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In a way it’s only fitting that my Top 2 Avengers kind of came to prominence around the same time. Perhaps that because writer Steve Englehart was writing the Avengers in the 70’s, and he was one of the first to pay attention to female characters. Not that they were perfect, in fact my top 2 Avengers are pretty flawed characters both dealing with some major ups and downs over the years. One has been pretty consistently in the limelight took dealt with a rather lengthy absence, before returning in another book with another team. And now, both have made it onto the big screen in the MCU!

#2 – Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff)
Joined Avengers #16 (May 1965)
Creators: Stan Lee; Jack Kirby

The Scarlet Witch has been around a long time, debuting as a villain in the X-Men comic book in March, 1964. Like all the women in Marvel superhero comics back then, she was fairly passive and demure, but Wanda did have a temper and some mighty cool, if poorly defined powers to back it up. Just over a year later she was an Avenger, and a lengthy tumultuous year as mostly a heroine, with some tragic and disastrous forays back into villainy lay ahead. Had i been making this list in the 80’s, Wanda would have been in my Top 5, possibly as high as her appearance today, but a couple of decades of misuse saw my interest in the character plummet, and I suspect she wouldn’t have even made the Top 10 until as recently as five or so years ago. After a lengthy period of misuse, Wanda’s star has definitely risen again, and while she still struggles with a bit of a taint from those dark years, writers such as Alan Heinberg and James Robinson have gone a long way to return her to her proper status as an interesting, enjoyable character.

As many who have been around as long as Wanda has, her origin story has been retconned multiple times. When Wanda and her twin brother Pietro were first introduced, they were children of the Romani Django and Marya Maximoff, fleeing from their village because they displayed abilities beyond humankind. Pietro could move at superhuman speeds, and Wanda possessed a mysterious “hex” power that caused unexplained phenomena to manifest where she pointed. They were rescued from a rampaging mob by Magneto, at the time a mutant terrorist, and leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Wanda and Pietro were grateful for his aid and pledged to help him for a time. This brought the pair into conflict with the X-Men. After a handful of forays into villainy, Wanda and Pietro grew tired of life under Magneto’s law and fled. When they heard the Avengers were looking for new members, they applied and were accepted along with another former villain, Hawkeye. The three of them were lead by Captain America, and dubbed Cap’s kooky quartet. They were a far cry both in power and temperament from the original team of heavy hitters that included Thor, Iron Man, Giant Man and the Wasp. Though the team faced a rocky start, Captain America was able to forge them into an effective and loyal team, bringing out the best of them, particularly Wanda and Clint (Hawkeye).

Wanda served with the team for quite a while, until a stray bullet wounded her during a confrontation, and Pietro took his sister from the team to allow her to recover. When Wanda was later kidnapped by an interdimensional ruler named Arkon, Pietro sought the Avengers’ aid. Upon her rescue, Wanda returned to active duty with the Avengers. During her absence, the android, The Vision has joined the team. Almost from the very start, Wanda and the Vision were drawn to each other, as an artificial construct, no one expected a romance to ultimately blossom between the two. That is precisely what happened, as The Vision explored his humanity, he found strong emotions building toward his teammate, and those feelings were returned. The Vision’s feelings first fully manifested themselves during the first Kree-Skrull War and the two started officially dating shortly thereafter. This led to some encounters with hatred and bigotry form those who thought love shared between a mutant and an android was wrong. Unfortunately, that bigotry and resistance was shared by Wanda’s twin brother, Pietro. This caused a fissure between the siblings. Another Avenger who had difficulty coming to terms with their romance was Hawkeye, who harbored his own feelings toward the Scarlet Witch. Another brief threat to their relationship came form the romantic interest of their Avengers ally, Mantis, who briefly pursued the Vision when her own partner, The Swordsman, let her down. Despite these challenges, the two remained true to each other and married.

