Everybody is getting rebooted at Marvel these days. It’s an old trick of the comic book business, one usually employed to sell more comics or hold onto a copyright. The original Human Torch morphs into Johnny Storm. Captain America is thawed from his frozen slumber to fight with The Avengers. Even the money machine that is now The X-Men was at one time canceled, then resurrected with an injection of youth and diversity. Every once in a while, out of what is usually nothing more than a decision based on sales figures, a talented group of writers and artists reboot a character and create a narrative twist so simple and daring that we see old characters with fresh eyes and remember why they held our imaginations in the first place.
Vision, out now from Marvel, is one of those unique comics. Yes, it’s a superhero comic with fight scenes and muscular people in tights, but writer Tom King and artist Gabriel Hernandez Walta have created a superhero comic that is both a re-invention of a classic character and a nihilistic meditation on what it means to be human. All the while, it manages to be a gripping page turner–and we’re just talking about the first issue!
The Vision has become something of a household name since the release of the blockbuster movie Age of Ultron, but a little background: Vision made his first appearance in the pages of Avengers #57, way back in 1968. A synthezoid created by Ultron to destroy the Avengers, Vision turns on his creator and eventually becomes the closest thing the team has to a permanent member. He’s a bit like the Avengers’ dusty old butler; the guy just always seems to be around. Vision has always pined to be fully human, but like Data on Star Trek, he views humanity with the cold language of a computer, confused by our many contradictions.
There have been previous attempts to break him out into the mainstream. Vision had his own book in the mid-1980s, teaming up with his then-wife Scarlet Witch, but since then his place has always been in the pages of The Avengers.
When we catch up with Vision in his new title, things have changed. Not only has he purged the emotions associated with his memories from his hard drive in order to keep himself running smoothly, he has also created a family: a wife named Virginia, and two teenagers, Vin and Viv. Moving with his newly made family to a northern Virginia suburb, just outside of Washington, DC, Vision is attempting to move away from the Avengers and forge a normal life as an attaché to the President.
Right away, we get the sense that integrating themselves into a neighborhood built around conformity is not going well for the Vision family. The first pages open with a settled, comfortable white couple doing the most good-natured of things: bringing cookies to their new neighbors. They banter back and forth about whether the Visions are normal or not, whether they will be able to appreciate fresh baked cookies, and we feel appalled by their lack of good will–until the Visions front door is opened and we meet the new family, with unnerving smiles pasted over metallic bodies and skin that is just a touch off-pink, like an attempt at mimicry gone bad. Their essential inhumanity is impossible to hide.
And that inhumanity is part of what provides The Vision with the tension that makes it such an unsettling read. The challenges the Vision family face—work, love, fitting in—are all too human, but through the detached narration and Walta’s spare, clean panels, there is an undercurrent of dread to these big questions, as if they may have no answer at all. Emotional conflict surfaces on nearly every page in one way or another, but the Visions are so alien, so unexpressive, it creates a singularly unsettling effect.
Vision is unnerved by his decisions; without the emotions to understand his past, he struggles to remember feelings of love for his wife, but the most powerful scenes of self-doubt are left for Vision’s wife and children, who are still exploring their newly created lives and personalities. In a quiet moment, Virginia searches the corners of her memories, memories created from the brainwaves of another person, and is surprised by how many of them make her cry. Viv and Vin try their best to fit in at a new school, but a single question from a classmate–R U NORMAL?–has Vin doubting his place in a human society, his very identity. It’s a dash of Hal in 2001 and a pinch of the monster from Frankenstein; the Created asking the Creator, “Why am I here, where do I fit in?”
“To assert as truth that which has no meaning is the core mission of humanity,” Vision tells his wife, just after meeting their new neighbors, and his family’s attempt to solve that contradiction is why we feel their plight so keenly. Instead of a story about a super-powered synthezoid created by a mad robot to wield ultimate power against supervillians and intergalactic threats, we get a Vision that is more like the Willy Loman of comics, albeit one with the power to control his own molecules. All he wants is a piece of the American dream, and his power can’t help him achieve it any more than it can help Viv and Vin fit in at school or help Virginia find her way in life. These are human challenges that no super-power can help overcome, and it’s what King and Walta use to keep us emotionally gripped in the inaugural issue of what is gearing up to be a must read comic.
