One of Our Androids is Missing!

The Scarlet Witch wakes up alone in her bed at Avengers Compound. She calls out for her husband, the Vision, but gets no answer. After checking on their children — Tommy and Billy — she goes out looking for her husband. Searching the grounds, she finds Hawkeye training outside. When she steps on a twig, the sound causes Clint to fire an arrow in her direction. Luckily, her hex powers cause the arrow to lose all momentum and fall to the ground before striking her. Clint hasn’t seen the Vision this morning so they check in on Hank Pym in the lab.

Hank informs them that he was doing a systems check to find out why a biostatic analysis was off. That’s when the communicator suddenly cuts. Suspecting this is not an ordinary glitch, Pym races upstairs to see what’s going on. There, the Scarlet Witch and Hawkeye are being attacked by Ultron.

Elsewhere, Tigra wakes up from a dream in which she is a big cat on the prowl. She wakes up just as she makes her kill. Rather than ripping into the warm flesh of her prey, Tigra rips open her pillow. This isn’t the first time she has had such a vivid and violent dream and wonders if it might be time to tell the others about them.[1] However, all thoughts of her dream are put aside when she hears an explosion. Racing outside, she is joined by the Wasp and Wonder Man who have also been drawn outside by the sounds of battle.[2] Wonder Man is surprised to see Ultron again but despite whatever upgrades the robot has gone under since their last encounter, Simon is confident that he will beat him again.[3]

As Hawkeye and Hank cheer from the sidelines, the Scarlet Witch fears that Ultron’s sudden arrival has something to do with her husband’s disappearance. She thinks back to how the Vision came to be created. He started his life as the android Human Torch of World War II, created by Professor Phineas Horton.[4] During the war he fought alongside his partner Toro, and joined Captain America, Bucky, and the Sub-Mariner in forming the Invaders.[5] However, the Torch’s powers grew out of control in the 1950s and he burned out. Decades later, his body was recovered by the Mad Thinker who revived the Torch to battle the Fantastic Four. Ultimately, the FF won the battle and the deactivated Torch was left behind in the lab.[6] Not long after that, Ultron found the Torch’s inert body…

Wanda’s recollection is interrupted by the ever escalating battle with Ultron. Hank comes up with a solution to defeating their foe. Using his Pym Particles, he shrinks Wonder Man down in size and orders him to fly into Ultron’s mouth. Not sure what the plan is, Simon complies. However, once he is inside he begins to return to his normal size and in doing so he rips Ultron to pieces from within. Hank explains that he deduced that this wasn’t the real Ultron and thus not constructed out of Adamantium like the real one. He believes that this impostor was sent to distract them, possibly to prevent them from looking for the Vision. The team then splits up to search the entire compound.

As she looks for her husband, Wanda continues her recollection of the Vision’s origins. After Ultron recovered the body of the Torch, he kidnapped Phineas Horton and forced him to help rebuild the Torch into his instrument of destruction. To give it a brand new personality, Ultron used the brain patterns of Wonder Man — who was believed dead at the time.[7] This new synthezoid didn’t have a name until he was sent to attack the Avengers, when the Wasp first saw him phasing through a wall she called him a “vision” and this name stuck ever since. Eventually, the Vision betrayed his master and became a long standing member of the Avengers ever since.[8] It was during this time that Wanda first met him and the two fell in love and were eventually married.[9]

By this time, Wanda has arrived at the cliff that overlooks the ocean. It’s here that she is contacted by Hank Pym who tells her to come back to the compound. When the rest of the team checks in, Hank informs her that nobody was able to find any trace of the Vision. This upsets Wanda, but Hank has more bad news: Someone infected their computer database with a virus that has erased all records of the Vision from their files. Worse, this virus has also purged all mention of the Vision from the east coat’s computers, the Fantastic Four, even various government agencies such as SHIELD. Hank says that this would be an impossible feat to pull off unless someone had the proper access codes, suggesting that they have a traitor in the midst. Hawkeye can’t believe this but he is interrupted by his wife, Mockingbird, who has returned to tell them that she is responsible for the Vision’s kidnapping.[10]

