Avengerous Tales 1.31 - Avengers #57-#58

To read Avengerous Tales 1.30, go here!

NO BLOOD

NO STAIN
ALL WE NEED IS
ONE WORLD
ONE VISION

We open with a brief introduction of our mysterious new* character walking through the rain, making his way to Janet van Dyne’s swanky apartment building.  Jan is hoping that Hank will propose and Hank just wants to go check on his germ cultures.  (Actually, he does say he has something important to talk to her about, but that he wants to do it later so we’ll discuss it later too.)

As soon as Hank leaves, the Vision pops in through an open window to grab Jan.  She shrinks to Wasp size and escapes through a keyhole to call her boyfriend—because that’s what superheroes do when they get into trouble, right?  Call their boyfriends?  Steve certainly seems to call on Tony often enough—but the Vision walks straight through the wall.  Ooh, creepy beginning!  Me like!  Me don’t like Jan getting kidnapped again, but what did me expect, a miracle?

(Me speak like Cookie Monster all of a sudden.  Delayed gratification!)

And it’s not like the Vision succeeds in his quest anyway: the world’s most ill-timed migraine strikes him down first.

 

“I KNEW I SHOULDN’T HAVE TRIED TO BREAK BOARDS WITH MY FACE!”

Jan must manage to hit an emergency signal around this point, since Hank gets a distress call, grows into Goliath, and just starts climbing the exterior of the building to get to her, scaring the pants off the neighbors (and probably catching a glimpse of a few neighbors without their pants).  Still, I don’t blame him—at least he’s playing King Kong to protect the woman he loves.  If I could grow to twenty-five feet, I’d scale buildings just to scare people on purpose.

The Vision is still unconscious by the time Hank gets there (after breaking Jan’s window, much to her displeasure), so they decide to take him to Avengers Mansion for some good old-fashioned pokin’ and proddin’.

Meanwhile, at another apartment…

 

Oh look, Natasha’s still around!  Hi, Natasha!

As you can see, her decision to give up being the Black Widow “forever” back in Avengers #46 totally stuck.  SHIELD has offered her another mission and, since Hawkeye’s always so busy with Avengers business—oops, sorry to interrupt Natasha, but Hawkeye’s getting a call from the Avengers right now!  I guess that demonstrates your point better than words anyway.

We then see T’Challa, a.k.a. the Black Panther, stop a robbery before he, too, gets the call to assemble.  And now that the gang’s all here, we can start investigating.  The comic finally remembers that Hank is specifically a biochemist instead of Generic All-Purpose Scientist, and he does some scans to learn more about the as-yet-unnamed intruder.  It turns out that he is what Hank dubs a “synthezoid,” or a perfect replica of a human being except that he is entirely made of synthetic materials.

In the middle of the examination, the intruder wakes up and starts attacking again, dubbing himself the Vision after the stilted dialogue Jan spouted when she first laid eyes on him.  It’s a short-lived fight, though—despite his ranting about needing to destroy them all, the Vision seems oddly reluctant to do so, especially since he can’t remember why he came here or even where he got his density-shifting powers.

 

That explains a lot.

Now that the Vision’s memory of his creator has returned, he is more than happy to lead the Avengers right to Ultron’s hide-out.  If that seems too easy, that’s only because it is: Ultron programmed the Vision with two goals: if he couldn’t achieve the first by killing the Avengers, he was to lead them to Ultron’s hide-out so Ultron could kill them himself.

Goliath is the first to vanish, unsettling the others.

 

For someone who claims to have no emotions, Ultron seems big on hurling insults, getting revenge, and other high-emotion pursuits.

As for the others, Ultron traps them in the classic room with walls that slowly move inward to squish our heroes.  Hawkeye, not without reason, suspects this whole thing was a trap with Vision as the bait—a hypothesis he only clings tighter to when the Vision easily walks through the moving wall, which he interprets as leaving them to their deaths.
 

Vision, however, has other plans.  He goes to Ultron and directly confronts him, resulting in hot robot-on-robot action.  (I’m sure that’s a turn-on for someone somewhere.)

After besting Ultron, Vision demands to learn more about his creation, like why he has feelings when Ultron claims to scorn them.  As you might imagine, Ultron isn’t exactly forthcoming with the details and the Vision, uh, throws him into a wall, I guess?

Actually, Ultron leapt at Vision, who lowered his density so that Ultron went right through him into I think the “seething energy vat” that Ultron himself tried to kill the Vision with earlier.  Or maybe he just crashed into some really volatile equipment.

But whatever, right?  The Avengers are saved, the Vision has earned their trust, and Ultron never bothered anybody ever again.  Job well done!  Let’s go out for schwarma!

Oh, wait, we have one more issue left to cover today.  Issue Fifty-Eight begins with ALL of the Avengers assembling—yup, even erstwhile members Captain America, Iron Man and Thor—to consider the Vision’s membership request.  Cap responds by “testing” the Vision, and by that I mean pouncing on him.

 

Oh my gosh I love Hawkeye’s face here, it’s hilarious.  He’s all like “Yup, that’s my guy, about to show y’all what he’s made of.”  Which may or may not explain why Iron Man was so pissy on the last page.  (He wasn’t all that supportive of Vision’s membership bid, even slamming his fist on the table.)  Hey, Shellhead, you’ve been out of this book for years—did you think that no one else would flirt with Cap while you were gone?

