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…and other than Spider-Man, I didn’t know any of these
characters!
So it was back to the library to pick up books about
Marvel superheroes, such as
Origins of Marvel Comics and
Bring on the Bad Guys.
But I couldn’t find anything about the most
interesting-looking characters in the puzzle.
Who was that yellow and red robot guy over at the center right, for
instance?
And who was that
in the green and yellow costume?
I got the answer to the latter question when I found myself in a
bookstore that turned out to carry “Marvel Illustrated
Books”—paperbacks containing a couple of comics
with the color removed and the panels rearranged to fit the smaller
pages.
And one of them, which I eagerly snatched up, was all about that red
guy:
So that was how I first read Avengers #57
and #58, featuring the debut of the Vision.
Or, rather, the debut of the Silver Age version of the
Vision.
In the Golden Age, way back in 1940, Marvel Mystery
Comics #13 had launched a character who went by the same
name, this one
with the power to teleport between wisps of smoke.
Twenty-eight years later, Avengers writer Roy
Thomas was fixated on the idea that even though the Marvel Universe had
begun with Fantastic Four #1 in 1961,
Marvel’s predecessor companies Timely and Atlas had nearly thirty
years of history that Thomas could mine for content—and
one example of his fixation was that he wanted to make the Golden Age
Vision, whose last appearance had been in 1943, into an Avenger.
Stan Lee vetoed the idea—he wanted the next Avenger to be
an android.
And so Thomas created a mysterious android called the Vision whose
costume looked virtually identical to the alien’s.
Except the Avengers’ resident scientist at the time, Hank
Pym, pulled the “akshually” card and declared that the
Vision was “not an android… but a
synthozoid!”
Okay, so what’s a synthozoid?
Or a synthezoid, as it would soon be spelled?
How does it differ from an android?
And how does either differ from a robot?
Etymologically, it would seem that an android is distinguished from
other robots by its resemblance to a man.
But I can’t recall the the Avengers’ arch-enemy Ultron ever
being described as an android, despite the fact that he’s got two
arms (with elbows), two legs (with knees), two hands with five fingers
each, a head with two eyes and a mouth—he is
nevertheless always called a robot.
I guess it’s because he’s made of metal and his face is a
fright mask, so he can’t pass for human?
Yet the Vision is an android despite his tomato-red skin and solid
black eyes.
Saying “no, he’s a synthezoid” doesn’t help
matters, because that’s an even stricter category: Pym explains
that it means “You’re basically human in every
way—except your body is made of synthetic parts!”,
and years later, the Vision himself explains, “Some men have
prosthetic arms, or legs, or eyes! I have prosthetic
everything!”
That is, rather than just being a robot with an outer covering that
makes him look human(-ish), he’s got a heart and lungs and
kidneys and whatnot, just all made of plastic.
Except in later years when we see the Vision disassembled, whoops,
he is a robot on the inside, full of circuit boards and copper
wiring.
And two pages after specifying that the Vision is a synthezoid,
Pym himself goes back to calling him an android.
So the comics’ explanation of who (or what) the Vision is
probably sounds more than a little handwavy.
And it is.
But it could have been much handwavier.
Recall that Stan Lee came up with the idea of mutants in large part
because he got tired of having to come up with unique explanations
for how all his characters got their powers.
Posit the existence of mutants, and you can say, “They were
just born with ’em, okay?”
Similarly, Roy Thomas and company could have played off the Vision
like so: “Hey, folks, the newest Avenger has density powers!
He can make his body more durable than solid steel, or turn ethereal
and walk through walls! How? He’s an android! He was built that
way!”
And then that would be the last you’d hear of him being an
android.
Marvel had done it before.
That’s how the company had played off its first superhero, back
in 1939.
Marvel Comics #1 starts with a man
introducing himself as “Professor Horton”, who then
declares, “As you all know, I’ve been working on a
synthetic man—an exact replica of a human
being!”
The problem is, his creation has to be kept in a vacuum chamber,
because when exposed to air, it bursts into flame.
But the automaton learns how to control the reaction, and since it
speaks like a human, acts like a human, and thinks like a human, the
press dubs it—or, rather, him—“the
Human Torch”.
By #4, the Torch has adopted the civilian name “Jim
”,
and the fact that he’s a robot has fully receded into the
background.
Not so for the Vision.
In 1968, Stan and Roy saw the induction of the Vision into the
Avengers as a prime opportunity to teach their young audience some
lessons about the importance of diversity and inclusion.
