‘WandaVision’: The Stew Of The MCU
by Frank Martin
Adapting comics for the big screen is no easy task. Comics are a very peculiar medium that utilizes the artwork and the page itself to tell very particular stories. What works in a comic is not always going to work on the screen. But this has become doubly difficult as characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe continue to grow and take on lives of their own. That doesn’t mean straight up comic adaptations can’t continue to happen. But the stories told have to get more and more creative with the material. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Disney+ show WandaVision, which uses many different elements of the comics to create something completely original.
A lot of the MCU was in chaos following Avengers: Endgame, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) especially. The House of M comic book series was always a big possible storyline the studio could adapt to feature Wanda. Obviously, the MCU couldn’t do it exactly the same as the comic. But they could utilize Wanda’s reality altering powers in a different way. There have been Marvel stories of towns being isolated and rewritten by cosmic forces, and that concept was utilized and mashed together with House of M to essentially create WandaVision — which itself was a vehicle to tell Wanda and Vision’s (Paul Bettany) story about their marriage and children from The Avengers books.
Throw in ideas of White Vision and Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and WandaVision is truly a unique creation of the MCU. It’s kind of like a stew where they took several different elements from the comic books, threw them into a pot, and came up with something completely original. And that’s one of the great things about the MCU. Rather than straight-up adaptations of comic book storylines, this cinematic universe has reached a point where bits and pieces of comic story lines can be used to add to this universe in completely new and interesting ways.
WandaVision is now streaming on Disney+.