SCARLET WITCH

In 1979 the Avengers watched two of their own simply switch off. Wanda Maximoff and her twin Pietro collapsed into a state their doctors could only describe as neither dead nor alive — no heartbeat worth trusting, no decay, no waking. The explanation was sitting in a Bowery flophouse in Avengers #181–#182 (1979): an elderly doll-maker named Django Maximoff had carved two marionettes from the magical wood of Mount Wundagore, and the twins' life forces were inside them, rattling around in enchanted cages.

Django was no stranger with a grudge. He and his wife Marya had raised the twins in a Roma caravan after losing children of their own, and he had come to America convinced the famous Avengers were the babies he had lost. Channeling his power through a relic called the Nivashi Stone, he had pulled the twins' souls into the figures he had whittled in their likeness. When the Avengers came to take them back, he conjured an illusory battlefield and animated mannequins to defend his family — until Vision destroyed the Stone and the twins woke in their own bodies.

The dolls were not done with Wanda. Months later, on Wundagore itself, the elder god troubling her past seized control of her body, and Django reached for the same trick in reverse: he called her soul back into her marionette, the Avengers lent their combined will to the transfer, and the possessing essence was shunted into the little wooden figure instead. Pietro hurled the doll into the mountainside and Wanda buried it under an avalanche of her own making. Django's heart gave out during that final working, and the twins buried the doll-maker in the foothills, among the trees his carvings came from.