During this time, Wanda also began to take an interest in studying witchcraft, which she did so under the tutelage of Agatha Harkness. This education gave her greater control over her mutant hex powers as well as limited control over the natural world around her. Wanda and Pietro also met Robert Frank, a World War II hero known as the Whizzer, who believes them to be his children. This was later disproved when Wanda and Pietro were abducted by the man who they believed to be their true father, Django Maximoff, and taken to Wundagore Mountain, home of the High Evolutionary, where the infants were found and raised by Bova, one of the Evolutionary’s Ani-Men, a cow evolved into a human hubrid. Wanda was temporarily possessed by the demon Chthon, and after defeating it with the help of the Avengers, was advised by Bova that neither Frank nor Maximoff was their biological father, and that all she could tell them was their mother was a woman named Magda, who came to Bova from out of a blizzard, about to give birth, fleeing from their father, who she would not name. She fled soon after she gave birth, and Bova gave the infants to Django Maximoff to raise as his own.  Soon after, while trying to track down Magda one last time, Magneto learned that he was the father of the twins. He immediately informed them of their relationship, shortly after the birth of Pietro’s and his wife Crystal’s daughter, Luna. The Scarlet Witch and the Vision decided to take a leave of absence from the Avengers to focus on their family, setting up a suburban home in New Jersey. During a conflict involving a great deal of mystical foe, Wanda seizes control  of the magical energy and using it, conceived twin boys eventually named Thomas and William. Using magic was the only way Wanda and the Vision could bear children, and for a time, the pair are happy parents. Their idyllic suburban life didn’t last too long before called back to service, this time with the West Coast Avengers.

Before I go into the next segment of The Scarlet Witch’s background, let me just say that Wand and Vision were two of my favorite characters in comics. I loved their development and their ongoing appearances, and especially their relationship. It makes the next phase in both of their lives particularly painful, and sadly, for me disappointing as it has become largely the defining moments for their characters even to today. When John Byrne took over the writing duties for the West Coast Avengers I believe he didn’t really like Wanda and Vision’s relationship, or thought it was boring, and I read interviews where he clearly state that he didn’t like the idea of Wanda having kids via magic. As writer, he decided to do something about it.

Byrne started by having the Vision dismantled, his memory wiped, and the brain patterns of Simon Williams (Wonder Man), which originally allowed him to develop emotions, removed from his system. Not only did this pretty much irrevocably destroy the Vision that we all knew and loved, it was tantamount to murdering Wanda’s husband, only worse, because his body was still walking around, it also tarnished Mockingbird’s character, as it was through her that the government organization gained access to the Vision, and Simon’s as well, because he refused to allow his brain patterns to be loaded back into the Vision to restore his emotional capability. To complicate matters (and make me start to dislike Simon, who, up this this point, I quite enjoyed) it was revealed that Simon had feelings for Wanda, so rather than restore his “brother,” he selfishly stood in the way of his restoration. As one might expect, this put Wanda in a fragile state.

Byrne’s next blow was to go after Wanda’s children. Agatha Harkness noticed that whenever Wanda was preoccupied, her children seemed to vanish. Turns out that in order to create her twins, Simon and William, Wanda in inadvertently used missing shards of the the demon Master Pandemonium’s soul. The twins were destroyed when they were absorbed back into Master Pandemonium. Agatha Harkness temporarily erased Wanda’s memories of her children from her mind in the process of disrupting Master Pandemonium’s physical form, and to keep the terrible burden of what had happened form sending Wanda over the edge.. It was ultimately revealed that Immortus masterminded both of those events, as he sought to tap into the temporal nexus energy the Wanda was revealed to possessed. The Avengers ultimately rescued Wanda, who regained her memories of her children in the process. Wanda seemingly recovered from these twin devastating losses, that of her husband, and her children, and after trying to reach the Vision and be continually rebuffed, began a relationship with Wonder Man. She also threw herself into her work, and when Avengers West Coast disbanded, she formed and led a new team called Forces Works. This team didn’t last too long, and during its first adventure, Simon is presumably killed, another loss for Wanda. Wanda and Hawkeye decided at that point to return to the main Avengers team.

