The Mercurial Marvel: A Quicksilver Retrospective

At long last, my Quicksilver retrospective. Marvel’s most prominent speedster, and one of its most embattled characters as well, both in-universe and in real life. His beginnings were as a village boy named Pietro Maximoff, growing up alongside his twin sister Wanda. His normal East European upbringing came to an end, though, when both he and Wanda discovered their mutant abilities --- his being incredible speed, hers essentially being to cast “hexes” inflicting bad luck upon others -- and were nearly lynched for them by the other villagers. They were rescued by the self-styled master of magnetism, Magneto, who used this to recruit them into his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, a terrorist outfit made up of mutants who eschewed the X-Men’s and their mentor Charles Xavier’s more peaceable methods of trying to achieve parity with humans and aimed to beat humanity into either submission or extinction. While serving in the Brotherhood, Pietro and Wanda, under the names Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, fought the X-Men on multiple occasions, though it didn’t take long for them to eventually tire of Magneto’s terroristic ways and desire something better out of life than fighting for a cause they only signed onto because they owed Magneto their lives.

This would lead Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch to join the Avengers, which at the time included Captain America and archer-turned-criminal-turned-hero Hawkeye for a group of four nicknamed “Cap’s Kooky Quartet.” While there was plenty of friction between the twins and the other Avengers, mostly on the end of the abrasive and impatient Quicksilver, who particularly detested Hawkeye’s interest in the Scarlet Witch, they ultimately proved themselves valuable and worthy Avengers. In this time, Quicksilver would find love with Crystalia Amaquelin, the second daughter of the royal family of Inhumans, a once-hidden offshoot of the human race created through genetic tampering by scientists of the extraterrestrial Kree Empire seeking to create living weapons out of ancient humans thousands of years ago. They would even marry and have a child together named Luna, who thanks to the unique intermixing of mutant and Inhuman DNA was effectively a normal human with no noticeable superhuman traits, though their relationship sadly didn’t last.

After a certain period, Quicksilver left the Avengers and joined up with X-Factor, a special team of mutants sponsored by the government to police rogue mutants, led by Alex Summers, the younger brother of the X-Men’s longtime leader Scott “Cyclops” Summers and himself a mutant with the power to absorb and convert ambient cosmic energy into powerful plasma blasts. While in X-Factor, he would receive psychological counseling from Leonard “Doc” Samson, a gamma-powered superhuman who had retained most of his human features and intelligence, and in that session, he admitted to Doc Samson that his impatient and brash attitude was largely born of frustration at living in a world where everyone was so much slower than him. As it turned out, it wasn’t just Quicksilver’s body that was super-fast, but his mind that also functioned at superhuman speeds in order to keep up with and coordinate his bodily motions. Thanks to that unique aspect of his abilities, he was effectively stuck in a world where everyone was the slow person holding up the line at the ATM.

Quicksilver would eventually rejoin the Avengers for a time, serving alongside his sister the Scarlet Witch who had continued on as an Avenger, only for a tragic incident to forever alter the course of their lives and the lives of their fellow Avengers . . . and fellow mutants. Years earlier, Wanda Maximoff had fallen in love with the synthetic being known as the Vision, and though he returned those feelings, a sticking point between them was Wanda’s longing for a child, something the synthetically constructed Vision couldn’t naturally give her. When he suggested that she use her powers to create children of her own, she took that to heart, only for it to later be revealed that those children had actually been created from fragments of a powerful demon’s soul, and that demon, known as Mephisto, took those fragments back inside himself, killing her children. Wanda had been so distraught that it had taken her powers to a whole new magnitude of potency that nearly ended the world, and she had to be made to forget about her lost children to regain her sanity. When an offhanded remark from the Wasp caused her to remember those children . . . she decided she would do whatever it took to bring them back, and it led to tapping into dark arcane forces that ultimately warped her mind and drove her absolutely insane. This would also lead to the destruction of the Avengers team and the deaths of several Avengers, including the Vision.

