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Marvel Pick Of The Week – August 10, 2016

By Matt Conner

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Marvel Pick Of The Week goes to the book that proves Even An Android Can Make You Cry.

Spoilers ahead!

Marvel Pick Of The Week: The Vision #10, by Tom King, Gabriel Hernandez Walta, and Jordie Bellaire

The Vision has taken Marvel Pick Of The Week for eight of the last nine issues, and the only reason it hasn’t made a full sweep is that I didn’t write a column the week issue nine came out. Over the course of the last year, Tom King, Gabriel Hernandez Walta, and Jordie Bellaire have used a traditionally cold mechanical man to teach us about what it means to be human. We’ve known fear, we’ve known love, we’ve admitted the lies we tell ourselves. And this week, we’re going to learn to say goodbye, even if the story’s not over yet.

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In last week’s issue, the Vision’s son was accidentally killed by his uncle (made helpful by Mike Del Mundo’s deceptively simple cover blending an electric circuit with a family tree). This week, the family has been confined to house arrest, a bottle episode that pulls the reader into the lonely grief and the ways they have learned to hold one another. Wife Virginia keeps glitching, repeating words on loop, and her attempts to hide that by singing “Row Row Row Your Boat” are as transparent if she were a human chopping onions during a crying spell. The new puppy trips the alarm leaving the house in search of his best buddy.

Daughter Viv has the most honest quest for faith I have ever seen in a comic book, a masterpiece of writing that should make Tom King a legend: “I do not know if there is a God. It seems unlikely. I also do not know if Vin had a soul. This, too, seems unlikely. So first, I pray that there is a God. Then I pray that Vin had a soul. Then I pray for God to allow Vin’s soul to rest.” So blunt, so true, and a framework I think any of us could use to process our pain. Believers and atheists alike can follow this structure – Tom King has written a modern Lord’s Prayer for when we hurt.

And finally, the Vision himself processes his grief in a beautiful, gory visual, forcing himself to remember a time when his son wanted his attention but he chose to take a phone call instead. This book takes “Cats In The Cradle” and manages to make it that much sadder, and the way this emotionally stunted hero struggles to understand what his pain means…

Tom King has wounded me. He has wounded us all. But he’s a surgeon, not a sadist, and he’s bringing the best, bravest parts of us into the light. His art team is an intimate part of this, the way that Walta projects such profound emotion onto metal and plastic people, the way the letterer’s caption boxes pull our eyes deliberately around the page so as to softly absorb the grief in this house, the way Bellaire allows sunlight into the rooms but only partway. There is nothing about this book I don’t love. This little masterpiece is teaching us all how to let go. And there are still two issues left.

Honorable Mentions:

Scarlet Witch #9, for Wanda’s amazing way to say, “I’ll see your Challenge About Using Predictive Justice Strategies and raise you a I Ran A Team In The 90s Based Around This, You Jerk.”

A-Force #8, because amputees (and body diversity in general) don’t get much screen time in main stream comics, and it makes sense that Misty Knight and Nico Minoru would bond over their shared robot arms.

Spider-Man 2099 #13, because Captain America 2099 is not welcome at my zoo, but I kind of love that her first reaction to finding herself in one is to punch a tiger in the face. USA! USA!

All-New All-Different Avengers Annual #1, because Mark Waid’s depiction of misogynist fan fiction is hilarious and chillingly believable.

Catch up on previous Marvel Picks of the Week here!

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