“You accept me… though I’m
not truly a human being?” the Vision asks.
Pym replies, “The five original Avengers included an Asgardian
immortal… and a green-skinned, tormented behemoth! We ask merely
a man’s worth… not the accident of
his condition!”
Of course, the Vision soon found that not everyone in 1968 shared this
attitude.
On his first venture out in public after he was announced as the newest
Avenger, he found that “the world holds no warmth… no
welcome for one who is not fully human”, as we see some meathead
shaking his fist at the Vision and growling, “Crummy
androids… tryin’ to take over from
real people!”
He’s wearing a pork pie hat rather than a MAGA cap, but the
allegory should still be pretty clear.
But the Vision’s status as an android is more than just an
allegory for membership in a demonized minority group.
Right from the get-go, the comics played up the idea that the Vision
seemed cold, stiff, and yes, robotic on the outside, while on the
inside, he was roiling with emotion.
It was this android who, in
,
shed a tear upon being accepted into the Avengers.
It was this android who, with no need to sleep, would spend his nights
reading poetry and listening to jazz records.
It was this android who was wounded to the quick by every slight,
would snap at his friends and then apologize, would go off to
sulk and then berate himself for giving in to self-pity.
And he spent a lot of time falling into despair about how he was a mere
machine, a pale imitation of life, so much less than human because he
couldn’t really feel—the irony, of course, being that
his feelings were stronger than anyone’s.
The obvious story arc once the character was established, Thomas
thought, was to offer the Vision the prospect of a romance.
Maybe an android could cry, but could an android love?
Now, at the time, there was only one woman on the team: the
Wasp.
But she was married to Hank Pym.
The only other woman who had ever been an
Avenger was the Scarlet Witch.
So Thomas brought her back.
Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, had first appeared as an X‑Men
villain—sort of.
X‑Men #1 established Magneto as
the X‑Men’s arch-enemy; when he reappeared in #4, he had
his own team, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, to back him up.
But only two of his four new underlings, the Toad and Mastermind,
actually were evil mutants.
We learn in their very first appearance that the other two, Wanda and
her twin brother Pietro, were only on the team out of a sense of
obligation: Wanda had accidentally set a village on fire with her
unpredictable hex power, and Magneto had saved her from an
outraged mob.
In that first appearance of the Maximoffs, Magneto’s
scheme is undone not by the X‑Men, but by
Pietro—a.k.a. Quicksilver, one of the all-time great
sobriquets in the world of comics—who dismantles
Magneto’s doomsday device in a fit of conscience.
In their second appearance, the following issue, it’s
Wanda who zaps Magneto’s thingamajig and thereby saves
the X‑Men.
They are clearly being set up to switch sides and become the sixth
and seventh X‑Men—but Stan had a trick up his
sleeve.
Yes, in X‑Men #11, they do quit
the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants… but one week later, in
Avengers #16, they sign up to fight
not under Professor X but Captain America!
(When Wanda explains how they’d been forced to serve Magneto,
Stan, recognizing that perhaps having the X‑Men square off
against the Brotherhood in four consecutive storylines may have been
overkill, amusingly footnotes her speech “As shown in practically
every issue of X-Men”.)
Wanda begins her Avengers tenure as part of “Cap’s Kooky
Quartet”, in which the personalities line up thusly: Captain
America is the experienced leader, prone to brooding over his lack of
a private life; Hawkeye is the earthy hothead who spends most of his
time sassing Cap; Quicksilver is… another hothead, overly
protective of Wanda; and Wanda doesn’t have to worry about her
personality overlapping with that of another character, because she
doesn’t have one.
At least the Wasp had some traits, as demeaningly stereotypical as
they were: she was the Avengers’ ditzy mascot, who flirted with
any man within a ten-mile radius in hopes of getting Hank Pym jealous
enough to propose to her.
But in her first stint as an Avenger, the Scarlet Witch is a
blank.
Her dialogue is either purely functional (“Hawkeye, look
out!” “I will use my hex power!”) or serves the
purposes of the plot.
Does she support Cap’s leadership or side with the boys?
Does she resent Pietro’s domineering ways or meekly submit
to them?
It varies from one page to the next, depending on what gets the
characters to the next story beat!
But as I’ve discussed in many of these articles over the years,
one of the paradoxes of storytelling is that the emptier a character
is, the better that character works for a large segment of the
audience.
Ciphers have few conflicting characteristics to get in the way of
audience identification—or, in the case of a love
interest, to conflict with the readers’ own desires.
