- Name: Pietro Maximoff
- Code Names: Quicksilver
- First Appearance: X-Men #4 (Mar ’64)
- Powers: Super Speed
- Teams Affiliation: The Brotherhood, The Avengers, X-Factor, Knights of Wundagore
About
There is an old tradition in superhero comics for villains to be redeemed and heroes to turn wicked. In the last few years, the Avengers membership has included Sabretooth and Doctor Doom while Captain America became a Nazi. The shifting allegiances are a running gag at this point and when done too much with the same character, it becomes impossibly frustrating to pin motivations down. The constant rotation of heel to face and face to heel turns what was an engaging character beat into a question of why anyone is trusting this guy? All that is said to say this, I have no idea how to characterize Quicksilver.
Pietro Maximoff was born alongside his twin sister on Wundagore Mountain. A cow woman named Bova was the midwife. The twins were left abandoned at the home of the High Evolutionary and kind Bova found a home for them with the Romani couple Django and Marya Maximoff. Pietro traveled with his family through the years and took particular care of his sister Wanda. Anti-Romani villagers attacked the Maximoffs and Pietro used his newly emerged super speed to save Wanda’s life, but only hers. The two struck out on their own, keeping a low profile, but Wanda’s hex magic set a barn ablaze and drew the attention of a mob. Though they feared for their life, the Maximoffs were saved by a strange man in a flowing cape. His name was Magneto and he offered them a new family, a brotherhood of mutants.
The twins were uneasy with Magneto’s rhetoric. He preached mutant superiority, forcing the twins to take mutant names like Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. He enlisted them in his terrorist takeover of Santo Marco, but Quicksilver didn’t want this life for himself or his sister. When Magneto was captured by The Stranger, the twins felt free of their debt to him and set out on their own. Then, known terrorist and member of mutant supremacy group, Quicksilver saw an ad in the paper about the Avengers looking for new members and sent a letter inquiring about admission. More baffling was that the Avengers accepted them!
Now I consider myself an expert on the X-Men, but not so much an expert on a bunch of Avengers comics I haven’t read so we are just going to hit the highlights of his time of an Avenger. Quicksilver was a hotheaded teammate and clashed with his fellow Avengers. He rejoined the Brotherhood for a hot second before coming back to disapprove of his sister’s relationship with the synthezoid Vision. He met and fell in love with the Inhuman Crystal and they soon married with a daughter on the way. They named her Luna and she was a normal human girl, much to the dismay of Pietro. More disappointment followed when he discovered that Magneto was his true birth father.
Quicksilver found purpose as commander of the Inhuman royal militia but that often took him away from his wife and daughter. Crystal began an affair and their marriage crumbled once Pietro found out. In this depressed state, the Inhuman knock off Loki named Maximus the Mad manipulated Pietro to become a villain yet again and terrorize the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the Inhumans. When this was discovered, he returned to Crystal to try and fix their family but there was nothing he could do. They spent more and more time apart, especially when Quicksilver was given an intriguing job opportunity.
Val Cooper enlisted Pietro for the government-sponsored iteration of X-Factor where he was forced into counseling sessions to ensure he was still fit for field duty. He dissected his bad attitude with the world saying that everyone always moves so slow compared to him, the irritation of no one moving at his speed wore him down. He did find it surprisingly refreshing to talk about this with his psychiatrist and continued to work with Doc Samson outside of the mandatory sessions. This new attitude gave him a reason to try and reconcile things with Crystal, he wanted to be there for his daughter Luna. However, her continued infidelity was a bridge too far for Pietro.
Also troubling were the Acolytes, a mutant cult that began worshiping Magneto and wanting Quicksilver to take his father’s side. Pietro was never one for Magneto’s teachings and made it his mission to try and dismantle the new group. It became personal when former Acolyte Fabian Cortez kidnapped Luna in a ploy to stir up problems in Genosha. Cortez was quickly killed by new Acolyte leader Exodus who captured Luna for himself. Quicksilver and Crystal worked together to save their daughter, but Pietro was significantly injured in the assault. He stayed at Avengers Mansion and rejoined the team when he recovered. The reunion was short lived as Quicksilver had to watch Crystal, Wanda, and all his Avengers teammates seemingly give their lives to stop the attack on Onslaught.
He tried to regroup at the X-Mansion but Quicksilver never belonged with the X-Men. Instead, he took Luna to the land of his birth, Wundagore Mountain. He allied himself with the High Evolutionary, who helped Quicksilver battle Exodus and the Acolytes, and soon became the commander of the Knights of Wundagore. When the High Evolutionary turned into a megalomaniac (again) and Crystal returned from the horrible idea that was Heroes Reborn, Quicksilver left Wundagore to find his place in the world.
