Marvel's new Disney+ series, Agatha All Along, takes the lead villain from their critically acclaimed show WandaVision and puts her in her own adventure. Agatha Harkness (played by Kathryn Hahn) is a witch whose lifespan dates back to the old Salem Witch Trial days, and she is very much in it for herself. The show brings horror sensibilities and Marvel comedy to The Wizard of Oz and—led by Hahn's performance—is truly a delight. It feels different from all the recent Marvel fare, shows us something magical and dark, and is a refreshing take on the mythos of witches. Agatha has to reckon between her quest for power and her desire to make up for past deeds, and—gasp—perhaps do the right thing?

More than anything, Agatha All Along makes me want more shows and movies and books about witches in this vein, as well as others.

In many instances, witches have been maligned in the public consciousness and the zeitgeist of our storytelling. They've generally been the villains, the things that scare us.

Historically, though, the accused witches who were prosecuted in places like Salem were really women who either refused to conform to Puritan society or just ticked off their neighbors. The monsters were the ones who hung them.

It seems like this might be the right moment for witches to return to the pop-culture spotlight—and maybe through a feminist lens. We may be about to have our first woman in the presidency of our country after a legacy of hanging women who were "afflicting" others more than 300 years ago.

Zombies have already had their moment. George A. Romero brought them into the zeitgeist as possible metaphors for integration, the civil rights movement or even the Vietnam War with 1968's Night of the Living Dead. That popularity was kicked off all over again thanks to Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, and zombies were seemingly everywhere for a decade.

Vampires have served as metaphors in the popular culture for many things over the years when their popularity has skyrocketed—for addiction, for queerness, for leeching off society. Twilight brought them back out and kicked off another surge in popularity. Werewolves get a similar surge now and again, although their cycles last about as long as a full moon. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein seems to get its moment in the spotlight on occasion, but it's also fleeting.

I think witches, on the other hand, have been left out of that cycle more and more over recent decades. Sure, they might get a WB television show here or a cartoon short there. They'll appear in comics, or incidentally as counterparts to wizards in a transphobic creator's series or something, but they never really get the over-saturation we see with vampires and zombies.

Agatha All Along made me realize that maybe now was their time. There is so much to say with witches metaphorically and symbolically in the contemporary setting, but also across history. Seeing retellings of old stories we thought we knew through a lens of reframing history and—well, making it "woke" or something—would be utterly fascinating.

It would piss off a lot of the right people, too. And why would it piss them off? Because witches have power, and so do women. A book I read recently touched on some of these themes: Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown. It came out in 2015, and if you can find a copy, snag it—it's delightful. It's a Victorian era story of wizards and witches, but the women are oppressed—and while they aren't allowed to ply their magic, the magic of the men in England is dying. In the women, meanwhile, it's never been stronger, and the men are too stubborn to see it.

Sure, we're getting stories like this occasionally, but they're few and far between. I just want more—and I don't think I'm the only one.

I think folks are going to enjoy Agatha All Along and, like me, they're going to crave more of this sort of storytelling and these sorts of characters and archetypes, too. I think the faucet is just trickling on. In a year or two, let's hope the spigot has filled an entire cauldron, and that it's bubbling at a full boil.