Superheroes Behaving Badly : The Vision

Not all superheroes who behave badly do so from a sound psychological base. Some superheroes began neurotic and either stayed there or pushed the envelope of their illness, milking every bit of maudlin melodrama from their contrived tragic natures. In the Vision, we have such a figure.

Made almost, but not quite human, the Vision provided an excellent vehicle for writers who needed a character who, in spite of personal resources of intelligence, strength, and courage that outstrip anything known to normal humans, could nonetheless engage in the most morbid kind of introspection as the storytelling occasion demanded. Such a character could tear pathos from the reader by remaining outwardly heroic even as his synthetic heart broke inside. We must leave unanswered the question, "If someone could make a feel-sorry-for-yourself program run in an artificial brain, how come he couldn't make a make-jokes, I, or enjoy-self-esteem program?" The answer, after all, would tend to interfere with the dramatic purpose of the spike driven through the Vision's happiness.

The Vision's dual nature, as a being with one foot in human domains and one foot consumer electronics, makes him an excellent candidate for stories where superheroes behave badly, particularly where such tales examine the ethical problems inherent in such a borderline essence.

Mechanical Angst, the Comics Version

Many of the Vision's misbehaviors originate in questions that center around identity, a problem chronically exacerbated by Marvel Comics' indecision about whether this character partakes of a mechanical/electronic nature or of a synthetic biological nature, compounded by problem of having a mind created from duplicated components that belong to another superhero who keeps dying and coming back from the dead, compounded further by having a body that some origins say belongs to a deceased Golden Age superhero.

All in all, we might conclude that what little good behavior one can get out of the Vision represents a miraculous bit of good fortune. An entity so troubled would, most likely, give up early on and demand that his manufacturer recall him and set all the nonsense right.

The Erector-Set Hit Man

Roy Thomas created the Vision back in the sixties as a substitute another character that he really wanted to put in the Avengers somehow. The name had belonged to a Golden Age superhero, an extradimensional alien who could vanish and reappear in a manner altogether inconvenient to the forces of evil. This character had an inhuman face in a color not included in the stock color schemes for human faces, and wore a big cape with a high collar.

Marvel - which, in this case, probably means Stan Lee himself - told Thomas no on this one, and so, much as DC had done with considerable success with many of its Golden Age heroes, Thomas took the name and a few core elements from the original character and rebuilt the concept.

Thomas fit the new Vision in with the developing story involving Giant-Man's creation Ultron, a patricidal robot. Ultron, so the story developed, had built the Vision and had sent him to destroy the Avengers. Except Ultron evidently had no idea how to program this "synthezoid" - a created entity identical to a human except in that its body contained artificial materials rather than authentic tissue.

The Vision, therefore, didn't try too hard to take out the Avengers and instead fell prey to a fit of broody introspection in which exposition revealed him to by a hybrid of Ultron's manufacture and the brainwave patterns of the (then-) dead superhero Wonder Man.

In this, though the Vision did misbehave somewhat, he didn't really achieve superheroic badness, especially by Marvel terms, since every superhero had to fight his peers at some point in his early career. Usually such confrontations occurred over and over again.

The Collaborator

After Roy Thomas left Avengers to do other things, and Steve Englehart assumed the writing duties for that title, the Vision once again dabbled in deeds that threatened to undermine his credibility and reputation.

Once Roy Thomas had connected the character to Wonder Man via a copied set of brainwave patterns - and someday someone will have to explain how to copy one set of brainwave patterns into another brain, because it sounds a lot like copying a heartbeat into another heart - the Vision inherited a connection with the villainous Grim Reaper, a character whose developed definition made him the vengeful brother of the defunct Wonder Man.

As avenger of his brother's death, the Grim Reaper sought ways to a) restore his brother somehow and b) make everyone pay for killing him or letting him die in the first place. The Reaper discovered the Vision's connection, somewhere along the line, and tried to elicit his cooperation in a scheme to restore his brother, and, in the process, give the Vision a "real" body.

This particular episode of malfeasance, however, didn't prove true, since the Vision simply played along with the Reaper long enough to get that villain into a situation where fists and thrown objects might render him a bit more tractable.

The Vision therefore missed another opportunity for truly awful behavior, no matter how it may have seemed at the time.