After rejoining the Avengers, the Scarlet Witch was kidnapped by the sorceress Morgan le Fay, with the intention of using Wanda’s powers to warp reality into Morgan’s image. Wanda temporarily resurrected Wonder Man in the form of an ionic cloud of energy, and the Vision was damaged in the final battle with Le Fay. Agatha Harkness informed her that she was now able to channel chaos magic, which made her more powerful. Wanda was able to fully resurrect Wonder Man, and the two briefly became lovers. The Vision was eventually repaired and—after Wonder Man broke-up with Wanda—they resumed their relationship. Enter Brian Michael Bendis, the writer who picked up the threads started by John Byrne and completely destroyed the Scarlet Witch (and the Avengers for a lengthy period of time).

Wanda overheard the Wasp mock her ambitions for motherhood, only to find herself once again missing her memories of ever having had children. Scarlet Witch sought the help of Doctor Doom to see if he could restore her children to life. To do so, they summoned a mysterious cosmic entity which instead, merged with her and influenced her to launch a campaign of terror against the Avengers. The Vision is destroyed, Agatha Harkness and Hawkeye are killed, and Ant-Man (Scott Lang) was also apparently killed (it was later revealed that he was actually saved by Wanda’s future self, who teleported him to the future in a manner that made it appear he’d been killed). Wanda was finally defeated by the Avengers and Dr. Strange, and Magneto, took her to Professor Xavier to see if he could restore her sanity. Realizing that the Avengers and the X-Men were seriously contemplating killing his sister due to her unstable powers, Quicksilver convinced Wanda to take desperate action to keep this from happening: By using her powers, Wanda warped reality into the House of M, a world where mutants were the majority, humans the minority, and Magneto the ruler With the help of a young mutant, Layla Miller, Wolverine and a resurrected Hawkeye, Earth’s heroes were gathered together and their memories restored. It was also revealed that it was Quicksilver who convinced Wanda to warp reality. Upon learning of this, Magneto murdered Quicksilver in a rage. Wanda resurrected him and in retaliation, uttered the words, “No more mutants,” thus changing the world back to its original form but also causing the mass de-powering of 90% of the entire mutant population including Magneto and Quicksilver, thus being responsible for many deaths.

After the fallout, the resurrected Hawkeye tracked Wanda to a small village near Wundagore Mountain. Wanda was living in a small apartment with her only relative, her “Aunt Agatha” (who was never seen, but could possibly have been a manifestation of Wanda’s now-dead mentor Agatha Harkness.) She appeared to be powerless and believed that she had lived her entire life in the village. She did not recognize Hawkeye, nor did she remember her life with the Avengers or other events. The mutant Beast later found Wanda at the same village and sought her help to deal with the aftermath of M-Day. She had no memory of him either, and claimed that she did not believe in magic.

Wiccan and Speed two members of the Young Avengers, thought themselves to be reincarnations of the lost children of Scarlet Witch, and also tried to locate her. Magneto, Quicksilver (whose powers had been restored) and the Avengers searched for her as well. She was ultimately found in Latveria, amnesic and engaged to Doctor Doom. TheYoung Avenger Iron Lad rescued the team and Wanda by teleporting them into the past, where Wanda regained her memory. When the group returned to the present, Scarlet Witch was suicidal, realizing all the horror she had caused. Wiccan then told her that her father and brother were alive, as were many of the people she had thought she’d killed, and that he was her reincarnated son. Realizing that her sons were alive Wanda met with X-Factor and re-powered Rictor, planning to restore powers of all de-powered mutants who wanted it, but she needed more power. She returned to Dr. Doom, seeking his help to undo the spell that erased mutant powers, but Doom managed to steal her reality-warping power for himself. During the ensuing struggle, Wanda and Wiccan were able steal his newfound powers. Subsequently, the X-Men agreed to leave her be, Magneto and Quicksilver both wished to spend time with her as a family and Captain America offered her a spot in the Avengers but Wanda declined them all saying she needed solitude.