In this sense, even if Wanda’s hadn’t
been the only unmarried female Avenger, she would have been ideal for
Thomas’s purposes.
There was nothing in her personality to suggest that she would be open
to a relationship with an android… but there was nothing in
her personality to suggest that she
wouldn’t.
Because, y’know, there was nothing in her personality.
She returned to the team in issue #75, cover date 1970.04.
By #81, she was staring at the Vision with her thought balloons
filling up with reflections like “Before now, I’ve
always thought of him as cold…
aloof… but I was
wrong—so wrong!”
And then came years of the two of them going in for a kiss, only for
the Vision to turn away: “No! It must not
be. I’m an android—a mere
copy of a living being—a thing of
plastoid flesh and synthetic blood!”
But while “Can an artificial being truly love?” was the
primary theme of the Vizh/Witch relationship, the fact that the
Avengers’ acceptance of the Vision had served as an allegory
for the virtues of integration meant that, when he and Wanda did
become a romantic couple under the pen of Thomas’s successor
Steve Englehart, they served as an allegory for interracial
relationships.
Pietro is tapped to play the role of the intolerant patriarch:
“I am the head of our family—and I
forbid you to love that thing!”
As for the wider public, Englehart has the younger generation
on board with the relationship, while their elders are more
likely to side with Pietro.
One writes Wanda a hate letter, intercepted by Captain America:
“Androds are agents of the devil,” it reads in part.
“Wize up befor its to late! Androds have no soles!”
This adversity just makes their love for each other stronger, even
ferocious—and it becomes Wanda’s defining
characteristic.
By the time I started collecting comics in the mid-’80s, the
Vision and the Scarlet Witch were married and living in Leonia, New
Jersey, and I was going to say that not much had changed, as one Roger
Stern Avengers issue had arsonists burn down
their house—but, no, upon a quick reread, I see that
the emphasis was different.
The bigots weren’t angry that an android (read: member of a
racial minority group) was married to a human woman (read: befouling a
sweet flower of white maidenhood)—they just hated the two
of them, separately, merely for existing.
Part of this was that enough time had passed since
Loving v. Virginia that panic over
miscegenation was no longer a major part of the zeitgeist.
Another part was that Wanda was not human but a
mutant—in fact, she’d recently been revealed to be
Magneto’s daughter—and with the X‑Men having
risen from B‑listers to Marvel’s top sellers,
anti-mutant hysteria was now Marvel’s primary allegory for
bigotry of all sorts.
(In the twelve-issue limited series that provided the logo at the
top of this article, Englehart followed up on the arsonists: “I
don’t want a mutie living in Leonia!” is at the top of
their list of complaints.)
And then there was the Vision’s evolution to consider.
One of the fundamental components of storytelling is the character
arc.
This can be a matter of a character being changed by external
factors—e.g., when the Avengers’ butler, Jarvis,
reflects in Avengers #280 “how
little like the giddy young girl I met so
long ago” the Wasp had become, it is largely due to the abuse
she had suffered in her marriage.
But sometimes the steps of the journey to come are baked into a
character as introduced.
The Vision was an android who fretted about the extent to which his
status as an artificial construct made him less than human; it seems
only natural that his character arc would involve him becoming
less robotic, at least in fits and starts, and partaking in more and
more elements of human experience.
And that is what we see in the twenty years following his debut.
I mentioned that he grows interested in poetry and jazz, pursues a
romance with the Scarlet Witch that leads to marriage, and moves with
her to New Jersey.
The Vision was actually the primary focus of the first long
Avengers storyline I collected out of the
spinner racks: he becomes team leader, and at the end of it, he frees
himself of a “control crystal” Ultron had built into his
synthetic brain.
As a result, his speech balloons switch from his trademark rectangles
to regular round ones—signaling that he no longer sounds
like a Mattel Intellivoice, but like
.
And that’s the Vision’s status quo during the Englehart
series mentioned above: he’s just a guy who instead of being full
of microplastics is full of macroplastics.
This series also emphasizes the Vision’s family
connections: Roy Thomas had established that Ultron had programmed
the Vision with the brain patterns of a dead superhero called Wonder
Man, and with Wonder Man now back from the dead, the series makes a big
deal of the fact that the Vision has a “brother”, and
through him, a mother, and “Cousins! Nephews! Aunts! Black
sheep!”
So the next step in the Vision’s journey through the range of
human experience is parenthood, and nine months of the series are given
over to Wanda’s pregnancy, culminating in the birth of their
twins, Tommy and Billy.