Big Mechanical Brother

Build a six-foot Ken Doll, give it a funny paint job and an outrageous outfit, run the thing with the guts of an Atari console system, and add a few aftermarket components to give it implausible density powers, and you have a product most folks wouldn't care to see running the world.

Nonetheless, the Vision, with some outside help, decided that the world needed nothing else besides his synthetic hand to guide it in all its particulars.

Anyone who recalls the last time he got into an argument with an automatic teller machine will realize the logical flaw here. In general, human beings can find ways to make things work better by using mechanical logic devices; but we do not necessarily stand to gain anything by letting them use us.

One version of the genesis of the Vision's self-serving delusion about his fitness to govern the entire world without its consent suggests that, in a confrontation with Fantastic Four nemesis Annihilus, a control component within the Vision's synthetic brain became corrupt.

For whatever reason, though, the Vision hacked into all the computers on the planet and wrested control from humanity, believing himself entitled to and capable of creating a golden age under his control. Perhaps exaggerated accounts of the success of the USSR inclined him to believe a similar model might work worldwide; or perhaps the simple manliness of the mid-forties German model of governance suggested the benefits of strong one-man (or one-synthezoid) rule.

As global domination schemes tend to do in comics, this one failed. The Vision recognized (or, one might consider, rationalized) that the control crystal in his head had begun inclining him to incorrect ethical judgments and megalomaniacal scheming, and he removed this offending component.

Nonetheless, the taint on his reputation remained. People didn't understand. A cabal of security personnel from many countries, perhaps fanned into a frenzy by American talk radio hosts, somehow developed the delusional notion that someone who almost took over the world could represent a threat to the world in the future. Paranoia and intolerance, after all, tend to concentrate in security agencies. The job description involves finding and rooting out subversions of all kinds, including imaginary ones.

So, wearing their I Heart the CIA and I'd rather be replacing your legitimately elected popular government with my own hand-picked cronies and fascists, a cluster of multinational black ops came to deal with the Vision, years after the fact, when his return to the Avengers made him a security risk again, owing to the availability of just the sort of computers he used once before to take over the world.

In an odd but convenient bit of compassion, this coalition stopped short of feeding the components of the Vision into the nearest branch shredder or using a steam roller to render them into so much silicon sand and powdered ferric compounds. Nonetheless, they did erase the Vision's mind, plus all backups of the Vision's mind, plus a number of other things that someone might use to recreate the Vision's mind. They also disassembled this tragic soul into a spider web of hair-fine electronic filaments connected to miscellaneous mechanical organs and artificial muscles.

What Dr. Pym rebuilt from this do-it-yourself mechanical man kit had the abilities, but neither the look nor the classic personality of the Vision. The Thomas - Englehart version of the character, combining broody melodrama and unrequited love in a figure that had to conceal its humanity for fear of never measuring up, went away for a few years, replaced by a cold, white thing that, if not so much fun to watch it suffer, at least seemed unlikely to insert a convenient appendage into a phone jack and start reallocating funds from your bank account to more logical and "enlightened" destinations.

The Codependent Ex and Bad Sibling

Since the Vision tried (and failed) to take over the world, and subsequently suffered a series of indignities including having his mind erased, his body rebuilt, his color scheme rearranged, and his newly refurbished mind transplanted into another version of himself from a dimension full of evil Avengers, this hero has done little in the way of large-scale malfeasance.

Instead, he has toned down to a normal-for-Marvel level of sulking and squabbling, these events typically centering around Wonder Man and the Scarlet Witch. One can understand the Vision's situation - if you found out that your body housed a mind copied from another man who had died, and that this man had returned from the dead, and that this man had taken to shacking up with your ex-wife, you doubtless would occasionally encounter moments in which coping becomes difficult.

So, therefore, the Vision must currently satisfy himself with the ongoing snub of his widow, the Scarlet Witch, and with occasional petulant outbursts of superheroic violence against the deserving Wonder Man, an unstable superhero who crosses the line between hero and villain and between living being and cadaver a little too frequently for comfort.

As in the case of Speedy before him, though, the Vision's misdeeds never reached the point where the redemption of the character required a major retcon to render him usable again. The Vision had the excuse of a malfunctioning (or tampered-with) component to justify his attempt to become First Citizen of the World; and other misdeeds represent understandable, though not always justifiable, reactions to the vague status of a being who borders on both the human and the mechanical.