Agatha Harkness’ History With Mephisto, Explained

Speak of the devil and he doth appear. Ever since WandaVision, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been bedeviled by fan theories about the demon Mephisto: the soul-devouring Hell-lord of a fiery netherworld who has ties to the comic book origins of Johnny Blaze’s Ghost Rider, the Young Avengers Wiccan and Speed, and Spider-Man villain the Green Goblin. Also known by the monikers Mephistopheles, Master of Malice, Legion, Lucifer, Lord of Darkness, and Satan, Mephisto is name-dropped by the witch Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) on Wednesday’s Agatha All Along episode 3, “Through Many Miles of Tricks and Trials.” 

Since his first appearance in 1968’s Silver Surfer #3 by Stan Lee and John Buscema, Mephisto has battled the likes of Norrin Radd, Ghost Rider, Thor, Doctor Strange, and Doctor Doom. But the collector of souls appears in a key comic book storyline featuring the witch Agatha Harkness and the Scarlet Witch — one that spawned the events Avengers Disassembled and House of M, and which was adapted in part by WandaVision.

When the exorcist Elspeth Cromwell mistakes Sue and Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four to be a witch and warlock in 1984’s Fantastic Four #276, she unwittingly summons Mephisto in an attempt to exorcise the “demons.” Mephisto plans to torture them for eternity, but when Sorcerer Supreme Stephen Strange frees their young son, Franklin, the boy uses his destructive mutant powers to destroy Mephisto in Fantastic Four #277.

Centuries after she governed a coven of witches in New Salem, Colorado, the Richards hired Agatha to be Franklin’s nanny. It was at this time that Agatha’s son, the sorcerer Nicholas Scratch, sent his children after their grandmother: Vertigo, Brutacus, Gazelle, Hydron, Reptilla, Thornn, and Vakume, collectively known as Salem’s Seven. The Fantastic Four defeat the Seven, but after Agatha strips the coven of their powers, they later return and burn Agatha at the stake in 1985’s The Vision and the Scarlet Witch #3.

An astral Agatha later helps her protégé — Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch — defeat Salem’s Seven after Wanda and her husband, the Vision, quit the Avengers and retire to the New Jersey suburbs. After the events of Vision Quest, where the synthezoid has his memory wiped and is taken apart and put back together as the emotionless, all-white Vision, Agatha returns (in the flesh) in 1989’s Avengers West Coast #51. Hand waving away her death as “a terrible inconvenience,” Agatha tells Wanda she’s concerned about her twin sons, Tommy and Billy Maximoff (who were born in 1986’s The Vision and the Scarlet Witch #12).

Another shocking revelation: Agatha reveals to Wanda that her children disappear from existence whenever they’re not in her thoughts. The trio is attacked by the demon hordes of Master Pandemonium, a demon-limbed supervillain who believed he was collecting pieces of his splintered soul he traded to Mephisto as he lay dying in a car crash. In reality, the demon tricked Master Pandemonium into seeking parts of Mephisto‘s soul, which was fragmented by Franklin in Fantastic Four #277.

When Master Pandemonium kidnaps Wanda’s children, Agatha explains the truth about the twins: they’re fragments of Mephisto.

“Wanda longed all her life for the kind of normal existence foreverdenied her by her mutant powers. She so greatly desired a family — inher mind the perfect symbol of a peaceful, happy life — that shesuffered what in a human woman would have been a hysterical or imaginarypregnancy. In such cases there is usually no child to be born… butWanda’s power to change probabilities created Thomas and William. Twins,you see, to double the fulfillment of her dream. Since her power cannotcreate true life, she reached out unconsciously to snare anything whichwould function as souls for the newborns. What she caught, still muchweakened by their recent separation, was two of the missing pieces ofMephisto!”

Mephisto reabsorbs his missing pieces into himself, effectively erasing the twins from existence. Wanda opens her mind and soul to Agatha, who defeats Mephisto and returns the Avengers from the netherworlds of Hell. Because the twins were still bound by the Hex spell that Wanda used to create them, Agatha is able to erase the boys from their mother’s memory to spare her the grief of losing her sons.

Wanda suffers a nervous breakdown and attacks her teammates during the Darker than Scarlet storyline of Avengers West Coast, which eventually culminates in Earth’s mightiest heroes disbanding during Avengers Disassembled when Wanda suddenly remembers her children. It’s later revealed that Wanda’s erased twins were reincarnated as Billy Kaplan, a.k.a. Wiccan, and Tommy Shepherd, a.k.a. Speed — both members of the Young Avengers.