How could an android sire children, you ask?
Magic!
When first introduced, Wanda was said to have a “hex power”:
all she had to do was point, and an unpredictable disaster would
occur.
This could be anything from a pitcher of water falling off a table to
the wiring in a wall-sized supercomputer exploding.
In short, she had Stan Lee’s favorite power: she could do
whatever the plot required!
By the time I was reading comics, subsequent writers had added a
scientific veneer to the hexes: “The very laws of probability
warp and alter before her eyes!”
For instance, in the first issue of Avengers I
ever bought, #237, the Scarlet Witch defeats Electro by improbably
making “all the carbon dioxide in the room cluster around
his head, so he’d pass out from temporary lack of
oxygen”.
But that was her mutant power.
Back in Avengers #128, a member of the
Fantastic Four’s entourage had offered to help her develop a
parallel set of powers: “I know of a desire in you—a
desire to be more than you have
been—a desire for your name to be more
truth than
poetry—and I flatter myself that I
possess some small expertise regarding
witchcraft.”
This was a character Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had introduced in
Fantastic Four #94, very late in their
run; she was a thin, quite elderly woman whom Reed and Sue Richards
had selected to serve as the nanny to their baby son, Franklin.
This self-described “frail old lady”, black cat in
tow, fended off an attack by the Wizard, Sandman, and Trapster, and
thereby won the approval of the FF’s leader: “It
seems that
was the perfect choice for us after all!” he proclaims.
Now a few years had passed and Franklin was no longer in need of a
nanny, and Agatha selected Wanda as her
“new charge”.
Thus, by the time Wanda and the Vision had started talking about how to
start a family, Wanda was just as likely to be reciting incantations
while sitting at the center of a circle of candles as she was to be
using her mutant abilities.
When Kurt Busiek became the Avengers writer
in the late ’90s, he tried to reconcile Wanda’s power sets
by having Agatha explain that the imprisoned demon Chthon had, from
the moment of Wanda’s birth, shaped her mutant abilities to
make her a potential vessel for his re-emergence; in so doing, he had
given her the ability to wield chaos magic, unconsciously at first,
but with purpose if ever she were to study to become a sorceress.
Which, more than sixty years after her debut, is how she’s now
portrayed: she’s no longer a student, no longer a dabbler, no
longer a mutant playacting as a magic user, but is an actual
sorceress with students of her own.
You might say it’s the culmination of her character arc.
But there are creators, and certainly there are marketing types, who
find the very concept of character arcs misguided.
They believe that once a character catches on with an audience, the
job of those who work on that character is to give the people what
they want over and over again—to iterate through what
John Byrne called the character’s “established
motifs”.
Say you get tapped to write Spider‑Man.
You gotta play the hits!
Taking photos for J. Jonah Jameson to pay the rent!
Checking up on Aunt May to make sure she’s taking her
medicine!
Ducking out in the middle of a date because a bad guy has
attacked!
Which bad guy?
Oh, one of the regular rotation: the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus,
the Lizard… for Spider‑Man you’ve got a lot of
options.
And sure, you can launch a storyline that shakes up the status
quo, but after a year or two, you have to put the toys back where
you found them.
So if Peter Parker uses his established scientific acumen to start up
his own tech firm, that’s fine, but it can’t be too long
before the company collapses and Pete has to go crawling back to
Jonah.
If Aunt May, who appeared to be about eighty-five as drawn by both
Ditko and Romita, finally succumbs to one of her various ailments,
that’s fine, so long as she’s quickly
resurrected—perhaps a “genetically altered
actress” died in her place?
If Pete gets married, meaning no more dates with comely lasses who
don’t know he’s Spider‑Man, that’s fine, so
long as he gets divorced… wait, no, we don’t want him
to be a divorcé, because that’s a permanent change, so
maybe he can make a deal with the devil to retroactively alter the
timeline.
And then you can get back to playing the hits!
Now, you may ask, doesn’t that get boring?
If it gets boring for the creator, Byrne asserts, he should just move
on to another title whose star has a different
set of established motifs.
But boring for the reader?
How?
Comics are for kids!
Say you tell a story (e.g., someone else takes over for Steve Rogers
as Captain America) when a certain reader is eleven.
If you rehash it five years later, well, that kid is now sixteen, and
too old to be reading comics!
He’ll never know the story was done all over again, just as when
he was eleven he didn’t know the stories he was enjoying had
already been done when he was six!
