Scarlet Witch #2 // Review
Viv Vision isn’t exactly Wanda’s daughter. She isn’t exactly...not...her daughter, though. Viv has come through the Last Door to find Wanda is there to help her. She’s the artificially intelligent offspring of Wanda’s ex-husband and a woman programmed with her brainwaves. She’s having nightmares. Wanda will help Viv deal with them by entering her dreams in the second issue of Scarlet Witch. Writer Steve Orlando and artist Sara Pichelli journey into the dreams of an android (which don’t involve electric sheep). The issue also features a back-up story in which writer Stephanie Williams and artist Chris Allen take Wanda and Storm out on a quest for supplies.
Viv doesn’t know what the problem is. Given the nature of her intelligence, powerful negative dreams could completely destroy her. And so it is that Wanda must enter the dreams of her pseudo-daughter and confront the daughter of the supernatural force known as Nightmare. Wanda is powerful with magic, but the dream world isn’t one that she’s native to...and she’s up against a master of the dream kingdom who battles on her own ground. Then Ororo visits Wanda’s shop only to get enlisted to aid her in collecting something rare from a powerful being in the form of a horse.
Orlando could easily treat Wanda like some kind of Doctor Strange analog. Any magic user in the Marvel Universe who is helping people out is going to run the risk of doing that. Thankfully, Wanda comes across as very much her own wizard in a story that has deep links to her personal life. The actual conflict between Scarlet Witch and Nightmare’s daughter is cleverly rendered as Wanda uses her own greatest emotional distress as a unique weapon. By contrast, Williams’s team-up between Wanda and Ororo is intriguing, but it lacks some depth. Still...it IS fun to see Storm using a bit of magic.
The fantasy and the horror of Orlando’s story find some inventive rendering on the part of artist Sara Pichelli. The artist could have gotten a little carried away with conjuring the nightmares of an AI, but to her credit, she lets it have its own space without overwhelming the central drama. Above all, the drama is maintained in beautifully vivid emotional portrayals of Wanda, a supernatural villain, and a young woman who just happens to be an android. The much more dramatic energy of Wanda’s quest with Storm has a chance to be much more traditionally dynamic. Thankfully, Allen’s art delivers some of the drama of their story as well.
The Last Door continues to be a fun idea, but the conflict at the center of the main story is more than interesting enough to carry itself without the narrative gimmick. Families get hopelessly complicated in the Marvel Universe, and Wanda’s family is one of the more complicated by far. Orlando manages to deliver a fun adventure that also provides a remarkably intimate look into the psyche of a casually dark practitioner of magic.
