Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment

The Vision #12 Ended Just Like Watchmen, As Well

Yesterday saw the final published issue of The Vision. A twelve issue series by Tom King, Gabriele Hernandez Walta and Jordie Bellaire that took a stock Marvel character with a convoluted background and used it all to tell a story about family, and how the existence of such drives you to do things that previously would have seemed impossible, illogical, incomprehensible. It's the best thing Marvel Comics has published since, well, Unstable Molecules. It utterly transcends its boundaries.

I've called it Marvel's Watchmen, and I mean that more than just its creation of a world to be explored in minutia, its measured control of time and pacing, creating patterns that expand and pair off like a Mandelbrot set, its thoroughness of making every panel count both in the reading and in the rereading, as to how everything pays off. But also taking on certain themes and ideas from that masterpiece and telling new stories. Remember that line with Manhattan saying he had found a new appreciation for life? And was going off to make some?

Turns out that meant making up a new Superman and Lois Lane for the DC Rebirth.

But at Marvel, that thought has The Vision making his own family. Just as he was the creation from Wonder Man's brain waves, so his wife Virginia is the product of Scarlet Witch's. There are two children, Viv and Vin. And a Vision dog.

The thing about creating life, as all parents know, is that they go on to do things that you could never have predicted. There's a moment as a parent when you have more than one child, when you hear them talking together for the first time and you realise that you have no input into this conversation. They are doing it all themselves.

So in The Vision, that's exactly what happens. It sets up a perfect nuclear family that is begging from the outset to be corrupted. And so the rest of the family follow their own path, create their own psychoses, hide it from The Vision – who has his own issues – and people start dying and get buried under the patio, revenge is enacted and its gets oh-so personal.

And a small family drama threatens to expand and threaten to destroy the world. The same world that the Vision has saved thirty-seven times.

Oh yes, and with this final issue. Everything seems to have been tidied away neatly. The Vision was prevented in the previous issue from committing an act that would have put him over the edge. His wife, Virginia, has taken it all upon herself, even as she portrays herself as the unreliable narrator. The Vision is left with his daughter. Who, we can see, goes off to join The Champions. Things have become steady and stable. Terrible things have been done and lies have been told about them – but have been accepted by the rest of world and the apocalypse has been averted. Just as in Watchmen.

But also,  just as Rorschach's book had been sent to the New Frontiersman, so in the final issue of The Vision is a secret, something to be uncovered, something that cannot be contained that is threatening to explode the new suburban paradise.

If only it gets discovered. If not, everything will carry on as before…

Tom King, you bastard.

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