10 Unbelievable Retcons That Changed Comics For The Better

Magneto is the father of Pietro and Wanda Maximoff. It is an ingrained truth that has existed for the past 40 years. It was never really stated explicitly until the Vision & Scarlet Witch series, but since the mid-seventies, they have been Magneto's children.

Magneto’s wife, Magda, had fled to the Wundagore Mountains after her husband had developed strange powers. She gives birth to her twins but abandons them days later. The midwife attempts to give the kids to Robert Frank, the costumed speedster Whizzer, after his own wife and child die during birth, but he ran off so they were given to the Maximoff family in a local village. It has been a staple of their characters for so long that even in 2014, when that was revamped yet again so that the High Evolutionary gave them their powers and they were just born of dirt-farming peasants, it was met with a huge fan backlash.

However, originally, Robert Frank was there with a real purpose. Instead of running off because his own wife and child died in a separate incident, the twins were his! In Giant-Size Avengers #1, the story is told to Wanda, as the Whizzer lay dying in Avengers Mansion. His wife, the Golden Age hero Miss America, gave birth on Wundagore Mountain, but died days after giving birth to his twins and fled in grief at the loss of his wife. This was the status quo for a couple of years until the addition of Magneto tied Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver much closer to the extremely popular X-Men book.