This is "Walkin' Backwards," a new feature where I look into how superheroes who turned to villainy were walked back from their heel turn and turned into superheroes once more.

Scarlet Witch is obviously a bit of an odd exception, considering that she BEGAN life as a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. So, I mean, when you call yourself an evil mutant, villainy is a bit of an accepted thing, right? However, in the case of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver (ESPECIALLY Scarlet Witch), she really was not evil at all. She was just sort of stuck working for Magneto because he saved their lives and they felt obligated to work for him. They actively turned on him a couple of times early on when he wanted to do some outright villainous stuff. Within a year, they had left the team all together and joined the superhero team, the Avengers. So they really were never outright villains.

At first, of course.

You see, when John Byrne took over West Coast Avengers with issue #42 (inks by Mike Machlan), he pretty much instantly turned the book into "mess with Scarlet Witch's mind every month."

In that first issue, Scarlet Witch's husband, the Vision, is kidnapped...

When they finally find him in the next issue, it is really bad news for her...

In West Coast Avengers #47, the Vision is "fixed," but his personality is different and he no longer loves Wanda...

Making things worse, in the middle of all of this, Scarlet Witch's kids keep disappearing. This finally comes to a head in West Coast Avengers #51, when Master Pandemonioum shows up and says that they are parts of his soul...

He's ultimately defeated, but the kids are now gone, as Agatha Harkness explains...

This would naturally mess with anyone's head, right?

Then she was kidnapped to be the bride of Set during the Marvel crossover event, Atlantis Atacks. Once that was over, she was flat out catatonic, as seen in Avengers West Coast #53...

However, her father, Magneto (at least she thought he was his father at the time and, let's be frank, he'll obviously turn out to be her father in the future, as well - it's only a matter of time) had her in his custody and he whisper dark nothings in her ear and she eventually turned evil in Avenger West Coast #55...

Damn, Byrne sure drew a very attractively evil Scarlet Witch, right?

The next issue is the infamous "Wanda does something messed up to Wonder Man, but we don't know what except we know it is definitely not oral because they edited the panel to make sure her hair is visible so we could not assume that it was oral as we would all obviously assume it was oral otherwise and now the edited panels make the whole scene make no real sense as really, what the heck is she doing if it is not oral?" issue...

She is totally in on the "evil mutant" thing now and it seems like her brother is with her, as well...

In reality, Quicksilver is working with the heroes against Magneto, but we never get to see how Byrne would have played that out, as after a battle in the next issue when Iron Man shows up to help save his teammates, everything is cut off as Byrne was off the book in the middle of the story.

Then there were two fill-in issue before Roy and Dann Thomas could get up to speed on being the new writers on the book. See how they resolved everything in their first issue, Avengers West Coast #60...

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The Avengers get a rematch in the issue (drawn by the new art team of Paul Ryan and Danny Bulanadi) against Scarlet Witch and Magneto, but Wanda begins to act strange...

We then learn that she is really the puppet of Immortus!

The next issue shows that Immortus has manipulated events so that Wanda was so fragile that she would snap and he could then basically take over her mind...

In the final part of the story, however, she breaks free of his control by giving up the new powers he gave her to help him take down his Time masters...

So she was back to normal and her turn to villainy was all Immortus' doing and not hers. A neat trick by a writing team that had very little notice to resolve a high profile storyline!

Okay, folks, feel free to suggest more examples of this sort of thing! Obscure ones, famous ones, whatever! Send your suggestions to brianc@cbr.com!