Marvel’s WandaVision series on Disney+ has been applauded as a love letter to classic TV sitcoms. The show follows Avengers Wanda Maximoff (aka the Scarlet Witch) and her android husband Vision as they navigate an alternate reality that resembles famous sitcoms like I Love Lucy, Bewitched, and The Brady Bunch. Each episode mimics a different era of TV programming, causing the characters’ setting, costumes, and even personalities to reflect 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s sensibilities.
What new fans may not realize, however, is that Marvel Comics had the Scarlet Witch and Vision appear in their own sitcom parody decades earlier in the pages of their parody magazine What The…?! #12. The story, published in 1991, actually shows similarities to one of WandaVision’s own episodes and even comes with its own theme song!
Titled, “Married… With Super Powers,” the short story, written and drawn by Rurik Tyler, parodied the TV sitcom Married… With Children. The comic showed parodied versions of the Vision and Scarlet Witch living in a 1980s suburban neighborhood where “Iwanda” kept going to the mall, making her loafing husband, “Al Bino,” suspicious. Wondering how Iwanda could shop so much and yet wear the same outfit for twenty years, Vision/Al wondered if his wife was having an affair.
Vision’s suspicions were supported by the fact that he had somehow fathered twins with Iwanda despite being an artificial man. Realizing their circle of friends included multiple super-powered beings, Vision feared that the babies could develop weird abilities if their father was “Bruised Bananer,” allowing the kids to become Hulk-toddlers, or the water-being Hydroman, which could make changing diapers a fatal experience.
To make sure the twins were really his, Vision decided to invite all of his superpowered friends to a house party and then get “DuhhDevil” (a Daredevil parody) to use his super hearing and see if any of his friends had had an affair with “The Scarlet Itch.” Fortunately, DuhhDevil confirmed that none of the heroes knew anything about Vision’s children, and the relieved android… broke out in an elaborate song and dance number.
Sung to the tune of Married… With Children’s theme song “Love & Marriage,” the song “Super-Powers” had Vision blaring out, “Super-Powers, Super-Powers, Super-Powers/Sometimes I wondered if they’d have yours or ours!/I’m glad to know now bro-ther/They got their talents from their mo-ther!” The other heroes quickly joined in—and then decided to continue celebrating by throwing Sandman in the swimming pool, handing Magneto an anvil, and leaving Doctor Doom out in the rain.
Meanwhile, it turned out Iwanda really wasn’t completely on the level as her “twins” were actually wooden puppets she’d enchanted to look like real boys just to give herself time to play poker with the She-Hulk and Invisible Woman. Sue even suggested that once Vision discovered the real scam, Iwanda could get out of it by pretending to be possessed by some evil force—an idea Iwanda enthusiastically embraced.
While played strictly for laughs, “Married… With Superpowers” did show how well Vision and Scarlet Witch worked in a sitcom-style setting. Marvel has tried repeatedly to place both characters in a domestic setting, and while it never works out for long, the success of WandaVision does show the two really do thrive in family-comedies.