The unusual thing about Master Pandemonium are his arms, specifically what he has in the place of his hands: two young boys, turned green and monstrous. Even more absurd are the variations of that same scene inside the issue, where Master Pandemonium has two normal young boys at the end of his arms.
Those boys are Tommy and Billy, the twin sons of Vision and Wanda, and everything about them is weird. Vision is, of course, a synthezoid, an artificial human being made from the body of the Golden Age Human Torch and implanted with the “brainwaves” of Simon Williams a.k.a. Wonder Man, long dead by the time of Vision’s first appearance in 1969’s Avengers #57. Make no mistake: Vision is a wonder, a complex android capable of thought, self-awareness, and even emotional depth, as demonstrated by his love for Wanda.
But Vision cannot reproduce, so when Wanda gave birth to a pair of twins in 1986’s The Vision and the Scarlet Witch #12, questions were raised. And those questions went mostly unanswered. Chalk it up to the power of love, chalk it up to a miracle, chalk it up to Wanda being a witch. Somehow, a synthezoid got her pregnant—with twins, no less!
The Devil’s Due
Eventually, an explanation for the miracle did come, in the story leading up to Avengers West Coast #52. When Wanda used her magic to make the twins, she inadvertently stole fragments of Mephsito, the Marvel Universe’s version of Satan (you saw him played as just a regular dude, for some reason, by Sacha Baron Cohen in Ironheart). The magic-user Master Pandemonium wanted to use those fragments to gain power, but he in fact drew Mephisto’s attention. Mephisto absorbed those fragments back into himself, thereby wiping Tommy and Billy from existence.
Or so we thought. The first signs of something strange happened in 2005, with the arrival of the Young Avengers: a group of teen heroes arrived to take the place of the Avengers, who had just been defeated when a crazed Wanda turned Vision into a bomb. Initially, the teens all mirrored members of the original Avengers, with Patriot mimicking Captain America and Asgardian mirroring Thor. However, as the storyline went on and we learned the secret behind the team (they are adolescent heroes assembled by a teenage Nathaniel Richards, to stop his older self, the time-traveling villain Kang the Conquerer), the heroes began to take on new identities.
In particular, Asgardian revealed that he wasn’t from Asgard. Rather, he was a magic-using boy called Billy Kaplan. Moreover, Billy had hex powers like those of Wanda Maximoff. And with good reason, because it turns out that he is Billy Kaplan… sort of.