Re: Vision
Though rarely able to sustain a solo series, The Vision has long enjoyed popularity among Marvel readers. He is also a gift to writers, particularly in his early years. Here is a character who is underdeveloped by design, since he is an artificial life form created as an adult, with no past, only a future. Like Pinocchio, the Vision is on a quest to become, if not a real boy, at least a full-fledged individual. So what does Englehart do? He gives him a hitherto-undisclosed past.
Granted, this was all Roy Thomas’ idea, as mentioned in the previous entry. But Englehart was under no obligation to spend so much time on a dangling subplot consisting of only two hints: the Vision’s unexplained claustrophobia and an enemy robot identifying him as an artificial life form of “three decades’ vintage” when the synthezoid had only been active for less than a decade in real-time (and still less in Marvel time) (*Issue 102). Instead, Englehart uses Thomas’ retcon as the stimulus for, and gradual resolution of, The Vision’s identity crisis.
After a slow-burning near-romance that played out over several years, the Vision and Wanda the Scarlet Witch finally admitted their love for each other. The fact that he is synthetic and she is a mutant could have provided enough drama on its own, but now each of them could only move forward in their relationship by finally coming to terms with their own individual identity. Wanda gains power and assertiveness, while the Vision explores his past in order to see that he is justified in thinking of himself as a man.
In keeping with Englehart’s use of time travel as a metaphor, the Vision makes his initial discovery thanks to temporal paradox. Kang has taken over Immortus’s ream of Limbo and brought back heroes and villains from the past to fight the Avengers. Limbo, as depicted in these issues, is a timeless realm in which no events actually amount to anything. Theoretically, the Vision and the rest of the cast of characters could spend eternity there without aging or changing; even death is temporary. In other words, Limbo is the worst type of superhero comic book continuity: just a series of immediately reversible events that have neither ramification nor meaning.
In Limbo, the Vision is mortally wounded, only to be saved by a revived (original) Human Torch, who discovers that the Vision’s synthetic interiors are identical to his own. That is to say, the Vision’s initial discovery of his past takes place because his prior iteration knows himself so well that he recognizes his own insides when wrapped in an unfamiliar exterior. The Human Torch thus function not only as the Vision’s previous instantiation, but as the incarnation of the very self-knowledge that the synethezoid so sorely lacks.
When Immortus sends the Vision on a journey into the past, the revelations about his life as the Human Torch are intriguing, but verge on the obsession with continuity often derided as “fanwank.” Yet the Human Torch’s life story does successfully prefigure some patterns in that of the Vision. A failed science experiment, the Human Torch is repeatedly awakened, captured, killed, and revived, framing him as a passive plaything in the hands of others. But when his deactivated body is taken by the villainous android Ultron 5, his story finally takes on a more individual and emotional resonance.
Ultron, accidentally created by a mentally disturbed Hank Pym (who, as Ant-Man, was one of the Avengers’ founders), is a robot whose first act was attempt homicide. Ultron is quite upfront about his “Oedipus complex—the hatred I harbored for my ‘father,’” but ultimately, rather than kill Pym, he erases Pym’s memory and embarks on a project of self-reconstruction: “In a mad orgy of transformation I spent a night and a day—/—in becoming the most perfect example of a robot in all the world!” In itself, this reconstruction is a symbolic parricide—by recreating himself, he becomes his own father.
In so doing, he also repeats his father’s mistakes, but where Pym’s motives are all subtext (creating artificial life could well be the sublimation of an unfulfilled desire to have the children he and the Wasp would never conceive), Ultron’s are pure text: “I am living out a full, normal lifespan—/—and I want to have a son!/ There must be someone who owes me his life—/so that I may have a trustworthy servant!” The fact that he could say such a thing shows the extent of his blind spot, since he himself responded to his “father" with violence rather than fealty.
After gaining custody of the Human Torch’s inert body, Ultron requires the help of the Torch’s inventor, Phineas Horton. Horton revives the android, but deliberately neglects to erase his memory: “I conceived him—myself, with no one’s aid! He come to life under my hands […] / I love him!/ He’s the high point of all my days on Earth!” Horton dies, Ultron defeats the Vision and erases his memories, reconfiguring his mind with the brain patters of the dead Simon Williams (Wonder Man).
The Vision is satisfied with what he has learned about himself: “…now I know of the courage and love that comprise my heritage…and now I know that I have a heritage…/ that I did not spring full-blown from Ultron’s brow…but was, in fact, one of the greatest heroes the world has ever seen!”
These revelations are a clever rethreading of various skeins of Marvel continuity. But why should they be so crucial for the Vision’s sense of his own personhood? His satisfaction at learning his own backstory resembles that of an adopted child who, in adulthood, finally discovers the story of their biological parents. The mere fact of access to facts is important.
In the Vision’s case, there is the complication of not having biological parents at all. Just before embarking on one of the most important rituals of human adulthood (marriage), he finds out that, despite his artificial body, he is the culmination of a set of all-too-human neuroses: Ultron’s Oedipal conflict with Hank Pym and his resulting desire for a son; Horton’s dying acknowledgment that the Torch was his son in all but biology; and the complicated family ties that will arise from the use of Simon Williams’s brain patterns. The sheer messiness of his origin and the complexity of his extra-biological family ties argue in favor of the Vision’s essential humanity.