After years of neglect (and some would say misuse), the Scarlet Witch has been given an embarrassment of riches under the hand of writer Steve Orlando. Beginning with 2023’s solo series, Wanda Maximoff has seen more consistent care and development than nearly any other Avenger over the last three years.
With a home base of sorts in Lotkill, New York, a protégé of sorts in Darcy Lewis, and an ever-cycling cast of characters who are important to her – including her brother Quicksilver and her father figure’s clone, Joeseph – Wanda has been allowed to flourish as a much more rounded (and much less insane) character. Her personality has been established, her powers have been explored, and she’s developed a self-sustaining narrative, mostly free of the larger Marvel continuity of line-wide events (at least until the upcoming Sorcerer Supreme series). All this has been done by a sort of checking in and airing out of those guest characters: her relationships have been redefined and smoothed out so that her long troubled publication history can be put behind her.
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That care continues in The Vision & the Scarlet Witch: Fear the Reaper, a miniseries which pairs Wanda with her ex-husband on a surprisingly cosmic, horrific adventure. Wanda has no bigger dangling plot thread than Vision, a character she was all but synonymous with throughout the 1970s and 80s.
But the book hasn’t just concerned itself with reestablishing Wanda and Vision’s relationship; it also wants to do some of its trademark reestablishment of Vision’s life, which has been left a bit ambiguous in the larger Marvel universe since the landmark 2015 Vision series by Tom King and Gabriel Hernández Walta. That book saw Vision with a wife and children, and left that family devastated by his “brother”, the Grim Reaper.
To tidy Wanda, the book seeks to tidy Vision. The book’s primary villain is the Reaper (after a fashion), and what remains of Vision’s family – his daughter Viv and their dog, Sparky – even make a brief cameo so that we readers know that they remain a major part of his life.
It’s the lingering love between the book’s protagonists that takes the lion share of the spotlight, however. Though Orlando’s ongoing Wanda epic has been about cleaning her up and making her less problematic, Fear the Reaper retains that dramatic wrinkle: however adamantly past their relationship they are, Vision and Wanda are still carry torches for one another.
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With a great deal of care – and a heavy helping of cosmic horror and undead villainy – Fear the Reaper stuns with every issue. Dazzling cover after cover by the fantastic Russell Dauterman draw readers into a world just as expertly realized by artists Lorenzo Tammetta and Jacopo Camagni, who capture the characters with an almost sleek lushness of line. Everyone looks vivid, animated, and appealing. The colors by Ruth Redmond sing, grounded in Lotkill but ethereal in the book’s otherworldly Graverealm.
The Vision & the Scarlet Witch: Fear the Reaper continues the great work of Wanda Maximoff, and it does it with style and heart. This has been a delightful and endearing reestablishment of an important, long neglected character and her loved ones, and we can be thankful that that work continues with as much urgency, care, and joy as it does.
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