The Vision (2015)

Written by Tom King, art by Gabriel Hernández Walta & Michael Walsh, colours by Jordie Bellaire, lettering by Clayton Cowles.

What’s it all about?

We launched our project with a series of threads about the Eisner Award-winning 12-issue miniseries The Vision. You’ll find the full text of our threads below!

An Introduction to The Vision

This week we’re focusing on “The Vision” (2015-2016), with Tom King on writing, Gabriel Hernández Walta on art (minus one issue by Michael Walsh), and Jordie Bellaire on colours with lettering by Clayton Cowles. It’s a 12-issue miniseries published by Marvel. #TheVision 1/7

The Art of Gabriel Hernández Walta

In “The Vision” penciler Gabriel Hernández Walta’s unique style empowers the eerie silences and punctuating moments of violent eruption to create a rare and powerful atmospheric anxiety that drives the story onward and signals many of its key themes. 1/7

The Vision and Racial Metaphor

Themes of passing & prejudice and the pursuit of truth & justice should make superhero comics well-suited to discussing racial politics. However, the frequent use of racial metaphor can be a slippery slope. King & Walta’s “The Vision” miniseries shows why. 1/14

The Vision & The Stepford Wives

The Vision *SPOILERS AHEAD* features intertexts with various Marvel Comics’ series, but also some deeply important connective tissue with “The Stepford Wives,” a story that notably informs and grounds the arc of Virginia, the series’ emergent tragic protagonist. 1/7

The Vision and Sexuality

In an award-winning essay, our own Anna Peppard relates the Vision’s history of gender & sexual conflicts to the politics of Comics Studies in ways that help contextualize Tom King’s treatment of superhero sexuality in “The Vision.” 1/7

The Vase of Zenn-La

The Vision *SPOILERS AHEAD* is a densely symbolic text with a vase representing one of the more compelling and important elements to (literally) hover within that space, providing – like Rosebud in “Citizen Kane” – a key to the existential view of the series. 1/7

Concluding The Vision

As Sequential Scholars’ study of The Vision comes to an end, let’s discuss the ending of the series *SPOILERS AHEAD* and the way the anticlimactic resolution of the story might be seen to resolve the key themes and morals that “The Vision” explores. 1/10