Recurring Characters

West Coast Avengers (Hawkeye, Mockingbird, Wasp, Hank Pym, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Wonder Man, Tigra), Billy Maximoff, Tommy Maximoff

Continuity Notes

1. Tigra is beginning to regress into a feline dominant form. She will have become totally feral by Avengers West Coast #49 and will be detained. She won’t get cured until Avengers Spotlight #38.

2. Here, Wonder Man recounts that the Wasp used to be the chairwoman for the east coast team. She held this position from Avengers #217 to 238 and again from 255 to 272.

3. Wonder Man crushed Ultron with his bare hands back in West Coast Avengers (vol. 2) #7

4. The Human Torch was created waaaaay back in Marvel Comics #1.

5. The Torch first started fighting crime with Toro in Human Torch Comics #2 and joined Cap and Namor in forming the Invaders in Giant-Size Invaders #1.

6. The Torch’s deactivation and revival in the present day and his battle with the Fantastic Four happened in Fantastic Four Annual #4.

7. The creation of the Vision is somewhat complicated. The details:

   • His brain patterns were based on Wonder Man’s brain pattern during a period he was believed to be dead from Avengers #9 through 151.

   • The creation of the Vision was covered in Avengers #134-135. This truth was told to the Vision by Immortus.

   • This was part of a larger manipulation. In West Coast Avengers (vol. 2) #44 and Avengers West Coast #50, everyone is led to believe that the Vision wasn’t created from the Human Torch.

   • However, things are a lot more complicated than that. All of this was used to manipulate the destiny of the Avengers. In reality, back when the Torch was laying dormant, Immortus created a chronal duplicate of the wartime hero. One copy was buried back in Sub-Mariner #14, the other went on to be transformed into the Vision. This will all be explained in Avengers Forever #8.

8. The Vision was named and joined the Avengers in issues #57-58.

9. Wanda and the Vision first met in Avengers #76, fell in love in issue #91, started dating in #108, and lastly got married in Giant-Size Avengers #4.

10. The Avengers are shocked to see Mockingbird because she had just recently quit the team. It’s a long story:

    • This drama began in West Coast Avengers (vol. 2) #17-23: During a trip through time, Bobbi was kidnapped by the western hero known as the Phantom Rider. She was forced to drink a love potion. She eventually broke free and hunted her rapist (confirmed in Hawkeye & Mockingbird #1) down and left him to fall off a cliff to his death.

    • When returned to her own time, Mockingbird kept the truth a secret because the Avengers had a rule against killing. However, the Phantom Rider continued to torment her from beyond the grave in issue #31. Everyone learned the truth in issues #34-35.

    • Hawkeye was incredibly upset and Bobbi was angered that her husband put Avengers duty over supporting his wife. Things became untenable and Bobbi struck out on her own in West Coast Avengers (vol. 2) #37.

Phineas Horton in the Modern Age

As the Sliding Timescale moves forward it becomes increasingly impossible for Phineas Horton — who was already in his middle age in 1939 — could survive into the Modern Age without some means of prolonging his natural life span. Marvel has yet to explain how Horton could live this long.

I have two possible theories:

First, as seen in Marvel Comics #1000, Horton was associated with a group of scientists called the Enclave who managed to cheat death by prolonging their life spans using science. It’s not unreasonable to believe that Horton was able to obtain such technology, thus prolonging his life until his death during the creation of the Vision, per Avengers #135.

The other possibility is that the man who helped Ultron was actually a Space Phantom. Since Immortus used a Space Phantom to post as Horton to sell the idea that the Vision and the Torch were not connected, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that Immortus would manipulate Ultron with a Space Phantom posing as Horton either.