'Wandavision': Superheroes and Canned Laughter

Westview was a small, idyllic New Jersey town until its 3,892 neighbors disappeared without a trace.

Since then, it has been a ghost town in which nothing and no one can enter.

In fact, they can, but at the risk of also disappearing and perhaps never returning.

The infinity of microwaves that the place gives off can only be decoded with an old television set because, surprise, what happens there is being televised.

In fact, it's a mutating sitcom - each episode belongs to a different decade - starring a pair of Avengers: Wanda Maximoff, also known as Scarlet Witch, and Vision, the metal guy.

• Disney wants to be the only one

This is the starting point, subject to deep swings, of the

(

in its original version), from Disney +.

Turned into the first Marvel cathodic cult classic, fiction, the work of the reckless Jac Schaeffer - writer of other products of the Marvel film world, such as

and

-, says goodbye this Friday with the premiere of its ninth episode, having made it clear how another world of superheroes is possible.

Remember the naive comic delusion

from Tim Burton's

movies

?

Joel Schumacher's

absurd

in

?

Add to

that the spirit of a

(

) Copyright and good dose of metanarrative highly

intelligent and will come to the result.

An

author

?

Geniuses of

comics

at the time signed alternate numbers of

and

in which they allowed themselves to take Peter Parker or Bruce Banner to their territory, that of, in the case of Peter Bagge, a decidedly absurd despair that propelled the universe in another direction, the one that allowed to play with the possibilities of the character in the ridiculous everyday.

There were those guys with all that power always being late for their appointments and being a complete disaster.

Or trying to get married.

Or looking for a job because they were broke.

The

have been, whether or not they were a guest author, a playground.

With that intention, Schaeffer raised the possibility of installing Wanda (a witch with psychic and telepathic powers) and Vision (an android with a certain humanity) in a comedy that would grow up with its protagonists to be able to see the couple far from life situations or death - even sometimes on a planetary level - to instead see her, in his words, "preoccupied with something as common as serving a correct dinner to the boss."

This mutant comedy is a refuge —because the story speaks of creating worlds within the world, shield worlds that protect us from what we do not want to happen even if it has already happened—, that is, a new universe, and one that values ​​the domestic life, and opts for the complex internal battle against the simple instrumental warmongering of the genre.

But the thing does not stop here.

Schaeffer turns the sitcom appeal into a delightful metanarrative tool with which he constructs a witty tribute to the ever-intelligent, but often reviled for popularity - like superhero comics themselves - canned laugh television of the late 1960s. years, copying formats especially suitable for nostalgic people.

tune of

is even rebuilt and readjusted

and it is plagued with nods to classics of each era.

For example, in the end, they seem to live like the Pritchett - stars of

- on the set of

, that is, on Wisteria Lane.

And he does all of this while edifying Wanda's sad past, and exploring the fascinating acting possibilities of Elizabeth Olsen, who goes from flamboyant housewife of the 1950s to allegedly neglected mother of the 1990s in two episodes, as well as promoting the creation of characters if not unforgettable yes in some mythical sense.

And we're not just talking about Agnes (a chameleon Kathryn Hahn) and the rest of her perfect neighbors, but even those that Schaeffer herself describes as "instrumental", like Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings), the astrophysicist who, in a triple mortal metanarrative , ends up being a fan of the series.

"The only way forward is to go back," says the powerful witch Agatha Harkness at one point, and she might not just be talking about recovering Wanda's past to explain how she has managed to build a world based on the comedies she saw from a girl with her parents and her brother when the world was already a horrible place, but she was not alone yet –the family, always the

superhero's

, that which makes her vulnerable, because she would want nothing more than if nothing had happened–. Perhaps he was talking about a return to the origins, taking advantage of cathodic seriality. A definitive commitment to the free and voracious and unapologetic spirit of comics –and series– from another time that were taken seriously, not taking themselves seriously.