Some time later, after defeating both M.O.D.O.K. and A.I.M. with the help of Ms. Marvel and Spider-Woman, she was invited to Avengers Mansion. Despite both heroines pleading her case, the Vision angrily snapped at Wanda, blaming her again for having manipulated and killed him, and telling her to leave. Respecting the Vision’s wishes, she left again but began to have visions of the Phoenix Force and a future in which the Phoenix killed the original Avengers. Believing the Mutant Messiah, Hope Summers, to be the key to defeating the Phoenix Five, the Avengers launched an operation to extract Hope from Utopia. They are nearly defeated by a Phoenix force-empowered Cylops, but Scarlet Witch arrived and saves them. Wanda convinced Hope to go with the Avengers, as Cyclops vowed that he would no longer tolerate the Avengers. Hope revealed that Wanda was the only Avenger the X-Men feared and respected. Ultimately, Cyclops was transformed into Dark Phoenix. The Dark Phoenix began to burn the world so Wanda and Hope decided to join forces in order to stop him. Together, they managed to take him down. The Phoenix escaped Cyclops’s body and entered Hope’s. Hope used its power to reverse the damage and destruction caused by Dark Phoenix and restored the mutant population. Then, as Wanda had once used her powers to wish away mutants by uttering the words, “No more mutants,” Wanda and Hope joined their powers and wished, “No more Phoenix.” It is unknown if Phoenix was destroyed or merely banished from the Earth by the spell.

Following the war, Captain America selected the Scarlet Witch to join the Avengers Unity Squad, a new team of Avengers composed of both Avengers and X-Men. After that, she asked her close friends Janet Van Dyne and Wonder Man to join and sponsor the new team. In a conflict with Rogue, who still blamed her for the death of hundreds of mutants, she met her apparent death at the hands of her teammate, who had absorbed Wolverine’s powers. This death is eventually undone when the surviving Unity Squad were projected back in time, having learned that Rogue was manipulated by the Apocalypse Twins into killing Wanda, allowing the Avengers to band together and defeat an approaching Celestial. During a later struggle with the Red Skull Wanda worked with Doctor Strange to cast a spell of moral inversion to draw out the part of Xavier in the Red Skull and put him in control of the body, but this spell backfires when Doctor Doom is forced to take Strange’s place, resulting in the moral inversion of all heroes and villains in the vicinity. When Quicksilver and Magneto try to talk the inverted Wanda down, Wanda attacked them with a curse designed to punish her blood, but only Quicksilver reacts and Wanda discovered that Magneto was not their father. The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are later transported to Counter-Earth. After being tracked down and defeated by Luminous (a woman who was created by the genetic material of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver), Wanda and Pietro were brought to the High Evolutionary. He revealed to them that Django and Marya Maximoff were their true parents—implying that the twins are actually the lost Ana and Mateo Maximoff—and that they were not mutants but had been experimented on by the High Evolutionary.

Seeking to find her place after all the revelations of her true past, Wanda finds herself working with the ghost of Agatha Harkness to investigate recent disruptions in magic, and briefly meets the spirit of her biological mother, Natalya Maximoff (Django Maximoff’s sister), who was apparently the Scarlet Witch before Wanda. Wanda’s search for answers led her to Serbia where a priest revealed that Natalya, seeking to spare her children of her difficult life as a witch, gave baby Wanda and Pietro to her relatives, Marya and Django Maximoff. When the town came under attack by the High Evolutionary the priest told him the location of the twins, whom he proceeded to experiment on. Upon discovering this, Natalya pursued the High Evolutionary to Transia and died fighting to rescue her children. Touched by her sacrifice, the High Evolutionary returned Wanda and Pietro to Django and Marya to raise after he had concluded his experiments. Wanda learned that Marya was still alive, and was finally able to thank her aunt for looking after her and her brother when they were younger though she questioned why she and Django never told them the truth about Natalya being their real mother. Marya also reveals that, like her mother, Wanda’s grandfather was the Scarlet Warlock. Wanda finally discovers that a manifestation of Chaos is responsible for destroying witchcraft and, joining forces with the spirits of Natalya and Agatha, were able to weaken it enough for Quicksilver (whom Natalya summoned at the last moment) to destroy it. The toll on Natalya’s was too great, however, but before vanished, she revealed that it was not the High Evolutionary who killed her, but Wanda and Pietro’s father. After this, Wanda re-dedicated herself to being an Avenger, declaring that while she has fixed witchcraft, she still must work on herself but that she is ready to do so alongside her teammates.

