SCOTT: By now, there have been many channels that've made videos
about the origin and history of The Vision,
but there's one thing about him that is pretty confusing,
and I want to talk about it in a little bit more detail.
It's fairly common knowledge that Vision's body
was made from either the original Human Torch,
or a copy of the original Human Torch, or something.
The whole story is really just a complete mess,
so let's try to clear things up today.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Comic Misconceptions, I'm Scott,
and we're down to our last video for Avengers Month,
even though it carried over to the next month.
There have been a lot of things that I wanted to explore
with the character of The Vision,
including the philosophical ramifications
of learning that even an android can cry,
but we'll save that one for another video.
Let's talk instead about the somewhat convoluted origin
of the character, specifically in regards
to where his physical body came from.
As always, I'm going to skip over a lot of things
regarding the character and just link up
Arris's video on the history of Vision
because he did a great job yet again,
and there'd be no point in me
going over the same information.
So, you can go watch that
if you want a general overview of the character.
Now, allow me to cut everything down
to just the info you need for this specific video.
Vision is an android or a synthezoid
as he's also been called before.
He was created by Roy Thomas, Stan Lee, and Steve Buscema,
but in the comics he was created by Ultron.
How he was created has changed a few times over the years.
In his first appearance in Avengers #57 from 1968,
Vision's origin was kept pretty vague.
The only thing we knew was that he was created
in some capacity by Ultron,
but Ultron didn't want Vision to know much more than that.
The story of where his physical body came from
was in the works for awhile.
It was supposed to be the body of the original Human Torch.
This character is not the one that you know
from the Fantastic Four but rather a Golden Age Marvel hero
who was himself an android
and debuted in Marvel Comics #1 from 1939.
Man, we've been talking a lot
about Golden Age heroes lately.
Human Torch was created by Professor Phineas T. Horton
and had just one minor flaw.
When exposed to oxygen, the android would burst into flames.
Luckily, he learned to control this fire
and became one of Marvel's first superheroes.
And if we've seen anything over the past few episodes,
it's that Marvel really loves to find ways to link up heroes
from the Golden Age into modern continuity,
and that's where this story comes into play that we can see
told for the first time in Avengers #133-135.
Long story short, Human Torch was dying
and went out into the desert
where he could go Nova without harming anyone.
A little over a decade later, his body was found
by a villain known as the Mad Thinker.
He was brought back to life in Fantastic Four Annual #4
where he fought the Fantastic Four, only to die yet again.
Mad Thinker later gave Human Torch's lifeless body to Ultron
who explained that he wanted to have a son.
But he couldn't fix Human Torch, however,
so he kidnapped Torch's creator, Professor Horton,
and gently coerced him to fix the android.
They even gave him a new face
so that he would live a new life.
But Ultron wanted to make his new face scarlet as a joke
so that he could remember the android's heritage
as Human Torch, while the android itself
would remain completely ignorant to it all.
When the android was finished, he was turned on
only to reveal that he still remembered
that he used to be Human Torch.
As it turns out, Professor Horton had made sure
to keep his original memories intact
because he wouldn't be able to forgive himself
if he erased Human Torch's soul.
Ultron kills Horton and this new android
then uploads the brain patterns
of another Marvel character called Wonder Man
to the brain of the android and turns him on once more.
This time, he's just what Ultron envisioned.
Pun.
But yeah, this is when the android
would go over and attack the Avengers,
receive the name Vision by Wasp,
and then betray Ultron, saving the day,
and becoming an Avenger himself.
But if you think that's the end of the story,
then you are mistaken, my friends.
That would be way too easy.
This is comics.
We have to make it way more complicated than that.
West Coast Avengers brings this idea
of Vision as the original Human Torch into question.
When Vision is captured and dismantled by the government
after he tried to rule the world through every computer,
you know how that happens sometimes,
we find out that Professor Horton is still alive.
But that's not the only twist in the story.
In fact, Horton doesn't even recognize Vision
even though he supposedly helped create him.
In issue #50, the story gets a little bit more interesting.
They go to Human Torch's grave
where Vision phases underground to find
that his android body is indeed buried there.
Scarlet Witch even uses her powers
to raise him from the dead, then he and Vision shake hands,
showing that the are in fact two separate bodies.
So then what the poop, where did his body come from?
Ten years later in Avengers Forever #8,
it was finally explained even further.
And at the center of it all is a guy named Immortus,
who is simply another incarnation of Kang the Conqueror,
about whom we discussed in the Stan Lee episode
from a few weeks back.
So you know something with alternate timelines
is about to go down, and it's about to get overly complex.
You ready?
The original Human Torch was still used
by the Mad Thinker against the Fantastic Four.
When he died again after that fight, it's believed
that Immortus used his mental manipulation abilities
to secretly influence the Fantastic Four
to just leave his body there in the lab
where Ultron would eventually find him.
But before Ultron would come along,
Immortus used a powerful object known as the Forever Crystal
which has incredible power over time,
to split the timestream but keep both Human Torches
in the same timestream, thus creating
a duplicate android body.
Ultron would take one and use it to make Vision
and the other would be buried as the dead Human Torch
whom Scarlet Witch would resurrect later.
It was even explained in an earlier comic,
Avengers West Coast #61 to be exact,
that Immortus has been planning all of this from the start.
He showed Vision his origin as the Human Torch
so that he would feel secure enough in himself and his past
to be free and ask Scarlet Witch to marry him.
Heck, Immortus even officiated their wedding!
He would go on to influence Vision
to take over the world's computers
and then turn around and influence the governments
of the world to capture him and dismantle him
so that he would be rebuilt as an emotionless machine.
It even explains why Professor Horton
didn't recognize the disassembled Vision
as one of his own creations.
Basically, that Professor Horton
was really just an impostor sent by Immortus.
He even laid out the breadcrumbs for the Avengers
to revive the original Human Torch from his grave.
But why, why go through all of this trouble?
Well, he simply wanted to destabilize Scarlet Witch
by making her start to believe her entire world to be a lie.
The resulting trauma she suffered
would make her power levels go off the charts.
Immortus would be able to use Scarlet Witch
and her extreme level of power as his own tool
to alter the probabilities of all possible timelines
and protect them from harm and control them under his rule.
Immortus was doing all of this
for what he believed was the greater good,
the highest purpose in life.
So, if he had to mess with the Vision
to get to Scarlet Witch, to him it was worth it.
As far as retcons go, this one is pretty sloppy.
However, I think it would have been pretty neat
to have had Vision's origin in Age of Ultron
somehow link back to the Human Torch
whose body we see here at the Stark Expo
in Captain America: The First Avenger.
That would have been neat.
What do you guys think?
Do you like the idea of Vision
as the Golden Age Human Torch?
Or should he have just been his own unique android
that Ultron created from scratch
to avoid all of this confusion?
And would you have liked to see the movies
make the connection between the two characters in some way?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Well, that finally brings our Avengers Month to a close,
albeit a week late.
Just so you guys know, I will be taking a break
from Comic Misconceptions indefinitely.
I have some personal matters to attend to,
like moving and all that stuff,
but there will be a video later this week
that goes into more detail about that and what that means
for this channel over the next however long it takes.
It's not gonna be forever,
but it will be probably for awhile.
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You'll get it.
Once again, I'm Scott.
You can find me on Twitter and Instagram,
and we will see you right here next time,
whenever that will be,
for more things that you thought you knew about comics.
See ya!