There’s a reason I keep mentioning John Byrne here.
As noted, Steve Englehart had been the primary caretaker of the Vision
and the Scarlet Witch since 1972; he’s the one who married them
off and the one who made them parents.
When their limited series ended, he brought them over to his ongoing
book, West Coast Avengers.
But shortly thereafter, Englehart left that book, in a dispute with
the editors over their interference in a storyline involving his pet
character, Mantis.
And John Byrne took over.
I was excited!
Byrne was one of the very top names in ’80s comics, both for
story and art, and even though I’d only caught the tail end
of his long run on Fantastic Four, I’d
really imprinted on the issues I had read.
And in interviews he was saying that the reason he’d chosen
West Coast Avengers as his next gig was that
he had a story about the Vision and the Scarlet Witch he wanted to
tell.
Well, you can probably put two and two together here.
The guy who’d started his Fantastic Four
run with a story called “Back to the
Basics!” thought that it was high time that these
characters stop progressing through life stages and return to their
“established motifs”.
In the case of the Vision, that meant turning him back into an
emotionless robot.
Of course, this was a wild misreading of the character.
The Vision had never been emotionless; right
from the get-go he was the most emotional member of the team.
And he’d never been a robot, either.
All that rigmarole about “synthozoids” was Roy Thomas
trying to put a giant blinking sign saying “NOT A ROBOT”
over the Vision’s head, but apparently John Byrne missed
it.
And the whole point of Hank Pym paraphrasing Martin Luther King’s
“I Have a Dream” speech was to establish the parallel
between the Vision and a member of a visible minority group: the
Vision’s synthetic body didn’t make him less than, or even
in any way that truly mattered different from, anyone else.
Byrne’s stance thus amounts to “Judge you by the content
of your character? Not when you have skin like
that, I won’t!”
In interview after interview, he insisted that the Vision was
nothing more than “a toaster”, and it was a travesty on
Marvel’s part to allow Wanda to marry one—seemingly
unaware that he was echoing the Marvel Universe bigots who stood in
for our world’s opponents of interracial marriage.
Wize up befor its to late!
Tosters have no soles!
Anyway, Byrne had a consortium of governments kidnap the Vision,
wipe his mind and all backups thereof, and take apart his body; by the
time the Avengers rescue him, his personality is unrecoverable, and his
synthetic skin has been so traumatized that it has turned from red to
.
Naturally, this devastates poor Wanda, and she hires a nanny to help
her with Tommy and Billy while she is busy tending to the Vision
during his reconstruction.
She ends up hiring a whole series of nannies, in fact, because they
keep reporting that Tommy and Billy have disappeared, yet when
Wanda returns in a panic, the boys are always right where they’re
supposed to be—so she gets furious and replaces the
nanny in question, only for the same thing to happen with the next
one.
Eventually Agatha Harkness arrives—she’d been killed
by Englehart, but Byrne didn’t let a little thing like that stand
in his way—and reveals that Wanda’s children are
figments of her imagination, given temporary form by her hex
power.
Discovering that she’s crazy drives Wanda even crazier: first
she goes catatonic, then she reunites with her father Magneto and
her brother Pietro to form sixty percent of the old Brotherhood of Evil
Mutants.
Back to the basics!
And then, like Englehart before him, Byrne found that the editors were
,
rescinding permission to do his proposed storylines when the
beginning and middle of those storylines had already been
published, prompting him to quit before resolving anything.
Byrne maintains that he’d made sure there were ways to undo his
changes: for instance, if and when the time came to reset the Vision
to his 1983 self, Avengers #238 could be
cited as a point at which his mind had been backed up on Saturn’s
moon Titan, far out of the reach of Earth’s governments.
But no one went back to that save point.
Instead, a series of other writers spent the next fifteen years or so
doing a slow-motion replay of the Vision and Wanda’s initial
development.
The Vision is returned to a red body and gradually regains his
emotions.
Wanda is depowered, then can cast unpredictable hexes, then returns to
Agatha Harkness and learns to wield chaos magic.
By 2003 Wanda and the Vision are starting to spend some time
together.
And then Avengers was handed to Brian
Bendis.
I wrote about
Bendis’s run on Avengers (and its
multiple spinoff books) while it was happening.
My main focus was the “Avengers
Disassembled” storyline that kicked off his
tenure.
It was very bad.
My summary was “talk talk talk chaotic
violence chaotic violence talk talk talk talk talk talk talk
talk chaotic violence talk talk talk talk talk
talk talk talk chaotic violence talk talk
inexplicable stupidity the end”.