This was a great recent step for the character, but unfortunately recent events saw her backslide a bit as a result, again, from past stories. Wanda traveled to Genosha where the hundreds of mutants who died as a result of her depowering spell, were buried. Against the advice of Dr. Strange, she sought atonement by resurrecting the fallen mutants. This backfired horribly as the mutants did regain life, but as the undead. Dr. Strange was able to counteract the spell, giving the dead mutants rest, but it’s just another example of how Wanda is now defined by this horrible piece of her history written by Brian Michael Bendis, and even when writers try to advance her past this black mark (such as Alan Heinberg in The Children’s Crusade, or James Robinson, in The Scarlet Witch’s first ever solo series) lazy writers will just fall back on the story that unfortunately continues to define her.

When the Scarlet Witch was first created by Lee and Kirby, her powers were not well defined. She had “hex powers”, that could cause random and unlikely events to take place. Despite the character’s name, she possessed mutant power, and not because of actual witchcraft. Later writers gave her an increased control over her power, so that she could cause specific events and not just random ones. Steve Englehart also made the character explore witchcraft under the tutelage of Agatha Harkness, a trait that was kept by later writers. The effects of her powers are varied but almost always detrimental to opponents. Scarlet Witch also has the potential to wield magic and later learned that she was destined to serve the role of Nexus Being, a living focal point for the Earth dimension’s mystical energy. Writer Kurt Busiek redefined Scarlet Witch’s powers and maintained that it was, in fact, an ability to manipulate chaos magic, activated due to the demon Chthon changing her mutation at birth into an ability to wield and control magical energy. Her powers were retconned by Bendis in hist story, Avengers Disassembled, removing chaos magic and turning them into reality warping. In House of M, this new power was enough to change the whole universe. Her powers were returned back to their previous ones in The Children’s Crusade, and the previous events attributed to an outside force that had temporarily increased them. In the 2016 Scarlet Witch comic series by James Robinson, it is confirmed that Wanda was born with the ability to utilize witchcraft and that this has been seen in other women within her family; Wanda also believes that The High Evolutionary genetically altered her, making her more receptive to magical energy.

The Scarlet Witch was a big favorite of mine as a teenager, through the 70’s, and 80’s before it all came crashing down and her character went through a rough time. Comics being cyclical they way they are, I was sure Wanda would get rehabilitiated at some point, and sure enough, she did, just in the past 10 years. Sadly, she and the Vision seem to have parted ways permanently, but they remain friends. At least she’s shaken off Simon Williams as well, now embarking on a relationship with Brother Voodoo, which is kind of nice. Marvel doesn’t have a lot of mystic characters, so Wanda is pretty much assured a place in the universe. Plus, with the MCU version of the Scarlet Witch gaining popularity, and about to star in WandaVision, a Disney+ series, things could be looking up for our scarlet sorceress. I am a little concerned, because the TV series looks to pick up with Wanda’s mental illness and reality warping powers, two hallmarks of my least favorite tenure of the character. Still TV isn’t comics, and it could make for some really interesting drama.

#2 – Mantis (Given name unknown; surname Brandt)
Joined Giant-Size Avengers #4 (June 1975); Associate in Avengers #114 (August 1973)
Creators: Steve Englehart; Don Heck

Mantis is one of Marvel’s more curious characters, created in the 70’s by Steve Englehart, and central to the cosmic epic, The Celestial Madonna. Mantis was a bit of a pet character for Englehart, and for a time, he was the only writer who used her, taking her from title to title, even comic book company to comic book company in thinly veiled disguises, implying the character could travel between realities. Except for one poorly written appearance with the Avengers in the 90’s written by Bob Harras (The Crossing – widely agreed upon to be the worst Avengers storyline ever written) where Mantis returned as a villain, and retconned out of existence years later, Mantis remained pretty under the radar until her reappearance in the 2007 miniseries Annhilation: Conquest which led to a reappearance as a recurring character in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Mantis can trace her roots back to the family of Vietnamese crime lord Monsieur Khruul. She was the daughter of Khruul’s sister, Lua, who married the German mercenary Gustav Brandt. Khruul did not approve of the nuptials and pursued the couple before killing Lua, blinding Gustav, and burning down their house. However, Lua had born a daughter, and the now visually-impaired Gustav fled with her into the jungle. Gustav and his infant daughter found sanctuary in the temple of the Priests of Pama, renegade pacifist members of the alien Kree race who were caretakers of the Cotati, a telepathic race of sentient plants. The Priests granted Brandt psychic sight, but removed his daughter from his side, afraid she’d be influenced by his violent nature as she grew. Gustav ended up leaving the Temple and joining the crime cartel Zodiac as Libra. Believing Mantis might grow to be the Celestial Madonna and give birth to the genetically perfect union of human and Cotati, the Celestial Messiah, the Priests of Pama trained her in martial arts, which she mastered, and gave her the name “Mantis” in recognition of her skill in defeating male opponents. They also taught her telepathic communication with the Cotati which gave her empathic abilities. On her 18th birthday, the Priests removed Mantis’s memories, implanted false memories of an orphaned, impoverished life in Ho Chi Minh City, and sent her to experience life among normal humans.

