Bridgett: With our Year of the Month featuring the last time Wanda’s children appeared in the MCU and Agatha All Along teasing a character who may or may not be some version of Billy Kaplan, we thought it was a good time to revisit the MCU’s Maximoff twins and their comics counterparts.
We should probably start with the comics, and that means we should start with a very quick summary of the relevant differences between comics Wanda and Vision and their MCU counterparts. One of the big obvious ones is that, at least so far, the MCU hasn’t had many retcons; “retroactive continuity” means whatever you thought about a character is now incorrect. Wanda has been hit with the retcon stick more than once; we’re not going to summarize all that crap because we haven’t got all day, but let’s stick to the basics:
- Wanda and Pietro have always been twins but they were originally children of Magneto.
- They stopped being the children of Magneto (and mutants) in the Ike Permutter era because Perlmutter was mad that he didn’t have the TV and movie rights to the X-Men.
- I am still waiting for them to undo this retcon.
- Vision has always been an android but his comics origin is much less straightforward than the MCU.
- Wanda and Vision had a much more long-lived relationship and were in fact married for years.
Am I missing anything?
Anthony: I think that’s everything that’s easily digestible, before you start getting into events like M Day and various Young Avengers shenanigans. (Pour one out for Iron Lad. That would have been hilarious.)
Bridgett: Well, let’s get to it, then. We’ll start with the easy stuff, which is summarizing the twins in the MCU.
The MCU: The babies are real, except when they aren’t
In WandaVision, Wanda’s mental breakdown following the death of Vision resulted in her magically transforming the New Jersey town of Westview into a fantasy paradise based on the sitcoms Wanda had loved as a child. While living in Westview, Wanda experienced a TV-friendly pregnancy and gave birth to two adorable children: Billy and Tommy (Wanda and Vision each named a boy). The children “aged up” twice and were mostly played by two adorable preteens. In what turned out to be a brief-lived attack of conscience, Wanda let go of Westview and her illusions, and the boys disappeared in the process.
So they were never real, they went away, too bad, what a shame.
But then we get to Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Wanda has been reading from the Evil Book of Evil Ideas (fine, the Darkhold) and realizes that her twins are alive and well in a different corner of the multiverse. They’re being raised by a loving, non-magical Wanda, who appears to be a single parent. Wanda once again has to let them go, but this time they presumably will be free to live their lives as ordinary kids with an ordinary mom.
That is, so far, the last time we’ve seen Billy and Tommy in the MCU. A tragic what might have been, really.
To understand why people won’t shut up about them, then, we have to go back to the comics.
I think I speak for everyone when I say the most pressing question I have is: how do Billy and Tommy wind up as built-in hand puppets on a demon?
Anthony Pizzo
The comics: the twins are fake, and also real
Anthony: I’m curious what the distinction is, since it kind of sounds like the MCU origin and the comics origin are similar, in that both times it seems like Wanda just magicked up a pregnancy.
Now…where should we start with this one?
Bridgett: Yes. Sort of.
In the comics, Wanda is exposed to incredible magical power and (in part due to the urgings of the spirit of Agatha Harkness) decides to channel it into a pregnancy. She has a much more conventional pregnancy, in superhero terms, and Dr. Strange delivers two twins, named Thomas and William after figures important to the creation of Vision.
Comics stuff happens, and Vision is dismantled and re-assembled. He loses his memories and his emotions for a while. Wanda turns evil-ish and gets better, but her relationship with Vision is a mess. (Soap operas have nothing on comics.) Agatha Harkness (who was not actually dead; if you’re starting to count retcons, stop now, it’s bad for your health) comes back around this time and tells Wanda that whoops, your kids never actually existed. It was a “hysterical pregnancy.”
Several doctoral dissertations could probably be written about the way male writers have handled female power, starting with Wanda and Jean Grey (but not ending there).
Anyway, this probably leads to an obvious question. You may have many questions by now.
Anthony: I think I speak for everyone when I say the most pressing question I have is: how do Billy and Tommy wind up as built-in hand puppets on a demon?
Bridgett: Well, because baby William and Thomas weren’t real, they had to be something, right? John Byrne, for whatever reason, decided “a real good collective hallucination” wasn’t good enough.
Honestly I have a lot of questions about what Byrne was doing. The answer is probably “cocaine,” it was the 80s.
Anyway, Byrne had decided that really Wanda made the twins with essences of Mephisto, the demon lord who’s the closest thing to Satan in the Marvel universe. (Note: every once in a while Marvel fans get all excited that Mephisto is coming to the MCU; my guess is this will never happen, because—again—Mephisto is the demon lord who’s the closest thing to Satan in the Marvel universe). Anyway, Mephisto takes his essence back, and then gives it to Master Pandemonium.
Now we are finally at the baby hands.
How much of this whole storyline was influenced by the fact that most of Marvel’s artists couldn’t draw babies? The world may never know.
Anyway, the babies exit stage right, Wanda gets her memories erased, and everything is fine.
Anthony: This is patently untrue, nothing is fine in the Marvel Universe for long.
And after this, Agatha Harkness reminds Wanda that her kids existed, but also weren’t real, which leads to a breakdown and a whole lot of reality rearranging.
