WandaVision and the Ultimate Goodbye

For the first time since The Last Dance debuted, I’ve consistently had something to do on the weekends. Every Friday, like a lot of nerds, I’ve been looking forward to the latest installment of WandaVision and what feels like a return to appointment television, a relic of the last century and early Y2K era before on-demand entertainment, binge drops from content providers, and Game of Thrones’s final season quality drop-off became the new normal.

And about 20 minutes into the finale of WandaVision, I noticed something else from the 21st century rearing its oddly-specific head around the corner: the Ultimate Universe, and its last throe of relevancy.

For those who don’t know or may have forgotten, the Ultimate Universe was a new publishing imprint by Marvel that began in the year 2000, just as the superhero movie boom started to take hold at the box office. The idea was basically this—What if the Marvel universe started today, instead of the early 60’s? What if there weren’t loud, garish costumes? What if the Hulk wanted to kill Freddie Prinze Jr.?

No, I swear this is a real comic, honest.

The Ultimate Universe (Earth-1610 for those keeping score at home) modernized Marvel’s most popular characters for the new millennium, and for the most part reflected the characters audiences were introduced to on the big screen.Jean Grey doesn’t wear a Green and Gold lycra catsuit with a giant phoenix emblazoned on it like an idiot. She dresses like the baddest ass who ever badassed their way out of a Staind music video, like a badass. This isn’t a cartoon. These were real heroes, for a real world. Nobody dresses like a Bavarian dessert dish in the real world.

Jean from the comics

Jean from 2006’s X-Men III: The Last Stand. Notice how she’s taller. They changed that for the movies.

These movies were successful and in turn the comics that inspired them were changed to better resemble them. When the changes seemed too drastic, the Ultimate Universe was born to more effectively look like the movies. Accepting these differences became the norm for seeing these characters get film adaptations. It was a compromise that audiences made with the films producers - we accept that a man shoots concussive laser blasts out of his eyes, but we do not accept that he would wear a skin-tight blue suit with a yellow bandolier & belt for him to keep… well, we never found out what Cyclops kept in his belt pouches. But we knew having them at all was bullshit. It was a bad idea and the creator should feel bad about it.

Daredevil’s costume went from red to maroon. Batman needed a reason to explain his cape’s ability for the gliding shape. Spider-man had to make his costume out of excess fabric from a pair of Nike Prestos. Costumes were being changed as a concession because comic-accurate gear doesn’t translate super well to a 60 by 30 foot screen. Hell, even the costume Steve wore in the beginning of the Captain America movie, when he was touring on the USO show, was his comic-accurate costume, and they put him in that to make him look stupid on purpose. Once the movies became what everyone knew, the comics had to be just like them.

Then I watched the finale to WandaVision. Slight spoilers ahead for people who don’t stay at home on Fridays.

In the final episode (final two, really), it’s revealed that Wanda is the most powerful witch in history. There’s even a prophecy about her destroying the world and everything. For her entire appearance history in MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) movies, she’d only ever been known as Wanda, but rival witch Agatha Harkness named her The Scarlet Witch. While it’s a title in the MCU, it was her chosen name in the comics. The audience is left to assume her future story-arc will explore what the title means and how she’ll measure up to it, but it seems like there’s another reason they never called her that before. No, I’m not talking about Fox owning the rights to Mutants.

I’m talking about the Ultimate Universe.

There were basically two approaches that creators took to the Ultimate Universe. The first is more or less what Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate Spider-Man did; retellings with modern influences. These two titles in particular were effectively cover songs with a few words changed but the same chords used to create basically the same feeling. They were a rare case of catching lightning in a bottle. Twice.

The other approach as seen in Ultimate X-Men and and particularly The Ultimates (their version of The Avengers), was to basically dial every nob up to 11. Cap was a World War II vet who came back so Patriotic he better resembled the nazis he almost died fighting than the Steve Rogers we currently know. Iron Man was a raging nihilist alcoholic who would have illicit affairs with celebrities on the ISS, like a Richard Branson you didn’t want to punch as hard (but still pretty hard). They weren’t superheroes, they were nuclear deterrents used by a Post-9/11 military industrial complex. They talked to their publicist as much as the Pentagon and you know what else? They didn’t have costumes.

They had tac-gear and low-rise leather pants.

Even Wanda’s powers were slightly changed. In the traditional comics, she dealt with chaos magic, something that let her alter reality thanks to an ancient power that no one really understood. In the Ultimates, she basically deals with chaos theory, where she uses hex-fields to alter the probability of something happening or not happening. it may seem like semantics, but old Wanda summoned obtuse magic to get what she wanted. New Wanda hacked the Universe get what she wanted. Y’know, because the year 2002 and computers. And she did it like she won VIP tickets to a Nine Inch Nails concert from calling into a radio station thanks to unlimited evening calls on her Cingular Wireless mobile device plan. Again, because 2002.

That’s what made the finale of WandaVision so fascinating to me. By giving her the name Scarlet Witch, they made the MCU inherently more comic-book-y. They gave her a hokey name (that I love and am so glad to see return) and changed her from this maroon trench coat wearing powerhouse into a comic book character. Her new costume is obviously inspired by the Ultimate Universe, given the tight, dark leather, sleek angles, and ribbed texture that make it look more functional than fashionable (though still head-turning). But this little nod was merely a last gasp of the Ultimate Universe, a bed of inspiration that no doubt helped create the MCU in a time when people wanted heroes but didn’t believe in them. The heavy genre-lean her character arc took in the series is a return to a more campy version of what used to be a supremely modernized take. She’s not Wanda anymore, she’s the Scarlet fucking Witch.

Like I mentioned when talking about the two approaches to the Ultimate Universe, it wasn’t just a look, it was a feeling. And as we get further away from the Post 9/11 world that drove the Ultimate Universe and its dramatic demand for heroes to do something, we’re getting closer to the original Marvel Comic universe. It’s one where heroes are more loosely defined and more allowed to have fun. WandaVision wasn’t about anything except grief and overcoming it. That’s a simpler story I don’t think we could allow heroes to explore even 10 years ago, because the audience so desperately needed them to save us. It would’ve been selfish of our heroes to save themselves.

The comics no longer have to be like the movies, but the movies are now becoming more like the comics.

As the movies and shows continue to release they add their own particular wrinkles to the greater Marvel mythos. The more things change, the more they become what they so staunchly tried to not be 20 years ago. Thankfully though, 2003 called and doesn’t want its costumes back just yet. As the Ultimate Universe stops being a narrative inspiration for the movies it so clearly inspired, it’s only fair that it becomes an aesthetic inspiration. Because the Ultimate Universe is not just a feeling.

It’s a look, too.

this post originally published on March 8, 2021