The Shao-Lom monks of Saturn’s moon Titan, whose teachings also stemmed from the pacifist Kree’s beliefs, mentored another possible Celestial Madonna: Earth-born orphan Heather Douglas, later known as Moondragon. But her sheltered life denied her insight into human existence and made her a less-rounded candidate when the time came for the Cotati to choose.

Mantis became associated with the Avengers after helping the ex-villain called Swordsman (Jacques Duquesne) turn his life around. Duquesne had been a mercenary working for her uncle, Monsieur Khruul, who had unwittingly hired Mantis as a bar girl, not knowing she was his niece. Sensing a spark of nobility in the Swordsman and seeking a better life, Mantis romanced and rehabilitated Duquesne, convincing him to return to America and rejoin the Avengers. Both were accepted to the team and proved to be valuable members, though Mantis was mistrusted at first. This was because she pretended to side with their enemy the Lion God, single-handedly taking down both Thor Odinson and Captain America (Steve Rogers) as part of her successful plan to help the Avengers defeat him. Still, her abilities served the Avengers well; she aided the team during the Avengers-Defenders War masterminded by Loki and Dormammu, and against other foes such as the Collector, Klaw, Ultron and Zodiac. Her empathic abilities helped save the universe when she deduced how Captain Mar-Vell could defeat the Cosmic Cube-empowered Thanos, Death’s would-be paramour.

Once she was a part of the Avengers, Mantis developed feelings for the Vision, attracted by his analytical mind and nobility. This caused friction between Mantis and Scarlet Witch, who was involved with the Vision romantically. Mantis was abducted by Kang the Conqueror alongside the Scarlet Witch and Agatha Harkness, in his attempt to learn who would be the Celestial Madonna; Kang believed that he would sire the Celestial Messiah. She was revealed as the Celestial Madonna and witnessed the death of the Swordsman at the hands of Kang, only realizing the depth of her love for the Swordsman just as he dies, and regretting her romantic overtures toward the Vision. After burying the Swordsman, at the temple of the Priests of Pama in Vietnam and battling the Titanic Three, she would learn the origins of the Kree-Skrull War, the Cotati, and the Priests of Pama. Mantis then formally joins the Avengers and is revealed to be, indeed, the Celestial Madonna. She ended up marrying a Cotati who took the form of the dead Swordsman, and, after their wedding, she left Earth in the form of pure energy, the same day of Vision and Scarlet Witch’s wedding . Merged with the Cotati’s essence, Mantis gained Cotati physical and mental abilities in addition to her own, and began to evolve into “the essence of life,” a change that physically manifested as a greenish hue in her skin.

After she bears her child Sequoia, she takes the name “Mandy Celestine” and lives with him for a year in Willimantic, Connecticut before handing him to his father’s people and going into space. In a search for enlightenment, Mantis traveled the galaxy, but only found violence and madness, which was often caused by the Mad Titan Thanos. She joined up with the Silver Surfer and traveled with him as he fought the Elders of the Universe, bonding romantically with him. When the Gardener attacked her using the Soul Gem, she barely escaped and transferred her essence across space to Shalla-Bal, the Surfer’s former lover on his home world of Zenn-La. The Elders subsequently captured both women and tried to destroy them, but Mantis sacrificed herself, allowing the Surfer to rescue Shalla-Bal. The power of the Elders’ Infinity Gems proved too much for Mantis, who could not fully reconstruct herself, and fragments of her essence formed several “shadow” Mantises, each unaware of the others and believing themselves to be the true Mantis. Some faded out of existence while others helped save the world—like an amnesiac green-skinned Mantis who awoke on Earth and aided the Avengers against the Voice and the High Evolutionary.

