SCARLET WITCH

Wanda Maximoff has commanded rooms full of Avengers, but only once was a whole headquarters wired around her power. When the West Coast Avengers were disbanded in 1994, Iron Man split from the main team's philosophy and founded Force Works in Ventura, California — and he handed field leadership of the new team to the Scarlet Witch.

The team's founding idea was prevention rather than rescue. Inside their smart building, the Works, a system called the Chaos Computer — run through the holographic computer PLATO — fed streams of incoming data into probability models, and Wanda's hex power was expected to interface with those predictions, flagging where a crisis would ignite so Force Works could arrive before it did. A superhero team, in effect, taking its marching orders from one woman's luck, calculated.

The experiment's first outing in Force Works #1 (1994) set the tone for everything after: Kree raiders attacked, Wanda's power accidentally pulled the alien warrior Century to Earth mid-battle, and Wonder Man was believed killed saving the planet before the team had even finished introducing itself. Wanda kept the leader's chair anyway — fending off the Scatter, reasserting her authority when Stark countermanded her in Houston, and holding the group together until it finally folded and she returned to the Avengers.