But let’s put the evaluation aside and have a look at the
content.
John Byrne had asserted that Wanda’s ’80s-era power
set—i.e., altering probabilities—required
that she be able to change the past.
For instance, for a building to collapse when she points at it, she
must be retroactively changing the accumulated history of stresses
upon the frame so that every piece of it just so happens to suffer
spontaneous catastrophic failure at that moment.
That would make her a cosmic-level powerhouse, able to warp time
and reality on a scale that would bring her to the attention of a
classic Avengers villain, who had first appeared way back in issue
#10: Immortus, Master of Time!
I’m not sure that Byrne’s conclusions necessarily follow
from the contemporaneous premise of Wanda’s powers, which were
set forth in The Official Handbook of the Marvel
Universe #9: that she could cause “a disturbance
in the molecular-level probability field surrounding the target”
she pointed at.
It seems like Byrne is positing a deterministic universe (e.g., the
likelihood of the building collapsing is either zero or one, and could
be known with a complete knowledge of the history of every particle
in the cosmos, and thus that must be what Wanda’s changing),
while the OHOTMU suggests that in the Marvel
Universe there is true randomness from moment to moment: that the
likelihood of the building collapsing is not zero but something
like 1×10–99, and she’s
upping that until it becomes so likely that it actually happens.
But in any case, for Bendis the takeaway was that Wanda is a reality
warper of immense power.
Or at least, that was one takeaway.
The other takeaway was that Wanda was actually just as crazy as
she’d been at the end of Byrne’s run and had just been
hiding it for fifteen years of real time.
He also took it as gospel that Agatha Harkness had, as she says in
Avengers West Coast #52, made her forget
the existence of her children, and indeed had “closed that corner
of her mind for all time”—even though by #75, Wanda
had recovered her memories of them.
And Bendis wanted to radically change the Avengers lineup to kick out
the sorts of characters he didn’t know how to write and bring in
those he felt more comfortable with (Spider-Man,
Spider‑Woman, Luke Cage, Wolverine).
And so he set forth a story in which the Wasp inadvertently reminds
Wanda that she had once had children; again, Wanda had demonstrated
that she remembered them as far back as 1991, but under Bendis’s
pen, this reminder causes Wanda to become psychologically
unmoored.
She secretly starts warping reality in ways that go far beyond her
usual “gun jams” and “machine blows up” tricks:
zombie versions of dead Avengers show up and explode, a fleet of alien
spaceships launches an attack, and in a scene that kind of sums up the
storyline, the Vision flies a quinjet directly into Avengers Mansion
9/11‑style, emerges from the wreckage, spits out a bunch of
spheres that turn into an army of Ultrons, and is then ripped in half
by a berserk She‑Hulk.
While a few dozen Avengers stand around barking Bendis dialogue at each
other, Doctor Strange shows up, gives them all an issue-long lecture,
and then leads them to a bubble of false reality where Wanda has holed
up with replicas of loved ones she has conjured up: the old Vision,
their two boys (now age ten or so), Agatha Harkness.
Bendis can’t write superhero fights that go beyond
“overpowered hero zaps villain”, so he just has Doctor
Strange zap Wanda and that is pretty much that.
And, I mean, given that (as
I once documented) the recurring gimmick of early issues of
The Avengers was that the hapless Avengers are
bailed out by outside help, I guess Bendis was sticking to those
established motifs.
So the Vision and the Scarlet Witch were off the board for a
while.
Of course, in comics no one stays dead—even in cases like
Ben Parker and Gwen Stacy, there’s always an alternate universe
or six out there that has its own book that allows you to follow their
ongoing adventures.
So not only was the Vision eventually brought back and the Scarlet
Witch rehabilitated, but Allan Heinberg even imported young adult
versions of Tommy and Billy from parallel universes to serve as key
members of his “Young Avengers” spinoff team.
Tom King wrote a critically acclaimed twelve-issue series called
The Vision in which the Vision builds himself
a synthezoid family: wife, son, daughter, even a dog called
Sparky.
And Steve Orlando has taken a few swings at keeping a Scarlet
Witch series running.
But c’mon.
We know the drill.
As far as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is concerned, Brian Bendis
is Homer, Shakespeare, and Stan Lee all wrapped up in one.
So when, in a pleasant surprise, the MCU folks decided to devote an
entire show to the Vision and the Scarlet Witch, naturally they
were going to see what Bendis had done with them, even though the answer
was that he had written them out of the series immediately because
they are not
.
