The Vision - Little Worse Than A Man + Little Better Than A Beast (Marvel Comics 2016)

If you know your Shakespeare, you'll be able to identify the titles of these two volumes that collect Vision #1-#12. They are from The Merchant of Venice:

NERISSA: How like you the young German, the Duke of Saxony’s nephew?
PORTIA: Very vilely in the morning, when he is sober, and most vilely in the afternoon, when he is drunk. When he is best he is a little worse than a man, and when he is worst he is little better than a beast. And the worst fall that ever fell, I hope I shall make shift to go without him.

Weaving a bit of The Bard into your graphic novel/comic is always a good way of looking smart, and adding a touch of gravitas to the proceedings, but Tom King has gone well past just showing off. This incredible tale, in turns touching and terrifying, asks some pretty deep questions about what it means to be human, and what it costs to be normal. Even android teenagers worry about this kind of thing It's been a long time since I was on top of all the ins and outs of The Mighty Avengers. When I was a kid I read a lot of the UK Marvel reprints, which included the classic Roy Thomas/John Buscema period of the late 60s/early 70s. That's when I first saw The Vision. An android created by Ultron (evil robot mastermind) who planned to use him to infiltrate and destroy The Avengers. The Vision caught a bad case of humanity, and sided with The Avengers against Ultron. He also had a complicated and tempestuous love affair with the Scarlet Witch. The Vision & Scarlet Witch making out behind a tree This was all many decades and multiple re-boots ago, so I wasn't sure if this new Vision story would make sense to me, but a couple of years ago I realised that you don't need to know all the history to enjoy the stories being written now. It's a bit like not watching a soap opera for a few years. You know many of the characters, there are some new ones, and some of the old ones are in relationships or situations that are unfamiliar, but there's enough to provide a platform to move on from. It's like that for me with Marvel, and I'm glad. Anyway, this two-volume collection deals with The Vision's attempt to be 'normal'. In order to get there he has to do a few things that are about as far away from normal as you can get, although it does all beg the eternal question: what is 'normal'? To create a nuclear-family, white-picket-fence existence for himself, Vision has to actually make an android wife and two teenage android children (one of each naturally). They then move into a cookie-cutter house in a faceless suburban location. The Vision's idea of normal seems to have been gleaned from TV shows of the 1950s. It's a bit like David Lynch, but in this case, the town doesn't have a dangerous underbelly. Instead, the danger is the android family that moved in across the street. I suppose this is one of the points of the story. The Vision family don't face a lot of prejudice when they move in, in fact people are reasonably accepting of them, maybe due to the fact that The Vision is a famous superhero, and has (as he points out a number of times) saved the Earth thirty-seven times. Unlike all the other stories we're used to, where an ethnic group or an individual are singled out and persecuted although they're harmless, in this story the 'others' are really fucking deadly, in spite of their efforts to fit in. Do Androids Dream of Chocolate Chip Cookies? Although The Vision family try to 'get along' with the locals, they are obviously missing most of the necessary components. They are beyond Mr Spock in their questioning of human foibles, and because they can pass through solid objects at will, do not need to eat, and fly everywhere, there's not really any chance of them passing for ordinary. Also, they have no reason to, and that's the real problem. They simply are too 'different', and The Vision's need to be human is therefore impossible. Sadly it soon becomes obvious that things are spiraling out of control when Virginia Vision unnecessarily beats an intruder (who is also a major super-villain) to death with a baking tray, then buries the body, and doesn't tell her 'husband'. I realise that I'm getting a bit bogged down in trying to make sense of all this, but I think that's because the story and the issues it raises are too complex to be simply summed up, by me at least. I'm still not sure I understood the ending, for example. The collection is everything you could want from a comic; smart and thoughtful writing from Tom King, and excellent artwork from Gabriel Hernandez Walta, combining to give us some beautiful storytelling. Although it helps if you have some grounding in Marvel's universe, it's not vital. This could be read by someone who had never picked up an Avengers comic before. It's a story about a struggle for humanity, and the fact that some people are simply incapable of achieving it.