Snowflake Challenge 2025 #6

[brightknightie]

snowflake_challenge '25:- Share [a] favorite piece of original canon

One favorite is a single page of Marvel Team-up Annual #5 (1982) by Mark Gruenwald (script & "breakdowns"). It's available inside the Thing: The Serpent Crown Affair anthology, as well as digital and the original paper. None of the surrounding story is important to what this page accomplishes for the characters or how it clicked with my imagination (not in c.'82 when it somehow came into the household, possibly for a long car trip, but in c.'84 when I imprinted on it).

• Memory only:
  A bald man and a curly-haired woman in ordinary clothes, together in a dark, crowded movie theater, enjoy Raiders of the Lost Ark. Suddenly, ghostly snakes writhe out of the screen! The woman gasps, recoils, stands, and heads down the row of seats. Only she sees the snakes. Concerned, the man follows her to the lobby, where the lights reveal that his skin is red -- literally, artificially, synthezoid red -- and he asks her if she's all right. As she tells him about the snakes and her suspicions, she gestures and transforms her ordinary clothes into a scarlet and magenta super-hero costume with a swirling cape and peaked headband. "I will come with you," he volunteers. "No," she puts her hand on his arm. "This is a job for the Scarlet Witch. You enjoy the movie. If I'm not back by dawn, gather the Avengers and come running!"


• Double-checking:
  It's one page + one facing panel. The costume transformation is unseen, elided with a "Soon, outside..." transition. And the final lines are actually: "The Scarlet Witch must find out why!" / "You do not want me to come with you?" / "No, my love -- your strength must be kept in reserve. If you do not hear from me within twenty-four hours, notify the Avengers and come running!"

That launched the Scarlet Witch as my favorite superhero. And it made Wanda and Vision not only one of my very few OTPs -- fight me, Marvel -- but an enduring image of a complementary, companionate relationship between healthy adults, as later dwelt on in Steve Englehart's The Vision and the Scarlet Witch Volume 2 limited series (1985-86), which is the basis of Wandavision, despite all the misuses and mischaracterizations since. (Mr. Byrne, you were wrong; Vision is not a toaster; Wanda is not mentally ill for loving him; how could you not see the metaphors? Or did you see and acted to veto?) (DC physically fridges its heroines. Marvel psychologically fridges them.)

Yes, I have wondered whether Jac Schaeffer (head writer of Wandavision; producer of Agatha All Along; sadly no longer attached to the upcoming Visionquest) also imprinted on that page or an equivalent in her own way, in her own time.