New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel's Vision

Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis is long overdue – 17 months overdue, to be precise, since it was the last guide you all voted for in a Patrons’ Choice Poll just a few weeks before my entire life got flipped turned upside down…

Vision – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Despite anchoring five significant limited series spanning from 1982 to 2017, Vision has spent the majority of his publishing life as a team character in Avengers beginning in 1968.

In that sense, he is one of the most quintessential anchoring Avengers, because he’s never really appeared elsewhere! Plus, what character could be more of a core Avenger than an android created by Ultron (himself the creation of Hank Pym) based on the brain waves of Wonder Man and who falls in love with Scarlet Witch!?

Vision experienced some of his greatest development under the pens of Bill Mantlo and John Byrne.

First, Bill Mantlo wrote him in his two limited series with Scarlet Witch in 1982 and 1985 – an unusual format for Marvel in the early-80s, and especially as a way to co-bill a couple in their own book!

Then, John Byrne stripped away Mantlo’s emotional progress with the character in his run on West Coast Avengers and Avengers in the late 80s. Byrne’s albino white Vision is actual an homage to co-creator Roy Thomas’s original plans for the character’s visual identity in the 1960s – limited at the time by the fidelity of printing presses!

Just as Vision’s “Anchor Avenger” status saw him return to the team in the famous Busiek/Perez run of 1998, it also made him an early victim of Brian Bendis’s Avengers Disassembled, along with Hawkeye and Ant-Man. What better way to burn down the franchise and emerge from the ashes than to do away with as many Silver Age characters as possible who didn’t have their own solo titles!

Lest we go too hard on Bendis, it was he who returned Vision to the playing field in 2012, and it was on the heels of his Age of Ultron that Mark Waid and Sam Humphries introduced the idea of Vision as the father figure to of all of Marvel’s A.I. characters.

That fatherhood would be made literal by Tom King in All-New All-Different Marvel with the universally acclaimed 2016 Vision series.

This guide didn’t take the longest to research or create, but it was one of the hardest for me to organize as I pecked away at it over all these months. I think I’ve really improved my approach to guides like this one (that have no core solo ongoing title) over the course of the past two years of producing new guides for Patreon.

I hope it helps you find your way through The Vision’s fifty-year publishing history!

Want access to this guide today? As a Patrons’ Choice poll winner, this guide is available to all Patrons for as little as a $1/month pledge to cover CK’s hosting expenses.

Current Exclusives For Crushing Cadets ($1/month): 7 Guides!