You can’t even mention the name Scarlet Witch without alerting pretty much everyone on Earth. Losing those kids is what made her insane in the first place during Avengers: Disassembled, so Wiccan and Speed decide to seek her out. The Children’s Crusade posits that there may actually be a reason for at least two of them to share similarities – the speedster and the mage both realize they’re identical twins, and may just be the reincarnated sons of The Scarlet Witch and Vision. These guys really felt like dorky knock-offs of their adult versions. For whatever reason this particular team never really spoke to me, though I’ve enjoyed other YA, teen superhero teams in the past (see: New X-Men, Avengers Academy, Generation Hope).

Now I’ve never really read much Young Avengers. In this special nine-issue limited series that ran from 2010 to 2012, Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung brought Scarlet Witch back to the forefront using the Young Avengers. Instead we were treated to a whirlwind of cascading events, and the Scarlet Witch was mostly forgotten about, though her “No More Mutants” legacy forever altered the X-Men. I’ll give credit to Marvel for at least not doing this story like a year or two after House of M. In this case, the sobering saga of the Scarlet Witch. But Avengers: The Children’s Crusade represents a lot of what annoys me with Marvel comics – time-travel, retcons, and do-overs that let them “fix” any formerly awesome scenes and situations that had years-long revelations. I dig it quite a bit, despite lots of missteps. Big events, major character deaths (which were never permanent but hey), and years-long fallout and regime changes became the norm.

Issues: Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #1-9Īvengers: Disassembled in 2004, followed by House of Min ’05, kicked off the modern Marvel era of story-telling. Like my gaming Final Thoughts, this will be full of spoilers. Thanks in large part to trade paperbacks and the digital convenience of Marvel Unlimited I can make relatively quick progress, and I’ll write down my Final Thoughts for each collection here on my blog.

Thus begins my grand catching-up of the last ten years of Marvel comics, events and stories. I grew up a big fan of X-Men and other superheroes but haven’t really kept up since the 90s.

With Marvel’s popular and successful foray into films with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I’ve finally decided to get back into comics.

Avengers the childrens crusade