Following the surprising enthusiasm for my surprisingly enthusiastic thoughts on the Bluray release of series one of Blake’s 7 – which you can now find here – the second highlighted subject for my attempt at establishing a mailing list of weekly recommendations was Scarlet Witch: Witches’ Road, a collection published to tie in with the broadcast of Agatha All Along, which incidentally you can find me and Una McCormack talking about here. To be honest, this was the point – a whole two weeks in – where I began to get a distinct impression that the putative weekly sensation was probably not going to get very far off the ground, as there was a huge disparity in interest between the two instalments which indicated that it was certain subjects that would attract readers rather than the idea of my ‘recommending’ anything in and of itself; considering that a significant part of my reason for giving the whole mailing list business a try was to give other people whose work I enjoyed a bit of a boost, this did seem to suggest that maybe it was a better idea to present similar recommendations on here instead. However if you are still interested in receiving regular additional bits and pieces, including long-lost highlights from the archives, deep dives on fifties and sixties newspaper adverts, occasional audio exclusives and more, then you can find out more about my Patreon here. Anyway, while there may be significantly fewer of you out there who want to read about Wanda Maximoff rather than Kerr Avon, hopefully it still persuaded some of you to give Witches’ Road a chance. If you are the sort of reader who does want more Scarlet Witch, though, then you might well want to lend an ear to my chat with Hanna Flint about WandaVision here.

Doubtless to the dismay of those who insist that that superhero movies are ‘killing’ cinema, that nobody watches linear television any more and that everyone is fed up of ‘woke’-ism infiltrating popular entertainment, Agatha All Along – a horror comedy about a coven of ethnically diverse middle-aged witches and a gay teenage boy traversing a widely-feared path through a mystical realm in search of… well, they’re not even quite sure themselves to begin with – was one of the biggest critical and commercial hits of 2024. While it was conspicuous by its absence from the quality press’ end-of-year top twenty slash twenty five roundups, even those compiled by critics who had been raving about it literally a fortnight earlier, there is no getting around the fact that this deeply weird and spooky series about a collection of suitably deeply obscure Marvel characters was a sensation in a way that, well, Secret Invasion had not been. Steeped in comics lore but aware enough of its audience to keep that as a background detail – fans might well have spotted who ‘The Teen’ and Aubrey Plaza’s character were way in advance or jumped in alarm at the namecheck for Nicholas Scratch, but regular viewers could take them on face value as part of the narrative – it whizzed along on a broomstick fuelled by hilariously knowing gags about friendships with other well-known fictional witches, a weirdly hypnotic recurring song, an inventive storyline that essentially shoved them into a series of hyper-realised escape rooms and yet another tremendous performance from Kathryn Hahn as Agatha Harkness. A genuine breakout portrayal of a character who previously barely had any crooked footprint in the ‘real’ world – don’t forget that when Russell T. Davies named Jack Harkness after her, he had to actually explain this in interviews – the catty ancient sorceress had last been seen having her memory erased by Wanda Maximoff at the end of WandaVision, and this is where Agatha All Along picked up; and, of course, there is a corresponding enthusiastic viewer slash potential casual reader-enticing Marvel Select comics collection to accompany it.

Originally published in 2016, Scarlet Witch: Witches’ Road isn’t actually the series that Agatha All Along was primarily based on, and those who are coming in to it from the small screen may find a couple of surprising differences in the narrative; in particular Wanda is at the height of what can only be described as her Big Divorced Energy era, whilst Agatha is currently without an actual corporeal form and is not in a hurry to allow her sister in magic forget it. They are currently making their way across Europe – or rather the parts of it that back on to entrance and exit points from the Witches’ Road – on the trail of some suspiciously exaggeratedly ‘Irish’ disturbances in the actual force of witchcraft itself, and Wanda is cagily wary, although equally suspiciously reluctant to discuss it, about who they might encounter on their way. The storyline proceeds in the time-honoured Marvel ‘road movie’ team-up format, and full creative advantage is taken of this with a procession of unanticipated diversions and a constantly shifting art style that appropriates both the religious artwork and cinematic cliches of their various stopoff points.

As well as the expected gallery of variant cover art, there’s also a nice extra in the form of SHHH, a semi-related Scarlet Witch backup strip in which Wanda travels to a Spanish monastic order to investigate reports of sinister disturbances emanating from the building’s foundations. Told in a pastoral pop art style and with virtually no text whatsoever apart from some bookending dialogue, it’s a neat contrast to the intricately structured settings of the main story. If you are one of those casual viewers, you won’t find much more about Nicholas Scratch, ‘The Teen’ or Aubrey Plaza’s character here, but what you will get to see in Scarlet Witch: Witches’ Road is Wanda at her most independent and unrestrained, which it has to be said is something that has sometimes been a little lacking in her on-screen representation. As for who’s been messing up everything, well, we know the answer to that already…

Buy A Book!

You can find much more about how even Scarlet Witch couldn’t deal with the disruptions to the fabric of time and space caused by lockdown in Keep Left, Swipe Right, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. Ellinikos Kafes will do nicely.

Further Reading

I Feel Like Everything’s Going To Work Out Fine takes a look at why audiences have come to love Loki despite his being, well, a villain; you can find it here.

Further Listening

You can find a chat about Agatha All Along with Una McCormack here and with Hanna Flint about Wanda and Agatha’s escapades in WandaVision here.

© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.