team of Young Avengers as Wiccan and Speed. Despite having never met until their teens, the boys are virtually identical twins except for their hair color, with Tommy's being prematurely white like Quicksilver and Magneto. When the Super-Skrull heard their names (identical to Wanda's twins), he simply assumed they were the children of the Scarlet Witch mentioned in Skrull intelligence file. Upon hearing the full story of Wanda's children, Wiccan has decided that he and Speed must be the reincarnated souls of Thomas and William. His conclusions have yet to be confirmed [Young Avengers #10-12]
Another child of the Scarlet Witch who has appeared in the main Marvel universe is Nocturne, a former member of the dimension-hopping Exiles who has since been stranded on our Earth. Talia Josephine Wagner is the daughter of Wanda Maximoff and Kurt Wagner, Nightcrawler, from her own dimension. Not much has been revealed about her history, but apparently her parents remained active members of the Avengers and X-Men in her reality. So far, Nocturne has only interacted with Nightcrawler and the X-Men, and has yet to meet the 616 versions of her mother’s side of the family.
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