Things between Marvel and Fox have gotten tense, if rumors are to be believed, but there has been some recent events to prove this. In the new issue of Uncanny Avengers #4 we learn the new history of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver: They aren’t mutants anymore, they are genetically engineered. So their long history of being Magneto’s kids is now void. Now there are two reasons for this: One it makes it hard on Fox to use Quicksilver in their X-Men movies because now he is not a mutant, and two in Marvel’s mind it makes it easier for people who are new to the comics to correlate the characters in the comics to the ones on screen. That is garbage though.
The movies aren’t driving people to the comics, a good comic book sales number is a little over a hundred thousand, but most are in the tens of the thousands, so for the most part their isn’t any confusion, and just because Fox is making money off their characters and isn’t running to Marvel for help like Sony doesn’t mean they should start changing all of Fox’s good characters to non-mutants just to screw with them. I mean where does that stop, “Oh it looks like Wolverine was really just a bioweapon created by the Canadian Government, so he is not an X-Man anymore! Welcome to the Avengers!”
I get with the current movie deal Marvel had to create a new backstory for the Maximoff twins because they can’t use the word “Mutant” in relation to their characters, and that is hard to work with, but changing decades of backstory in the comic books is just kind of lame. They at least could have just re-launched the characters as part of the Secret Wars event so that the old stories would have held up, but instead they chose a sloppy retcon. I am not sure Disney’s hard lock on their comic books is going to end well, and I am starting to appreciate DC’s much more loose grip.
