Quicksilver: Going Nowhere Fast

When it comes to deciding which titles to do for my index, it is some times a little more complex than “do all the Spider-Man books from the 90s”. Sometimes, a family of books are a little more harder to define, or there are periods where certain characters or groups weren’t associated to the family that now are. Do I include the villain solo books? How far the spin-off rabbit hole do I go? Doing the Avengers and related titles is a lot of that. Like, for example, when I the 70s, would I include the Invaders as part of the Avengers index? Captain America was a member of both teams. Or what about Hero for Hire/Luke Cage/Powerman? He wasn’t an Avenger in the 1970s, but he will be in the early 2000s. Ms. Marvel might qualify because she became an Avenger in the 70s and so on. So there are certain lines that I draw. Maybe I’ll change those opinions as other segments of the index get fleshed out, they might now. I can’t really say.

The 1990s were a lot easier because the relation between books were a lot more cut and dry. The Avengers and related characters were at a low point in their popularity so there weren’t that many spin-off title or related series on offer in this decade.

The only title that gave me momentary pause was Quicksilver. This title was ran for 13 issues in 1997 and 1998. It was part of a group of post-Onslaught series that were supposed to fill the gap left by the Avengers and Fantastic Four who were divorced from the Marvel Universe for Heroes Reborn. This was an interesting period as it felt like Marvel was taking risks to see what new titles would work or not. So you had solo books Quicksilver, Ka-Zar, and Maverick and then team books like Heroes for Hire, Alpha Flight, and the Thunderbolts. (Spoilers: Thunderbolts was the only book to achieve on-going success, while the others fizzed out after a year or two)

So when it came to Quicksilver, did I consider it an X-Men book, or an Avengers book. The series came out during a period of time when Quicksilver was believed to be a mutant and the son of Magneto, facts that would turn out to be deceptions or lies in later years thanks what was going on in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the desire to have the comics mirror the movies more closely. Long story. The way this series was marketed was certainly leaning heavily on the X-Men relation. Remember this was the late 90s when the X-Men were at the height of their popularity in no small part thanks to the popular Saturday morning cartoon. The recurring villains in the book are regular X-Men baddies. When it came to footnotes, the letterer would use little X logos (as was the fashion with X-Men titles at the time) rather than an astrix.

That all said, I don’t really consider this an X-Men book. Despite his origins and early appearances being in X-Men, Quicksilver has more associated with the Avengers since he became a member of the team back in Avengers #16. I’ll probably add this series to my X-Men index in whatever distant future update I do down the road (When will that be? 2025? Who can say.)

Anyway, enough justifying it’s inclusion in the Avengers family of books. What can I say about the series? It’s…. okay? I mean it’s not bad, but it just seems to have very little commitment to what it’s doing. The first six issues were written by Tom Payer and the rest of the series was done by John Ostrander and Joe Edkin. You got art mostly by Derec Aucoin, but there are many hands doing the art on this series to the point where it doesn’t get its own unique look. Too many cooks and all that.

Most of the series focuses on the High Evolutionary and the New Men and a new element called Istope E. You’ve got Exodus and the Acolytes as the main bad guys who are going after the Evolutionary and his creations because they are viewed as an effrontery to the mutant race. You also see a brief reconciliation between Quicksilver and his estranged wife Crystal after Onslaught. However, none of these ideas really seem to stick around long enough to really build any weight. I think that’s the problem with this series. It’s not given a lot of room to really stretch out and build on the ideas it is presenting. There is also a subplot involving what might be a version of Quicksilver from the future, which is never fully explored. The book was cancelled after 13 issues, so none of these concepts are every really visited.

I think it would be interesting to revisit this period and delve into it more a little deeply, particularly since we’ve now been revealed that Quicksilver isn’t a mutant and actually got his powers from the High Evolutionary. Even if this is rolled into a brief flashback that explains how this was all part of his deception to keep the truth about Pietro’s powers a secret. Feels like something Marvel needs to flesh out. They just kind of went “Pietro and Wanda were never mutants” and just didn’t bother going back and explaining all the discrepancies other than some surface layer shit.

I’ve said it before elsewhere in my index, but it bares repeating and I hope someone out there at Marvel picks up on this and rolls with it: If Pietro and Wanda weren’t Magneto’s children, then the fate of Magda Eisenhardt is an interesting story to go back and re-explore. Did she ever show up at Wundagore Mountain? If she was actually pregnant, what happened to those children? Is Magda truly alive or dead? These are all very interesting questions that I think a competend writer can go back and tell if they put their mind to it. Personally, I’d like to see that Magda did have kids and they’ve been secreted away somewhere and you could do a story where they finally appear and go after Pietro and Wanda for stealing their family legacy for so many years. That’d be an interesting tale to tell if you ask me.

Anyway, there isn’t much else I can really say about this book. It’s decent and an interesting read from a oft forgotten nook of the late 90s Marvel Universe. If you ever wanted to see the High Evolutionary devolve into an ape man this is the book for you, I guess?