Aside from mentions by Silver Surfer, Mantis does not reappear for several years until 1995’s controversial Avengers crossover story “The Crossing”. In “The Crossing”, Mantis returns as the villainous bride of Kang the Conqueror with the intention of bringing death to the Avengers; her father Libra; and the Cotati alien who had possessed the Swordsman’s body and married/impregnated her. Her anger at her father (whom she had vivisected) and the Cotati center around their “defilement” of her and that she hates the Avengers for believing their manipulative lies. The storyline was so poorly executed and controversial that Kurt Busiek, in Avengers Forever limited series, retconned the Mantis who appeared in the story as being a Space Phantom brainwashed into thinking he was Mantis.

Eventually the one true Mantis returned and began to recover as her scattered essence coalesced on Earth into five forms, each reflecting an aspect of her personality: mother, lover, freak, mystic, and Avenger. Fearing Mantis (the Celestial Madonna) and her son (the Celestial Messiah) were a threat to him, Thanos pursued her “fragments” and Sequoia across time and space. He succeeded in destroying several of Mantis’s fragments, unknowingly hastening the reformation of the true Mantis, who was reborn as “the goddess of life.” Thus reformed, she and a group of the Avengers go into space to stop Thanos from killing her son, Quoi, who by this time is a rebellious teenager desperate to leave the isolation of the Cotati home-world and travel the stars. During the adventure, Mantis flirts with Vision (with the implication that she has sex with him), but ultimately ends the flirting when she realizes that he has feelings for his estranged wife Scarlet Witch, who is jealous of Mantis and Vision’s friendship.

Mantis returned to Earth, where her powers enabled her to sense the impending threat of the Annihilation Wave. She voyaged into space and allowed herself to be captured by the Kree as part of her plan to join Peter Quill’s Guardians of the Galaxy following the defeat of the Phalanx’s transmode virus. Quill and his allies thought that Mantis was slightly unhinged, not believing her story about being the Celestial Madonna, but she did help them defeat Ultron and the Phalanx, after which she took up residence on the Knowhere station with the rest of the Guardians of the Galaxy. She has assumed the role of counselor for the group, using her knowledge of the mind to maintain a balance with all the very eclectic personalities of the group. It was later discovered that Star-Lord had Mantis use her mental powers to manipulate the members of the Guardians of the Galaxy to join the team against their will. Overhearing Mantis and Star-Lord converse about their deception, Drax shared this knowledge with the rest of the team. This caused most of the members to leave. Mantis was promoted to field status by Rocket Raccoon.

Mantis was apparently killed by the Magus, who, upon anticipating that she would use her mental powers to incapacitate him, struck her and her fellow psionic Cosmo dead with a powerful blast of energy. However, it was revealed that she, along with fellow Guardians Phyla-Vell, Cosmo, Gamora and Major Victory were still alive, but being held prisoner in suspended animation by the Magus. She reunited with the other team of Guardians, telling Moondragon that Phyla-Vell was the first one killed by Thanos’ rampage.

Mantis settled into a serene civilian life on the planet Rigel-7 but later rescued Peter Quill from a group of pursuing Spartax soldiers when he sought her out to gain her counsel. Though she refused to join his new incarnation of the Guardians, she helped him track down the source of mysterious “time quakes” that had been plaguing him.

Most recently, Mantis returned to Earth upon being contacted by Black Panther about the Cotati invasion and planned to reason with her son, who under the influence of his father, became corrupted and intended to end all animal life in the galaxy. Mantis waged a mental battle with her son, but was unable to sway him from his path. She also helped the Thing and the Invisible Woman battle the She-Hulk when she was taken over by the Cotati.