That didn’t stop the WandaVision team
from building their series around the handful of pages Bendis had given
those two characters, but it meant they had to bring in some other
material as well.
And the main thing they brought in was my favorite movie!
spoilers start
here
I don’t know how WandaVision was
advertised; for all I know, everyone else who watched it went in
already knowing the premise.
But the creators were brave enough not to start with a framing
sequence that would give away what they’re up to.
I went in having spent four years avoiding spoilers, so I was
expecting something that would pick up from where the
Avengers movies had left off.
Instead—well, as many have pointed out, one of the
successes of the MCU is that it has slotted its offerings into
a wide variety of genres.
On the TV side, for instance, Jessica Jones is
a film noir private eye procedural, Luke Cage
is ’70s blaxploitation, Runaways is a
superhero version of The Breakfast Club, and
The Punisher is part of that post‑9/11
genre that Jon Bois memorably described as “a quasi-apocalyptic
nightmare that reduced America to a cathedral of death
worship”.
And WandaVision kicks off looking for all the
world like an 1950s sitcom à la I Married
Joan.
Black and white, squarish aspect ratio, old-fashioned theme song,
old-fashioned jokes, old-fashioned situations: in this one, the
Vision’s boss from down at the data processing office is
coming over for dinner and our star couple needs to impress him
(and not give away that they have superpowers).
There are a few signs that things aren’t what they
seem—for one thing, the town seems more ethnically
diverse than we might expect for a ’50s sitcom, though initially
that seems like it might just be a concession to the fact that by
2021 a little anachronism was considered a worthwhile price to pay
for a more inclusive cast.
More tellingly, our attention is drawn to weird gaps in the
characters’ knowledge of who they are and how they got
here—and we zoom out at the end to show the closing
credits playing on a monitor in modern times.
But the creators courageously bet that viewers will tune back in with
no explanation beyond that.
And while episode two gives us an animated title sequence that shows
we’ve progressed to the Bewitched era,
it otherwise seems like more of the same.
At least for seven minutes.
But then Wanda discovers that a toy helicopter has fallen into her
hedge.
And it’s in full color, even as the hedge, Wanda herself, and
the rest of the world around her remain in black and white.
Eeeee!
This is the chief gimmick of
Pleasantville!
In that movie a couple of kids get transported to a ’50s sitcom
where everything is black and white, but their presence starts to push
the culture forward, and little pops of color start to appear in the
monochrome world!
And now the MCU was playing with the same trope—and not
just with any characters, but with two of the characters I most
imprinted on when I was nine, ten, eleven, twelve years old!
Like, I’m looking at what’s coming up next, and, like, I
don’t really care overmuch about the Falcon, or Bucky Barnes, or
fuckin’ Loki—but I absolutely
care about the Vision and the Scarlet Witch.
And here they are in Pleasantville.
It’s like when I watched
Knives Out and boggled at the extent to which it seemed to have
been made specifically for me.
So, yeah, this turns out to be a Pattern 11 story: it starts off by establishing
a false ceiling (the strictures of an old black-and-white sitcom) and
then bursts through it.
Because it turns out that we’re in the MCU after all, and what
we’re seeing is all part of the creators’ bricolage.
Avengers: Infinity War had established
Wanda and the Vision as a couple, but before that movie was over, the
Vision had been violently deactivated by Thanos, and Wanda was one of
the characters who had succumbed to the Thanos snap.
WandaVision eventually fills in the gap between
Wanda’s return at the end of Avengers:
Endgame and the 1950s sitcom: we learn that the Vision’s
body had fallen into the custody of a S.H.I.E.L.D.-adjacent
organization called
Wanda had stormed in and discovered S.W.O.R.D. technicians busily
dismantling the Vision in a scene
to the ending of Byrne’s West Coast
Avengers #43.
But instead of taking the body back with her, à la
WCA #44, Wanda retreats to the New Jersey
town where the Vision had proposed that they settle down, and in her
grief, turns it into a bubble reality—much like the one
Bendis had her create in Avengers #503,
complete with a Vision forged from her memories.
The twist from outside the comics is that the creators of the TV
show—being TV people rather than comics
people—establish that, as a little girl in Eastern
Europe, MCU Wanda had been fixated on DVDs of American sitcoms her
father had smuggled in, running the gamut from The
Dick Van Dyke Show to Malcolm in the
Middle, and that these influence the shape her bubble reality
takes.
For WandaVision is also a
Pattern 43 story,
television about television.