Bridgett: Right! I think the quickest way to describe this is that Wanda rejects the Marvel Universe and substitutes her own, where she has a loving family…including her dad Magneto and young Thomas and William, who are young children now. This storyline is a huge influence on WandaVision, obviously. At the end, Professor X snaps her out of it, and she causes even more chaos to the Marvel universe.
But hey, at least there are no more twins now, right?
Right?
Anthony: If that were right then we wouldn’t be here!
Now, this part coming up I do know, since I’ve read Young Avengers. The souls of the twins took another run through death’s revolving door and were reborn to two separate families, though they still look almost identical. (Because magic beats genetics, or something.)
They found each other while the team was being formed and realized that their near-identical looks meant something. Then word got out and certain people had to see this shit for themselves.
Bridgett: I have to pause for half a second here and shout out Allen Heinberg, the co-creator of the Young Avengers, because the re-introduction of Billy and Tommy was so smart. By this time about a decade has passed in real-world time, and Marvel Comics is such a big and populated place that tons of new characters have come and gone. But Heinberg and the rest of the Marvel team are very careful not to tip their hand. The first team is comprised of Eli Bradley (Isaiah Bradley’s grandson), magic guy Billy Kaplan, shapeshifter Teddy Altman, yet another reconstituted Vision and a guy named Iron Lad. They quickly add Kate Bishop and Cassie Lang (Scott Lang’s daughter). Some of these people had obvious connections to legacy heroes, some didn’t, and this was before Ike Perlmutter’s de-mutant-ification of the MCU, so it was easy to believe everyone with random-seeming powers were just mutants. Random mutants were pretty normal for the MCU.
These kids go through a whole arc together and are halfway through the second arc when they break into Juvie for Teens with Superpowers and discover the speedster they’re looking for looks exactly like their teammate Billy. Even they aren’t really sure of the connection for a while.
But yeah, they start getting attention.
Anthony: Oh, wow! I hadn’t realized that so much real-time time had passed! What a magic trick!
And to further praise Heinberg: the majority of the run is excellent work, and he does a great job of sliding these kids into the greater continuity and making it look easy. It’s not just that they’re fun personalities, it’s that they feel like they’ve always belonged.
Bridgett: Yeah, it was very well done. Obviously, the MCU was never going to be able to do that, in part because the cast is much smaller, and in part because that’s the kind of trick you can only get away with once. But it’s definitely one of the reasons a lot of Marvel fans got hyped for the twins pretty early. They’re great characters, their story is wild and fun in a very comics way, and of course the leads of the MCU were not going to get any younger.
…for once, I think the fandom was right on this and the MCU architects were out to lunch.
In the comics themselves, Billy kind of accidentally stops time, people get weird about it for some reason, and a long series of circumstances leads to the team being disbanded. There’s a second Young Avengers run later on, but for the most part Billy and Tommy have appeared off and on in other teams and in other titles; Billy in particular has been around a lot.
Steve Orlando has promised we’ll get Billy and Tommy with Wanda in his current Scarlet Witch run, and that’s exciting.
Anthony: Maybe Steve can fix the inexplicable bullshit of whoever broke up Billy and Teddy off-panel, between books. But I digress, as I’m sure that relationship is a whole other article.
Bridgett: You mean Tommy and David. (Tommy gets the shaft so consistently it would probably also be a whole other article.)
Anthony: Whoops! (it’s a big and busy universe)
Bridgett: That leads us to Billy and Tommy’s current status, or non-status, in the MCU. Joe Locke is playing an unnamed character in Agatha All Along, and there’s a lot of speculation that the MCU might be following the comics’ lead and having Billy (and who knows, maybe Tommy) appear as young adults. It’s too soon to tell, but the most disappointing thing about the way the Young Avengers have been introduced into the MCU is the way the original team has gotten broken up, and somewhat straightened out.
The original Young Avengers team was all around the same age; that seems to have gone straight out the window in the MCU. Kate/Hailee Steinfeld is now significantly older than any of the other young actors playing Young Avengers, including one of her canon love interests, Elijah Richardson’s Eli. The oldest actor playing a canonically queer character so far is Xochitl Gomez at 18. The one member of the founding team we haven’t seen yet is Billy’s canonical love interest, Teddy Altman (who’s a guy in Marvel, and a girl in Grey’s Anatomy; I guess Heinberg really liked the name).
At some point it feels deliberate that all the interracial and queer relationships have been neutralized before half these characters even meet.
(Wanda and Billy are also both explicitly Jewish, Tommy sort of…implicitly so, as Billy ended up parented by a nice Jewish family and Tommy was parented by assholes whose religion I’m not sure has ever been established. Anyway, they all show up in Hanukkah art from time to time.)
Anthony: Oh yeah, that’s all a big enough topic for another conversation, which I think would be fun to have.
So I guess that’s everything anyone could ever want to know about the complicated existence of Billy and Tommy.
Bridgett: Unless one or both of them show up for real in Agatha All Along.
So…stay tuned, I guess!
Further reading:
Marvel on Vision’s destruction and resurrection, with some fun with Master Pandemonium
The Comics History of Billy and Tommy, also on Marvel’s official site
Tommy meeting Northstar from scans_daily.