That place, for the first time in decades, was by his father’s side. Magneto had taken over the war-stricken country of Genosha and Pietro didn’t trust that it would be a civil rule. He tried to be his father’s conscious, but there is no arguing with a despot. He was cast out of Genosha and returned sullenly to the Avengers for a short time. He tried to help his half-sister Polaris after the destruction of Genosha by Cassandra Nova’s wild Sentinel but otherwise seemed content to stay out of the world of super heroics. Only one thing could drag him back into that world, Wanda.
The Scarlet Witch was sick. Her powers had grown uncontrollable and had caused the deaths of several of her Avengers teammates. Magneto and Professor Xavier tried to help her, but even they were unable to give her control. Quicksilver learned that the X-Men and Avengers were in discussions about what to do with Wanda, he feared they would try to kill her. He went to his sweet sister and asked her to reshape reality, to create a world where mutants weren’t hated and feared, where their friends could be happy, where their family could rule. In this world, ruled by the House of Magnus, things seemed alright, however, the Avengers and X-Men began to regain their memories and fought to turn the world back to the way it was. Wanda was overwhelmed by what she had created and set things back with a whisper. “No more mutants.”
Stunned by the loss of his powers and hunted by the Avengers for his role in the masquerade, Quicksilver became a drunken vagrant. He was suicidal and would have killed himself had Crystal not found him and taken him to Attilan. There he became obsessed with the Terrigen Mists, the source of the Inhumans’ powers. He stole them for himself in an effort to regain his speed and repower the mutants of the world. This affront to the Inhuman race lead to Crystal finally annulling their marriage, but it mattered little to Pietro. He helped for a terrorist group filled with former mutants that ran across the new X-Factor Investigations and stayed obsessed with repowering mutants.
He began reflecting on his life and decided he wanted to be a hero again. The Secret Invasion of the Skrull’s was the perfect opportunity for him to save face with the heroic world. He was able to pin all of his crimes on a Skrull but Hank Pym learned the truth. Seeing a kindred spirit looking for redemption, Pym never corrected Quicksilver’s lie and allowed him to join his Mighty Avengers. He followed Pym to the Avengers Academy where he tried to teach the next generation of superheroes to be nothing like him. The Avengers used him as a spy on the Serval Industries corporate X-Factor team and was able to begin reconciling with his daughter Luna. During the events of AXIS, Quicksilver discovered that Magneto wasn’t actually his father in a retcon that scientists have determined was “pretty dumb”. He confronted the High Evolutionary who revealed that Quicksilver wasn’t actually a mutant at all, but instead a genetic experiment on the children of Django and Marya Maximoff. He continues to serve on the Avengers Unity Squad till this day.
Must Read
Look, X-Factor #87 is a really good comic with probably the best Quicksilver scene ever printed. However, credit has to be given to what is arguably the best scene to ever come out of the boom of Superhero films of today. Evan Peters in X-Men: Days of Future Past acts almost nothing like comics Quicksilver, he doesn’t look much like him either, but wow is that “Time In A Bottle” scene so damn good. Let’s rewatch it, shall we?
Ranking
I’m gonna make a bold claim here, Quicksilver isn’t really an X-Men character. Yes he first appeared in X-Men, yes he has been a long-standing mutant, and yes he has served on X-Teams, but let’s look at this overview. Avengers, Inhumans, even arguable Wundagore are all more important to him as a character than the X-Men or mutant kind. His biggest connection is being the child of Magneto, and even that was more deeply explored in the Avengers line than anything with an X on it. That isn’t going to help him on this list. Also, not helping him is the fact that I don’t like him of his attitude. Pietro is a consistently unsympathetic character in the same vein as Hellion and Northstar, however, I can appreciate the history and importance of the character. He isn’t as good as Archangel but I like him better than Exodus. I think Rictor has been a bigger X-Character who I am more excited about, Quicksilver is more than a design so he goes above Omega Red. And even though I like her more, I think Quicksilver’s importance puts him above Lila Cheney as the new number 59 in the Xavier Files.
Quicksilver was requested by Patreon supporter Benjamin Mauger. Thank you for your support! If you have a request for how about you send it below? If you want to cut to the front of the two-year long line, we have a Patreon you can support Xavier Files for just $1 to get a line cutting reward.
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Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