Normally I consider Pattern 43 a negative, but the way the show
tracks the development of the sitcom through the second half of the
twentieth century, with episodes devoted to re-creating the tropes
of each decade… again, this could hardly be more up my
alley.
So, as in Englehart’s Vizh/Witch series,
Wanda gives birth to Tommy and Billy—but in the ’80s
episode, they age from babies to preschoolers in an instant, just
like the babies from such ’80s sitcoms as
Family Ties, Growing
Pains, and I’m sure many more.
The bricolage continues: the show references the characters of Glamor
and Illusion from that ’80s series, and brings in Sparky the dog
from Tom King’s Vision series of the
2010s.
Tommy and Billy gain powers as in Young
Avengers.
Pietro shows up—played not by the actor who played him
in the (Disney) Avengers movies, but the
one who played him in the (Fox) X‑Men
movies; one of the S.W.O.R.D. agents monitoring the bubble reality
makes this into an
on recasting.
The white Vision makes an appearance.
And Agatha Harkness turns out to play a significant role, though the
show changes her look significantly—I guess Maggie Smith
was booked.
WandaVision also gives significant
to a couple of characters rarely linked to the Vision or the
Scarlet Witch.
One is Jimmy Woo from the Atlas Comics era, who seems to have been
tapped as the Agent Phil of this phase of the MCU.
The other is the second Captain Marvel—Carol Danvers,
the one featured in the Captain
Marvel movie, is the fifth or sixth, depending on whom you
count.
The first was Mar‑Vell of the Kree, whom Jim Starlin had
succumb to cancer in Marvel’s first graphic novel, back in
1982.
Later that same year, Roger Stern introduced Monica Rambeau, a new,
completely unrelated character who adopted the same
name—gotta keep those trademarks active!—and
had her join the Avengers in his very first issue on that title.
Her tenure (#227 to #294) did overlap with the return of the Scarlet
Witch (who rejoined the team from #235 to #255) and the Vision (#242 to
#255), but otherwise she’s never really been in the same orbit as
those two, so it’s a bit odd for her to play such a prominent
role here.
But my understanding is that she’s returning at some point
and so she’s here not just as a S.W.O.R.D. operative but to get
powered up in preparation for her next appearance.
And, y’know, just to get some screen time so that she might
mean something to people who didn’t already know her from
the comics when she does reappear.
Because that’s one of the things that making a TV show about
TV highlights: television adds up.
Back in the era when the WandaVision
sitcoms are set, watching a sitcom meant visiting its cast of
characters twenty-two times a year.
That was a big part of what sitcoms offered, apart from the laughs:
spend half an hour hanging out with your old friends!
And, during that same era, much the same was true for comics.
See, I thought this was great.
Nothing in the MCU has come close to that first Iron Man movie that
kicked off the whole shebang, but I liked
WandaVision more than any MCU offering from
2009 to 2020.
But like I said, this show draws from my corner
of the Marvel Universe.
Again, I see that coming up I have MCU offerings featuring the Black
Widow, Shang Chi, the Eternals… and, sure, I know who they all
are.
But the amount of time I spent over the course of my childhood
(and have spent since!) reading comics featuring the Vision and the
Scarlet Witch in particular would be measured not in hours but in days,
maybe even weeks.
To have them starring in a twist on
Pleasantville was a delight, to me.
But to someone who only knows them from the MCU?
How much screen time did these characters get in the movies leading up
to this series?
Two minutes here, three minutes there?
The MCU is made up almost wholly of events: individual movies and
short series, with most of the latter releasing every episode at
once.
Only Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had traditional
orders of twenty-two episodes a season, starting in September and
showing one episode a week, with short breaks, until May, year after
year.
Not surprisingly, it was also the only one of these shows that,
near the end, traded on the idea that the audience might have bonded
with the characters over the course of years of watching them on
a regular rather than sporadic basis.
WandaVision couldn’t do the
same—except for people like me who’d already bonded
with them.
I mean… when I was nine, I brought along a stack of comics with
the Vision and Scarlet Witch in them to the week-long outdoor ed
program that sixth-graders in my district went to.
As I lay in my bunk in that cabin up near Big Bear back in 1983,
rereading those (already slightly battered) comics for the fifth
time, little did I suspect that I’d be watching a live-action
version in 4K resolution four decades later.
And I doubt I would have enjoyed the show so much if those comics,
now yellowed with age, hadn’t been sitting in boxes inches
behind my head as I watched.
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