Creators: Tom King, Gabriel Hernandez Walta & Jordie Bellaire
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Publish Date: June 29, 2016
(volumes 1 | 2)
Volume 1 of The Vision is a superhero story combined with Frankenstein. The Vision, wanting to be human (or at least have a more realistic experience of humanity), returns to the lab where Ultron made him and creates a family: a wife Virginia, daughter Viv and son Vin. (Catch a pattern?) They all share his powers, but Vision remains the only one working for the Avengers – the rest of his family is tasked with the seemingly innocuous responsibility of being normal.
All’s well until it isn’t, and Tom King immediately creates a sense of an ominous threat looming ahead in the distance – we aren’t sure what it is, but we do know that the Vision’s creation of his family will have serious repercussions. Whether it’s Viv and Vin trying – and immediately failing – to fit in at school, to the web of lies that Virginia begins spinning in order to keep everything together – you can tell it’s a house of cards waiting to crash down.
King is a master at this ominous story-building–slowly and deftly building the house of cards–but there are times when it can feel a little heavy-handed. Perhaps this is because I was reading all six issues at once, instead of installments once a month. But I noticed that King really likes to talk about one thing while the artist shows another – for example, he describes a magical plant that hangs in the Vision’s household while we follow Virginia, or the 37 times Vision has saved the world during a meeting with the school principal. It becomes a multi-layered story rich with metaphors and double meanings, but sometimes it can feel oppressive. Perhaps that’s the point.
Like the episode in Star Trek: Next Generation when Data tries to create a daughter in order to experience humanity, Vision and his family are constantly asking what it means to be human. What is “normal”? What is “purpose”? Even though they are technically artificial beings, each of them react to danger, bullies and opposition in very human ways.
Walta’s beautiful art does a magnificent job creating a believably artificial-looking family based on Vision, but they also have realistic human facial expressions. The art feels very grounded, the colors an eerie fall tone, allowing the story to really shine through.
This is an engaging, dark but thoroughly entertaining story that really stands out from other Marvel stories. It could just as easily be a story about an artificial being without any connection to Marvel, but the fact that it’s the Vision makes it a whole lot richer and creates some real depth to his character. (I say this not knowing much about Vision outside of his film persona.) This is a book that would be great for non-comic book readers, and I look forward to reading the second (and I believe final) volume soon.
Click here for the review of volume 2, “Little Better than a Beast.”
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