It seems as though by all rights I should have hated these comics... Most notably, the version of the Vision that appears in them seems to most closely resemble the "Byrned", emotionless Vision. He's not truly emotionless, but a blurb on the opening credits page of the issue informs me that the Vision has recently "purged the emotions associated with his memories from his hard drive in order to keep his processing system running smoothly." The number of objections I have to that sentence alone are fairly substantial, with terms like "hard drive" and "Processing system" clashing quite heavily with my favorite version of the character, who argued that he was no different from a man with an artificial leg or heart... he just had artificial everything. Here, the emphasis in completely on him being a machine.

So imagine my surprise when I found I really enjoyed these two issues. Chalk it up to a combination of disassociation (I really don't even emotionally connect this to the Vision I grew up with) and some clever, intriguing writing.

Despite being a Marvel comic, and apparently set within the current continuity, this seems very much like an attempt at a "Vertigo" kind of book. It's decidedly not a super-hero tale in the classic sense, being more like the kind of mature soap-opera that you would find playing out in an edgy cable television show.

The premise of the series is basically that The Vision is apparently now the Avengers' Liaison to the President of the U.S.A., and has created a family of synthezoids that he lives with in a D.C. suburb. This is not the first time that Marvel has published a comic about the Vision trying to fit in to suburban living, but this approach is decidedly different than the one in his mini-series with the Scarlet Witch, which was ultimately about family, love and tolerance overcoming hardships. There's a significantly darker feeling to all of this, and a pervading sense of dread hanging over the whole thing. We are repeatedly led to believe that this is not going to end up being a happy story by details in the omniscient narration... and considering how quickly the whole thing descends into murder and blackmail within just 2 issues, it's not hard to believe that.

I can go into details and spoilers if anyone is really interested, but in general I'd say that it's definitely worth a look, especially if you share any of the interests that I have and have touched on in various stories about Hallie or Artificial Intelligence in general. It's not really a big-picture Science Fiction kind of thing, though. It's very intimate, and slightly... "off". In short, it's very different than anything I was really expecting, and that makes it somewhat fascinating.