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This may sound familiar. A woman with superpowers whose limits are unclear wields them recklessly. As a result, the entire universe is threatened. Or perhaps this one: that same woman attempts to make a situation better by eliminating a threat and, in turn, brings near ruin to her allies.
One might think Scarlet Witch is the misguided hero above. It isn’t a bad guess. It certainly applies. In this case, though, Zatanna is the reckless one going too far.
In Batman: Urban Legends #11, readers witnessed a young Zatanna and Bruce Wayne running away for a romantic picnic…and conjuring an unseen but monstrous mystical being. You know, like young lovers are wont to do. Whatever threat the monster represented, the two somehow contain it. Unfortunately, the price seems to be returning to the site every few years to interact like high school sweethearts at a reunion. While they dutifully tolerate one another, they renew the suppression of the beast.
This year, though, Zatanna intends to make things different. Tired of a tradition that leaves them, as Superman says, both seeming “disjointed and raw,” Zatanna believes she’s found a permanent solution. Alas, she and Batman lie unconscious before a villainously purring individual by the story’s end. Worse, the other magical heroes of DC seem to have felt the intrusion and are notably concerned. Unfortunately, in trying to improve something, it appears Zatanna has made things much worse.
So far, this dangerous error pales in comparison to the impact of a previous misuse of magic. In the limited series Identity Crisis, fans learned of a secret long buried. When Dr. Light broke into Justice League headquarters and committed a horrifying act of violence and personal violation against Sue Dibny, the team decided Zatanna should wipe Light’s mind.
Some heroes were not on board with the decision. Others were intensely opposed. What followed was a series of further mindwipes that endangered the mental state of villains like The Top and left heroes like Batman totally unaware. Exposing these acts of mindwiping led to strained and broken alliances, the murder of multiple DC supporting cast members, seemingly reformed villains returning to lives of crime, and a pall settling into the tone of DC events for years to come.
If Zatanna needed someone to commiserate with, she certainly could’ve signed onto Multiversal Microsoft Teams and reached out to Scarlet Witch. The Avenger had more than her fair share of similar incidents. Once, she unconsciously triggered a meltdown of her fellow teammates — including a raging She-Hulk tearing Vision asunder, Tony Stark getting drunk without touching a drop, and a zombified Jack of Hearts acting the part of a suicide bomber — that altered the composition of the Avengers of years to come.
Sometime after that, she reduced the mutant population to near extinction by uttering three words: “No more mutants.” At that moment, scores of her fellow mutants found themselves powerless. She never gave them a choice. Yet, she took something away from them with a sentence. She and Zatanna could absolutely relate.
Of course, if Zatanna does head the Scarlet Witch route, she has a lot more rough road ahead. Wanda’s path began during her time with the West Coast Avengers. There she dealt with blow after blow to her life, including the destruction of her warm, empathic synthezoid husband Vision. His rebuilding process left him literally colorless and devoid of emotion, a situation that she tried to rectify only to end up manipulated by an evil parasitic lifeform. The reveal that her children were magical constructs courtesy of Mephisto followed. That trauma eventually led her to become a twisted version of herself, one that violated Wonder Man and attempted to destroy the Avengers.
Zatanna would still have several more options if Scarlet Witch were otherwise indisposed. Invisible Woman could commiserate with the magician about the times Sue has found herself taken over by her Malice persona. The so-called Mistress of Hate has emerged from Invisible Woman from time to time to threaten her family and — briefly during the Infinity Quest — all of existence.
Or Zatanna could ring up Jean Grey. The X-Man could reminiscence about her multiple dalliances with being the Dark Phoenix. She could tell the magician about the time she destroyed an entire planet of broccoli-looking aliens. Heck, she could even mention the time she teamed up with Darkseid and threatened both their universes.
While not as much an issue in the DC Universe, women being too powerful for their own good has undoubtedly become a comic book trope. Men sometimes cross from good to evil. Colossus’s time as one of Magneto’s Acolytes comes to mind. Black Lightning’s time as part of Lex Luthor’s cabinet might qualify as well.
Other times, they make mistakes that endanger their teammates or disrupt alliances. Batman keeping a list of ways to defeat his fellow Justice Leaguers certainly brought about some devastation in the “Tower of Babel” storyline. Tony Stark’s use of the Iron Man armor while drunk endangered others.
However, these tend to be discreet events. Hal Jordan, driven mad by grief, becomes Parallax. Later he sacrifices himself for the greater good and then returns years later to chants of “Greatest Green Lantern of All Time!” Superman kills the Joker and becomes ruler of Earth, but it’s all in the alternate universe Injustice book.
Meanwhile, Scarlet Witch just absorbed the Darkhold. Sure, currently, it’s presented as a good thing, but becoming one with a centuries-old book of evil isn’t the sort of thing that screams “good decision.” Instead, it feels a lot more like, “this is going to be a problem soon enough.”
Zatanna deserves better than being stuck with the boom-bust cycle of being a good guy until the storyline calls for her to mess up huge or do something evil. So does Scarlet Witch, for that matter. And Invisible Woman. And Jean Grey. Making Zatanna DC’s Scarlet Witch is a mistake because making Scarlet Witch carry those continuity burdens in the first place was a mistake, too.
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