While Pietro was horrified by what Wanda had done, he was still protective of her, and when he found out that the Avengers and the X-Men were planning on killing her for the threat she posed to the world with her expanded powers, his desperation to save her led him to a rather foolish plan. The plan was to convince Wanda to use her powers to create a perfect world where the Avengers and the X-Men could be happy, and that creation was a world where mutants were dominant over humanity and Magneto, who had been revealed years ago to be their father, was the ruler of this world. However, the illusion-made-real came undone when the Avengers and X-Men regained their memories of the world as it used to be and hunted down Magneto out of the belief that he had influenced Wanda to alter the world in this way. Pietro, believing they had come to kill Wanda, lashed out in fury against them, employing his super-speed to an extreme that had never been seen in him before. Realizing what Pietro had done, Magneto struck out at his son in rage for him exploiting his sister’s condition in such a way, which resulted in his death, only for Wanda to use her powers to bring him back and then curse their father for rejecting and neglecting his children in favor of his crusade for mutant ascendancy. Her curse upon Magneto resulted in the world being restored to its original state . . . with nearly every mutant in said world stripped of their powers, even though many of those mutants needed their powers to even live in the first place.

Pietro was one of the unlucky many that had lost his mutant abilities, and he was so despondent over the loss of his speed that he attempted to kill himself on several occasions. Eventually, he settled upon another desperate plan, to steal the Inhumans’ Terrigenesis Crystals, the source of the Inhumans’ abilities by way of triggering a reaction within their DNA, and use them to regain his mutant abilities. While he didn’t quite succeed in regaining his abilities, he did gain the power to manipulate time by vibrating his molecules at extreme speeds, which he could even tweak to simulate his former super-speed abilities. He then sought to spread this to other mutants that had also lost their powers thanks to his sister’s actions, only for it to result in their lost powers being amplified to such a degree that they were painfully uncontrollable. Unwilling to accept that his actions had brought more harm than good, Pietro even went so far as to expose Luna, his daughter, to the mists produced by the Terrigenesis Crystals, which also gave her uncontrolled superhuman abilities, horrifying her mother Crystal to the point that she completely renounced her former relationship with Pietro.

At some point, Pietro found himself locked up in a jail for vagrancy or disturbing the peace, and during that time, he had feverish dreams and hallucinations, only to awaken from them with his original mutant powers of super-speed somehow restored and amplified. Setting out to become a hero again, Pietro resumed using the name Quicksilver, and in the wake of the recently revealed and defeated infiltration of Earth by shape-shifting alien impostors called Skrulls, used that infiltration to clear himself of his recent misdeeds, attributing them to his own Skrull impersonator. Having found out about this duplicity, Crystal and Luna made it very clear that neither of them wished to have anything to do with Pietro anymore, something that would eventually haunt him in a big way.

While Quicksilver would make efforts to repair his name and reputation, it wasn’t until he joined a new incarnation of X-Factor led by his half-sister Lorna Dane, another daughter of Magneto who shared Magneto’s power over magnetism, that he found the strength to admit to his crimes. In the public unveiling of the new X-Factor, as this team was sponsored by Serval Industries, Pietro admitted to the world that it had been him who had given Wanda the impetus for her actions that had resulted in the near-elimination of the mutant race and him who had committed crimes against the Inhumans by stealing their Terrigenesis Crystals and using them on mutants that had lost their powers and even on his own daughter who had been born without powers. This actually regained him Luna’s respect, and even Crystal began to look upon him less harshly than she had before, hinting at possible reconciliation between them.

However, Quicksilver’s life would take a whole new turn during the AXIS event, which saw heroes and villains flipped into their opposite moral alignments by the actions of a Red Skull that had merged his brain matter with the now-deceased Charles Xavier’s in order to exploit Xavier’s telepathic abilities for his cause of exterminating mutants. In that event, the Scarlet Witch, who had been working to redeem herself since relinquishing the dark forces that had driven her so insane in the first place, sought revenge on Doctor Doom, who had been revealed earlier to have been behind her fall from grace in an attempt to gain the godlike arcane powers she’d sought for himself, and turned her ire on Quicksilver and Magneto when they attempted to stop her. Casting a hex intended to strike down her family, all three of them were shocked to find that Quicksilver was the only one affected, which meant that Magneto wasn’t their father like they’d all believed for so many years. However, this revelation actually pleased the Scarlet Witch, as she had grown to detest Magneto for the role she felt he played in the tragedies of her life since discovering she was a mutant. Ultimately, the heroes and villains who had been “flipped” would find themselves reverted to their original moral alignments, leaving Pietro and Wanda to hunt for their true origins, the subject of the Uncanny Avengers title relaunched some months ago this year.

There you have it. Quicksilver. The man, the hero, the villain, the Avenger, the legend.