You've got to be kidding, Marvel.
After all these years, after all they've done at Magneto's side — and endured thanks to his vendettas, after "Avengers Disassembled" and House of M and The Children's Crusade and all the rest... Now you're telling us Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver aren't mutants after all?
You can't be serious!
In Rick Remender and Daniel Acuña's Uncanny Avengers #4, hitting store shelves next week, Marvel is effectively retconning decades of continuity to alter Wanda and Pietro Maximoff's origins as mutants. In the comic, as previewed by Yahoo, villain the High Evolutionary explains that Magneto, aka Erik Lensher, was never their father, and they do not carry the mutant gene. The High Evolutionary himself claims responsibility for giving them their powers, as part of his eternal search for genetic perfection.
The entire story arc is pretty sci-fi wonky, taking place on some "Counter-Earth" that involves lots of genetic experimentation or some such. A recent issue planted the doubt that maybe Magneto wasn't the twins' father after all, so they set out to find out the truth, and their journey lead them here, to the High Evolutionary.
Until now, the Maximoff's backstory pitted them as the adopted children of Romanian parents Django and Marya Maximoff, with their true lineage as Magneto's offspring revealed later. That itself was a retcon from their earliest origins as the Maximoff's actual children. Now, Mr. H.E. says that nope, Magneto was in no way involved with their parentage, that he took them as infants, experimented on them, gave them their powers, was disappointed with the results, and then gave them back to their real parents. So Magneto's involvement was entirely arbitrary.
Oooooookay.
What with the recent releases of dual Quicksilvers in Avengers and X-Men movies, the timing of this seems awfully convenient. As both mutants and Avengers, Marvel Studios and 20th Century Fox shared the rights to them, which lead to the odd occurrence of two different Quicksilvers in X-Men: Days of Future Past and Avengers: Age of Ultron. (In Avengers, where Marvel can't use mutants of any kind, their history was changed so that they gained their powers from Hydra's experimentation with Loki's staff.)
So suddenly, in a climate when relations between Marvel and Fox are rumored to be frosty (to put it mildly), Marvel has changed the twins' origins yet again — in a way that's impossible to see as anything but in Marvel's own favor. Just like in Age of Ultron, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are no longer mutants.
Subtle move, Marvel. Real subtle. Doubtful anyone will even notice...
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