The Sad Fates Of Marvel Super Heroes’ Children

 Thomas and William Maximoff, sons of the Scarlet Witch and the Vision

Traumatic events: Never quite real to begin with, revealed to be missing shards of Mephisto

Status: Absorbed back into Mephisto, then reincarnated as different people

You know, maybe we all should have seen this one coming from a mile away. Since the Vision was a synthezoid, he couldn’t really conceive children with the Scarlet Witch. That is, until writers decided that maybe Wanda’s mutant power to make really unlikely things happen (back in the days before subsequent writers used it to explain just about everything) could make her pregnant with their children. And I’ll admit, they doubled down on the unlikelihood by making them twins. Well played.

First Billy and Tommy were fused into becoming the arms of Master Pandemonium in a comic whose cover gave me nightmares as a kid.

That wasn’t quite bad enough, so later it was revealed that they were simply lost aspects of Mephisto. Yes, the being that rules a portion of the underworld and has some of the citizens of the Marvel Universe believing he’s the biblical Devil.

The only really cool thing the boys had going for them during their sort-of-lives was that their nanny was a friendly witch, Agatha Harkness. She even helped Wanda learn a little more real witchcraft, though it’s debatable whether that turned out to be a good thing given all the unfortunate things she’s been involved with since then. Just little stuff like making most of the world’s mutants disappear.

Speaking of vanishing, that’s what happened to the twins once Mephisto reclaimed what was his. See what I was saying about fates worse than death? Even the subsequent reincarnation of their souls as the young heroes Wiccan and Speed doesn’t quite make up for what happened to them prior.