The Vision: Little Worse Than a Man, Little Better Than a Beast.

 The Vision: Little Worse Than a Man, Little Better Than a Beast. 

Things have been complicated over the last couple of months. It's been a series of barely controlled outcomes. Of late, dread and uncertainty filled my days. It’s been a maelstrom of decisions to make and fate’s random unjust hand. Life will have these periods, of course. Stretches of time where all you can do is stand in rain. You have the choice to run for cover or to scream down the thunder. 

Now that the clouds have passed, I feel that I can get back on with my journey… albeit slowly. The best way to get back on the horse is with a horse you know. 

Tom King is one of my comfort authors. Something about his work just meets my groove. His books are always about something, usually very personal to Tom but also a massively shared experience. There is a level of cynicism that hits home. His books are generally about “God this is all shit but let's make the best of it, eh? Because that's what we do and what we need to do, and maybe it won’t all be shit if we do it.”

I’ve read Tom King’s Vision run… maybe five times? It’s a book I can really relate to. I’m often accused of going into robot mode, of going into cold logic and disinterested observation to find the cause and solution to a problem. These books are a gloriously small scale encapsulation of that, and the impact that can have, and the blending of when thought and emotion meld.

What am I Reading? The Vision, Vol 1: Little Worse Than a Man (#1-6) & Vol 2: Little Better Than a Beast (#7-12). Written by Tom King, Illustrated by Gabriel Hernandez Walta. 

What’s it about? The Vision has earned a little break. He’s been killed, reborn, repurposed, divorced and abandoned throughout his career in saving the world. Time he settled down. In order to achieve that task, he ran the numbers, as a robot rightly would. He needs a home in the suburbs. He needs a wife and kids. He needs to be normal. But what is normal? 

What’s good about it? I often find what I struggle most with modern Marvel books is the pacing. Normally things are so massive in scope that everything feels rushed. Character moments on the page are rarely given the time to breathe. These books allow you to really get to grips with the members of the Vision household. It gives them all the time and space they need to develop. But the story doesn’t drag either, the escalation comes at perfect moments. 

King is often accused of just making characters sad to give them personality, I believe this to be unfounded. What King does is make them introspective. Vision is a robot, with a complicated past, and a forever yearning to be human. He wants to learn the lessons from previous mistakes, and repeat the experiment with a different variable changed. There is a fantastic stretch of the narration that describes the computing process of P and NP problems, and that sums this up perfectly. As part of my job, I often coach people on problem solving: Whenever people get overwhelmed with the scale of a problem, I remind them that anything big is actually made up of lots of little bits. Solving the little bits will add up to one big solution. NP = P, or atleast NP - Complete. Is that robotic? Or is that human endeavour? What's the difference? The difference is that miraculous monster of a variable: Human Error … or in this case, Synthazoid Error.

Another big thing that I find with current Marvel fails with is visual storytelling. It's very much show and tell. However, Walta does a fantastic job in this! There is a level of subtlety and subtext ingrained in the pages of this. You know that feeling when you walk into a “Family Home” and it's just… off? Things are too pristine to be lived in. Too well ordered to imply a happy relationship. You look round the kitchen, or the bedroom, and ask if everything is okay? I hate that feeling. It's like an uncanny valley for properties. I feel it most when walking around recently constructed houses. The worst is when it's a building that has clearly been designed by committee to be sold as student accommodation / shared housing, but it's been built in the wrong neighbourhood for that, so it's been repurposed for a family home. Little things like the bathrooms are in the wrong place, strangely shaped common areas, all the bedrooms are the same size, do you know what I mean? The worst property anxiety is I have a friend who has a downstairs bathroom that doesn’t have a mirror… What is that about? Only an alien would live like this. That's the feeling I get from looking at the Visions’ home.

What did I struggle with? It may be because I've read this too many times, but I felt the theme of cycles a little grating on this run through. You can see the cogs turning in real time. The repetition, the mirroring, the foreshadowing is all a little too obvious. As I said, I’ve read this a lot, maybe I’m being hypercritical. 

Not to yuck anybodies’ yum but one thing that I’ve never understood is why multiple Marvel heroines find Vision so sexually attractive. Scarlet Witch, Mantis, Monica Rambeau to name a few. I get the romantic attraction: vastly intelligent, enormous emotional depth, immensely powerful, continually searching to understand, adapt and improve. As a life partner I can’t think of much better. As someone to bump nasties with? Dude’s a toaster. 

Let's talk about the WandaVision (2021). I enjoyed the show. I honestly did enjoy it, but this blows it out of the water. The show owes a debt to this run, but the show also highlights the biggest flaw in Vision’s plan; don’t base your new wife’s brain off your ex-wife’s brain. Virginia tackles problems the same way that Wanda does, which usually means extreme violence. It was only ever going to go that way. Maybe that's the point though, Vision can’t be without Wanda but he doesn’t know what that means.  

Would I recommend it? Yes. It’s an easy read whilst containing magnitudes. For the new reader it might be a bit bewildering, but enjoyable.