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James Revilla
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Posted: 02 October 2010 at 1:31am | IP Logged | 1  

Where you the first person to bring up Wanda and Peter being Magneto's kids or was it something kicking around that you moved on? Also, before this was there even a mention that Magneto might have children? Thanks in advance.

Edited by James Revilla on 02 October 2010 at 1:37am
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John Byrne
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Posted: 02 October 2010 at 5:19am | IP Logged | 2  

The relationship was a classic example of what we used to call "Marvel serendipity". Those little things that turned up from time to time that had not been planned all along, but once they were put in place, really seemed like they had.

I suggested that Magneto be Wanda and Pietro's father, and once the idea was out there, there seemed to be a lot of "evidence" to support it.

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James Revilla
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Posted: 02 October 2010 at 5:22am | IP Logged | 3  

Thanks JB, always nice to hear the back story.
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Tony Midyett
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Posted: 02 October 2010 at 5:23am | IP Logged | 4  

Interesting!  I never knew that you were the one who started that ball rolling, JB.
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Gary Olson
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Posted: 06 October 2010 at 10:47pm | IP Logged | 5  

I remember how Steve Englehart, the Avengers scribe in 1974, was royally pissed off when editor Roy Thomas decided to step in and write a Giant Sized Avengers that established the Whizzer and Miss America as Wanda and Pietro's parents("In the middle of my[Englehart's] ongoing continuity"), and gave Wanda a live-in Dad staying upstairs.

Heck, I was taken aback because we didn't get GSA #1(?) here in Australia, and the first I knew of it, the above, was when the Whizzer was shown watching Pietro's marriage to Crystal in an FF issue, from his bedchamber in Avengers Mansion.. I thought, "What the- ?!"

I never knew the Magneto connection was JB's idea; it's a classic case of serendipity, as he puts it... and a good idea.

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John Byrne
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Posted: 07 October 2010 at 6:50am | IP Logged | 6  

I remember how Steve Englehart, the Avengers scribe in 1974, was royally pissed off when editor Roy Thomas decided to step in and write a Giant Sized Avengers that established the Whizzer and Miss America as Wanda and Pietro's parents("In the middle of my[Englehart's] ongoing continuity"), and gave Wanda a live-in Dad staying upstairs.

••

Unfortunately, that kind of thing happened quite often during the writer/editor days. Roger Stern used to refer to the writer/editor position as a "license to steal", and very often it was. Not in this particular instance, obviously, but there were occasions when writers would use ideas other writers had mentioned an intent to use, and nobody knew it was happening because there was no editorial oversight.

Dark times, at the House of Ideas! Fortunately, without the internet there was no way the o-so-important casual readers would ever be aware of it!

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Flavio Sapha
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Posted: 07 October 2010 at 8:27am | IP Logged | 7  

I vaguely remember this story about the Whizzer being father of Pietro and Wanda...sounded kinda corny to me.

I love Thomas´s work...whenever he can keep nostalgia at bay.

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John Byrne
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Posted: 07 October 2010 at 8:36am | IP Logged | 8  

The biggest problem with the Whizzer being the father of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch was that it meant Pietro was not a mutant! The Whizzer's power had "bred true", producing something closer to speciation than mutation, at least by the loosey-goosey definitions in the Marvel Universe.

That was a problem in and of itself -- there was just enough wiggle room in the definition that some writers had gotten sloppy, and it was increasingly difficult to know who or what really constituted a mutant. This led to much confusion in the readers, too, as witnessed in the letter I received during my FF days, in which the writer referred to the team as his "favorite mutants".

"Mutant" had become interchangable with "superhero". Which was a shame, since Roy had given us the nicely pseudoscientific term "non-mutant variant" to describe folk like the FF, or Spider-Man.

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Carmen Bernardo
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Posted: 07 October 2010 at 10:28am | IP Logged | 9  

     My recollections of Wanda and Pietro started with the Whizzer being their "dad", too.  By the time John was working with Chris Claremont on the X-Men, they started bringing on the heavy hints of Magneto's relationship.  That relationship was made "official" in the Vision and Scarlet Witch mini a few years later.

     I also remember when being a mutant became something of a "cool" thing, as well.  One of the characters whose "revelation" during the late 1980s as one was the Falcon, which made me go "WTF?"  This was in the days before Wolverine really started showing up in both X-books, his own solo series, and every other comicbook selling that month.

     I should've noticed a trend there...

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John Byrne
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Posted: 07 October 2010 at 12:01pm | IP Logged | 10  

My recollections of Wanda and Pietro started with the Whizzer being their "dad", too. By the time John was working with Chris Claremont on the X-Men, they started bringing on the heavy hints of Magneto's relationship.

••

Not quite. The one big "hint" that I put out there happened not in X-MEN, but in an issue of THE AVENGERS. We saw Magneto recuperating on Asteroid M and reviewing some old data files, when an image of his former wife popped up -- and she looked very much like Wanda.

That was as far as I took it, and even with that it came as a complete surprise to Chris. When he asked what the heck was going on, I said "I figured someone like Galactus needed a herald," invoking the way Jack had "sprung" the Silver Surfer on an unknowing Stan. Of course, my advantage here was that X-MEN and AVENGERS had the same editor back then -- Roger Stern. And Rog was totally on board for the Magneto-as-their-Dad retcon.

He was also on board for keeping it one of those "Marvel Secrets" that everybody knows, but is never actually stated in the books in so many words. Later writers decided to just state it outright. An early example of the bleeding obvious becoming a staple of storytelling at Marvel.

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Tshombe K. Hamilton
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Posted: 07 October 2010 at 12:13pm | IP Logged | 11  

Not quite. The one big "hint" that I put out there happened not in X-MEN, but in an issue of THE AVENGERS. We saw Magneto recuperating on Asteroid M and reviewing some old data files, when an image of his former wife popped up -- and she looked very much like Wanda.
......
JB it was in the  pages of the X-Men...#125 I believe...right before the Proteus Saga. That was a shock to me as well
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Adam Hutchinson
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Posted: 07 October 2010 at 12:36pm | IP Logged | 12  


 QUOTE:
The biggest problem with the Whizzer being the father of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch was that it meant Pietro was not a mutant! The Whizzer's power had "bred true", producing something closer to speciation than mutation, at least by the loosey-goosey definitions in the Marvel Universe

That's a neat point. How would you deal with mutants in the Marvel universe having children? (Whizzer wasn't a mutant was he? He's the one who got his powers from Mongoose blood right?)

Would those children be more likely to be mutants? Would they be guranteed to be mutants but with random powers? Or would they be normal humans? Would mutants be sterile like mules?

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