Mantis was trained by the Priests of Pama to become a grandmistress of the martial arts She has only lost in hand to hand martial arts combat to Moondragon, and her father Libra. When it comes to her full range of powers, Mantis has complete control over her body. This gives her peak human agility, the ability to accelerate healing through force of will, and sense the emotions of others as psychic vibrations. She can also control her heart and respiratory rate as well as blood flow. She was able to perform an elaborate dance that hypnotized the Lion God, and is able to slip free of most bonds, and to slither and contort into impossibly tight spaces without breaking stride. Her mastery of the Priests’ martial arts, which focuses on the manipulation of nerve endings and pressure points, has enabled her to knock out beings as powerful as Thor. Her blows can shatter hardened steel without apparent effort. Mantis has engaged Captain America on equal footing, and was clearly superior to the version of Midnight (M’Nai) summoned to serve among the Legion of the Unliving. She could also reliably hit Quicksilver despite his speed. She has been shown sprinting at speeds that seem slightly superhuman – perhaps 50 km/h. Mantis has two slim antennae growing from her head that amplify her telepathic and empathic abilities. She is highly intelligent, with superior deductive abilities and an excellent intuition. Mantis is highly intelligent, with her deductive skills rivaling that of Vision’s; in Vision’s own words, she has a “remarkable mind”.

Mantis also possesses a limited knowledge of the occult, allowing her to sense magical presences around her, conduct simple rituals, know basic information about thaumaturgic manifestations and entities, etc. By meditating upon nearby magical energies, Mantis can gather basic information about it. Such as the caster’s identity and the spell’s general nature and purpose. Mantis also has a form of mystical awareness, warning her of cosmic occurrences and mounting malevolent mystical machinations. But these flashes of insight are rare and random. Mantis is able to make her body vibrate slightly out of synch with the universe, to exist as a ghost in a nearby dimension. In this form she can talk and perceive, but is immaterial.

Mantis gained additional abilities as a result of communion with the Prime Cotati. Her empathic ability enabled her to communicate with the plant-like Cotati and with other plant life. To travel in space, Mantis had the ability to separate her physical and astral forms, projecting her consciousness from her body, allowing her to travel interplanetary distances. She also had the ability to transfer her astral form to any place where plant life exists. She could form and inhabit a plant like simulacrum of her human body for herself out of the destination planet’s local vegetation. Her fighting skills remained intact, and her empathic abilities were heightened to a superhuman degree and extended to the planet’s flora and biosphere. She could control the vegetation within her vicinity.

During her confrontations with a powerful Thanos clone, she displayed superhuman strength, a talent to simultaneously inhabit multiple simulacra, and the ability to project strong blasts of energy, but has not been seen using these powers since. As of her appearance in Annihilation Conquest: Star-Lord, Mantis also appears to have gained telepathic and precognitive abilities, and now labors under a constant awareness of future events. The source of these new powers is as yet unclear. Other powers displayed or referred to during the series were pyrokinesis, mid-range mentat training, and invisibility to the Phalanx.

In her first appearances, Mantis represents the “Dragon Lady” archetype, that of a mysterious Eastern seductress whose sexuality causes tension among the male Avengers. It was frankly, a fairly racist interpretation of the character, but she just fascinated me. She is assertive and confident in her powers, and while she appeared somewhat arrogant at first (as illustrated by her breakup with Swordsman when she chose Vision over him), she renounced her pride after Swordsman’s tragic death.  She almost always refers to herself in the third person as “this one”, “she”, and occasionally “Mantis”, which has to do with her upbringing at the Temple of the Priests of Pama. This speech mannerism is of importance for her, for when the Silver Surfer asked her to stop speaking in the third person, she refused to comply. After decades of intermittent appearances under the pen of Steve Englehart, I was very nervous about her transition to the Guardians of the Galaxy, under Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, fearing she would be used as a joke, and while she was a source of humor, Mantis flourished while with the Guardians. I particularly enjoyed her closeness with Groot, and the fact that her inherent mystery continued on beyond the Avengers. The Celestial Madonna story, and Mantis’ time with the team is one of the high points from my comic book past, and insures her a spot in my Avengers Top 10, but her subsequent development with the Guardians give her the added boost to #1! And I have to say, never in my wildest imagination did I think i would ever see Mantis on big screen! Too bad that character is quite a bit different than the one in comics.