Also, is it just me, or did Jan steal Wonder Girl’s Santa costume from Teen Titans #13?

Anyway, the Vision simply turns intangible and Cap ends up on his butt.  This annoys Iron Man and Thor and they attack the Vision as well, which was all part of Cap’s plan to let Vision demonstrate his range of powers.  Why he didn’t just ASK Vision to demonstrate instead of attempting a sneak attack is beyond me, but it works, and the Vision becomes our newest Avenger.

 

“For the love of Pete, just shut up so we can go get pizza!”

(He even pulled out a literal scroll to make his fancy speech.  This is amazing.  He’s like that dipstick from Green Acres—I can hear the fife playing already.)

Once Thor finally shuts up, the Vision tries yet again to remember his secret origins.  He manages with a little effort, but he really doesn’t learn anything we didn’t already know from last issue.

But it turns out that the Vision wasn’t the only one with memory problems.  Hank says that a few months back, he was working on solar-powered synthezoids very similar to the Vision, but for the life of him, he can’t recall what ever became of his experiments.  To answer that riddle, Thor flies everyone to Hank’s house in a literal cyclone created by Mjolnir.  It’s the only way to travel!

When they get to Hank’s house, they find it boarded up, but again, Hank has no memory of doing this.  So he decides to jog his memory with his electronic memory bank (what, you don’t have one?), which is another of those put-on-your-thinking-cap-and-see-images-of-the-past machines.  Hank sees himself right after the Dragon Man incident, using what he learned about androids from Dragon Man to further his own work on artificial intelligence, which looks more like a trash can with arms than the Ultron we know and love.

 

“I used a condom, dammit!”

And don’t ask me why Hank is a redhead instead of blond all of a sudden.  Just be grateful I’m not showing you that time in Captain America where Tony had red hair.  That was creepy as sin.

Hank is forced to fight his robot “offspring,” who has fricking lasers for some reason.  Hank, why would you invent an artificial intelligence WITH LASERS???  YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SMART.

Oh, and there’s this.

 

Hank, you are a doof.  This entire issue is filled with doofs.  I don’t know if that was the creators’ intention, but Avengers #58 is the funniest thing I’ve read in ages.

Ultron hypnotizes Hank into forgetting about him, boarding up his old house, and moving into Avengers Mansion.  That way, Ultron could use Hank’s old equipment to upgrade himself to his evil, non-existent heart’s content.

With the show over, Hank unhooks himself from the machine, and Iron Man notices something odd: Wonder Man’s memory tape is gone.

I think I should explain a few things first.  If you don’t remember, Wonder Man, a.k.a. Simon Williams, was given powers by Baron Zemo so he could infiltrate the Avengers.  You can read about it in Avengers #9.  Wonder Man ultimately had a change of heart and saved the Avengers’ lives, so Zemo stopped giving him the antidote that would prevent his powers from killing him, condemning Wonder Man to a heroic death.

Or so we thought.  As it turns out, Zemo actually shot Wonder Man as he made his escape, so it wasn’t his powers that killed him after all (though they would have if Zemo hadn’t shot him).  And then this happened.

 

This is all a fancy way of saying that Ultron based the Vision’s brain patterns off of Wonder Man.  This actually opens up a whole lot of philosophical questions about how human the Vision is, how much he’s Simon Williams and how much he’s his own person, and so forth, but the Avengers don’t care about that.  They just go home and make the official announcement: the Vision is an Avenger for realsies.

 

The last panel shows Vision having a moment alone after the announcement, crying silently.  It’s implied that they’re tears of joy at finally having a home and friends who accept him as he is, but he doesn’t look especially happy.  I’m sure he is genuinely happy about being an Avenger, but he’s also had a very trying couple of days.  Heck, he’s only been sentient for a couple of days, so I wonder how much of his crying has to do with joining the team and how much has to do with his needing to wrap himself up in a blanket and eat ice cream while watching cartoons for a couple of hours.

Issue Fifty-Seven felt a little rushed, though maybe that’s just because I’m used to the really decompressed storylines we’ve been getting recently.  Issue Fifty-Eight is mostly exposition and retcons, but I don’t even care, this was fun!

Also, just as an aside: you may have noticed about now that the panels I’ve been posting have a lot fewer narration boxes than they used to.  The late sixties saw a stylistic shift in that regard—oh there was still pretentious narration to be had, but the gigantic narration boxes of old were starting to vanish, giving the panels a less crowded look, making comics a heckuva lot faster to read, and eventually increasing opportunities for visual storytelling and more creative panel layouts.  Just wait’ll we get to George Pérez’s stuff—he’s a master.

To read Avengerous Tales 1.32, go here!

Images from Avengers #57 and Avengers #58

*I lied, the Vision isn’t new at all. The original Vision was a Golden Age character created by Simon and Kirby.  He was actually quite different from “our” Vision, being an alien policeman instead of a synthezoid, though you’ll note that their outfits and the poses they make during their respective debuts look suspiciously alike.