Peanuts |

TITLE: The Vision #4
AUTHOR: Tom King
PENCILLER: Gabriel Hernandez Walta
PUBLISHER: Marvel
PRICE: $3.99
RELEASED: February 3, 2016

By Rob Siebert
Editor, Fanboy Wonder

When I looked at the first issue of The Vision a few months back, I talked about an ominous, unsettling vibe that something very bad was going to happen. And make no mistake about it, bad things have happened, and it only seems to be getting worse.

The Vision’s children are sent back to school following Vin’s violent incident with another student. Thus, it’s all the more unlikely when Viv shares a sweet moment with that same student. But what isn’t so sweet is what’s happening with Virginia, and the mysterious voyeur who captured her burying Grim Reaper’s corpse mere minutes after she killed him. Before this issue ends, blood is shed once again.

As usual, King and Walta give us the Vision family’s warped version of suburban life. That creepy, bizarre, Twilight Zone-ish spin on things is a huge part of what’s made this series such a creative success. We open the issue with Vin and Viv playing with a football, and Vision joins them moments later. It’s a nice Rockwellian scenario that’s perfect for what King and Walta have created for us. We even get a Peanuts homage with a bait-and-switch about kicking the ball. But what makes it a great Vision scene is the way the characters talk to each other. They’re trying to be a family, but they talk like the machines they are.

Let’s look at some dialogue from Vin and Viv…

– “That was entirely unfair! The ball was thrown by father for me!”

– “Now brother, fairness is a simple mathematically determined balance, the lowest form of justice. Preeminence, however, is the assertion of complex covenants over instinctual norms. The highest form of justice.”

Who talks like this? No one human, that’s for sure. This scene is also a great illustration of the inherent element of tragedy in this book. We know no matter how hard this family tries, they’ll never truly achieve the normalcy they’re striving for. But they keep trying…

King seems to tease a romance between Viv and Chris, the boy Vin had a conflict with. Yet again, it’s painfully obvious just how robotic Viv is. Chris is obviously trying to connect with her, and the narration indicates she’s receptive to it. But it’s a delightfully awkward exchange, which leads me to hope Vin and Viv are around long enough to take a crack at high school romance. It’ll be doomed to fail, of course. But I’d still love to see it.

The drama in this issue comes from Virgina’s plot thread. For the sake of staying spoiler-free, I can’t say much about it. But to say the least, it succeeds in upping the tension. Virginia won’t be able to keep her secrets much longer…

On the lighter side of things, toward the middle of the issue husband and wife have a marriage-by-the-books conversation about scheduling as Vision and The Avengers are facing Giganto. And it’s done with the same robotic dialogue we saw from Vision and his kids. What’s more, we briefly get to see Walta draw Iron Man and Captain America. It’s a nice little interlude, as we haven’t seen any Avengers-scale stuff in this book yet.

The Vision continues to be one of the most compelling books Marvel has on the stands right now. Things are going from bad to worse. I suspect those of us who love great comic books will want to be here when it all falls apart for the Vision family.

Images from author’s collection.

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By Rob Siebert
Editor, Fanboy Wonder

It’s a little surreal to see all the Peanuts publicity over the last several months. I was never much of a fan when I was a kid. But after seeing the Peanuts exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago a few years ago, I became really interested in the life of Charles Schulz. Books like Schulz and Peanuts and My Life with Charlie Brown are on my shelf, and I’ve started looking at the strip with an adult’s eyes. You start looking at it completely differently when you realize it was written by a man who, to an extent, was extremely insecure about his place in the world. That’s so odd, considering he’s one of the medium’s all-time greats. But then you look at the strips, and you see Charlie Brown say things like…

“I want to be a special person…I want to be needed.”
“They say opposites attract…She’s really something and I’m really nothing…How opposite can you get?”
“I’m lonely. I feel that no one really cares about me. How can I cure this loneliness?

You look at this kind of stuff, and you realize that Schulz was not only providing us with his own special view of the world, but he was plunging into the murky depths of his own psyche and putting his findings on the page. It sounds pretty heavy when you put it like that, but it’s true.

When you look at the strip from this perspective, it’s so weird to see Peanuts looked at like a kids franchise, even though it’s been that way for so many years. The movie seems to be at least partially capturing the essence of the Charlie Brown character, though.

Incidentally, there’s a viral marketing campaign out right now that lets people “Peanutize” themselves, i.e. create a Peanuts character that looks like them. But if you’re like me, and you look almost exactly like Charlie Brown anyway, there’s not much of a point. As the Peanuts characters are kids, there’s no way to differentiate between my character and Charlie Brown…

Curiously, while they won’t let you give a child character facial hair, they apparently will let you give them a wedding ring. Yes, I know it’s the wrong hand. But why else would they put it in there? Maybe it’s a purity ring…

Image 1 from cowart.info.

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A Review of The Vision #4 – From Bad to Worse

The Peanuts Movie, Charlie Brown, and Charles Schulz