Avengers: "Behold... the Vision!"

Avengers #57 (1968)

By Roy Thomas, John Buscema, George Klein

Background: The current Avengers roster is Black Panther, Wasp, Goliath, Hawkeye.

So, What Happens? During a rainy night, a mysterious, red-skinned character enters Janet van Dyne's apartment and terrifies her. Describing him as an unearthly, inhuman Vision. Janet manages to shrink down and escape, but the intruder is capable of walking through walls and of shooting heat rays from his eyes. Wasp is in trouble, but the intruder suddenly collapses in pain, and moments later Hank Pym is there too. They decide to take him to Avengers Mansion, where they are eventually joined by Hawkeye and Black Panther. By studying their mystery man, Hank determines him to be an artificial human, or a synthozoid, something he himself had been unsuccessfully working on. The creature awakens and names himself the Vision after Wasp's remark when she first saw him. He says his mission is to destroy the Avengers and attacks, revealing the power to alter his own density from intangible to hard as a diamond. Eventually however he calms down, realizing he doesn't know why he was sent to kill the Avengers, nor how he came to be. Feeling he and the Avengers should be allies, he remembers being created by the robot called Ultron-5 and offers to take the team to him. Despite some uncertainty, the Avengers agree to follow the Vision, unaware that Ultron had both caused him to collapse at the Wasp's and programmed him to lead the Avengers to his lair, where he could destroy them himself. Upon entering Ultron's secret base, Hank is captured and the rest of the team falls into a trap. Vision phases through the walls and meets Ultron, revealing he really wants to help the Avengers and challenging his creator, who admits the Vision's power may be greater than his own but refuses to explain why the synthozoid possesses human memories, thoughts and emotions. Eventually, Ultron is tricked into jumping against the wall and explodes. With his destruction the traps stop and the Avengers reunite, unaware that Ultron's head has survived. The Vision rues the missed chance to learn the full story behind his creation.

Notes: The Avengers had met Ultron for the first time in issue #55, where he posed as the Crimson Cowl and led the Masters of Evil. The villain is not yet made of adamantium, explaining why he's so relatively easy to destroy. A very different Black Widow from what she is today makes a cameo appearance and mentions being in between missions for SHIELD. The memorable epilogue shows a kid playing with Ultron's broken head and features the sonnet Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Something Silly This Way Comes: Ultron has one weak spot and of course reveals it to the Vision less than two minutes into their fight. 

Review: I've always felt that, out of all Silver Age Marvel titles, The Avengers took the longest to hit its stride, and only really did so once the Vision joined the team. Even so, this debut issue is far from perfect and owes a lot to John Buscema's absolutely outstanding art and to the Vision himself being immediately a fascinating and dramatic character. Stalwart Roy Thomas writes a good, flowing script, but the story would have needed twice the number of pages to be properly told. As it is, the Avengers are guests in their own book and depend entirely on the Vision to save them. The synthozoid's change of heart rings true, but it all happens so quickly that the Vision feels a little forced on the team and Ultron looks like a fool for having created someone so powerful only to be betrayed by him five minutes later. A more gradual introduction, as in the Earth's Mightiest Heroes animated series, would have benefitted both.

I will discuss the impact of Vision joining the Avengers in my review for issue #58, but here it's interesting to see what was going on in Stan's and Roy's minds when they came up with the character. According to Wikipedia

Decades later, editor Stan Lee and writer Roy Thomas decided to add a new team member to the superhero-team series The Avengers. Thomas wanted to bring back the Golden Age Vision, but Lee was set on introducing an android member. Thomas ultimately compromised by using a new, android Vision. The second Vision first appeared in The Avengers #57 (Oct. 1968). Thomas wanted the character to be white as befitting his ghostly name, but printing limitations of the time would have rendered him colorless, with un-inked paper where his skin should be. He settled on red as he did not want Vision to be green like the Hulk or blue like the Atlanteans. The character has been compared with Spock from Star Trek, but Thomas said that he was barely aware of the TV series at the time. He acknowledged being influenced by the Adam Link character by Otto Binder, one of the first robots treated as a sympathetic character rather than as a mechanical tool.

As it was often the case, it doesn't sound like too much thought went into creating the character, but for decades the Vision will become the constant keeping the Avengers together.

Still, pivotal as the Vision will become, my favourite part of the story is probably the epilogue. Ozymandias is about impermanence, but also the foolishness of the powerful who believe themselves eternal, so seeing the broken head of the once-deadly Ultron reduced to being the toy a kid quickly gets bored of, perfectly serves to put his ambitions into perspective. This is quite a thought-provoking and learned bit of literature to use in a comic book, one that probably shows why kids reading stories like this in the '60s and '70s felt Marvel was treating them like adults instead of being condescending with simpler tales, and responded accordingly. Roy Thomas was an English teacher and lover of literature, so the sonnet is most likely his idea.

I've already briefly mentioned the art, but it has to be seen to be believed. In my eyes, John Buscema and George Perez are the definitive Avengers artists, and Big John certainly proves me right here. The Vision is dramatic from the start, his costume simple and memorable. The green/yellow colour scheme and the high-neck cuff of the cape have all the potential to look silly, but instead serve to highlight the Vision's red face, made all the more striking by the full-black eyes. A quick glance is all it takes to get that the Vision is not quite human, and yet his face is as expressive as everyone else's, if not more, immediately providing the duality that will define the character for years. If Ultron's unmovable visage emphasizes his evil nature, the Vision's deep, empty eyes and apparently-stern features are fully capable of conveying emotions.

Final Verdict: A rushed but superbly-drawn introduction to one of Marvel's greatest stars. 4/5