Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!
[part two]
Two AVENGERS scribes in particular -- Roy Thomas; and, later, Steve Englehart -- expended no little effort, successively, in charting the terra incognita that was the Vision's tortured (and tortuous) interior landscape.
During the pivotal "Kree/Skrull War" AVENGERS story arc, Thomas granted the reader a rare glimpse of android's inner mechanisms (as interpreted by 70's mega-penciler Neal Adams), courtesy of a life-saving mission of mercy undertaken by the Ant-Man.
As postulated by Adams, the clockwork trappings of the Vision's interior most closely resembled an unholy amalgamation of Fritz Lang's Metropolis and one of Frank Lloyd Wright's more intriguing hashish fantasies. Flying metal plates served as platelets; and bubbles comprised of unfathomable, coruscating energies burst from out of seeming nowhere, causing the android's inner density -- as well of that of anyone brave (or foolhardy) enough to be traipsing about within said android -- to run the gamut from the corporeal to the maddeningly intangible, and then back again. Visually, it was one of the high points of an artistic tenure (i.e., Neal Adams') on a series already established as something of a penciler's "showcase" title, having previously benefited from the interpretive wizardry of (among others) Jack Kirby; John Buscema; Gene Colan; and Barry Smith.
However: for every good, solid "lick" said pencilers got in, on the AVENGERS series of the 70's... Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart each scored a bare minimum of two, in turn. At the peak of the series' storytelling prowess and success, the only two Marvel comics of the period anywhere near as well-written as this one were Thomas' own CONAN THE BARBARIAN and Englehart's classic run on CAPTAIN AMERICA.
In large part, this was due to one particular "cylinder" pistoning remorselessly away within the AVENGERS storytelling "engine": the justly fabled love affair between the mechanoid Vision... and the enigmatic mutant sorceress known as the Scarlet Witch.
For anyone not terribly familiar with the tousle-headed temptress in question... a brief introductory paragraph or two, after the cover reproduction directly below:
Wanda Maximoff -- along with her impetuous and irascible brother,
Pietro (i.e., the Avenger Quicksilver) -- was born a mutant, of
parents (as of that period in Marvel history, in any event) unknown.
Pietro Maximoff had been blessed with speed and reflexes so accelerated,
no creature living -- whether human, or otherwise -- could dream of matching
them. Wanda, on the other hand, could cast at will a devastating,
all-or-nothing attack which she unfailingly referred to as a "hex sphere";
a sort of wide-angled probability-altering "field" within which, say,
all electrical power might suddenly find itself drained away into airy
nothingness... or an earthquake might inexplicably occur, within solid
bedrock. Not a bad little super-power, as these things generally
go. 
The Scarlet Witch's personality was, often as not, as mercurial and unpredictable as were the effects of the lady's powers, whipsawing wildly between the polar extremes of staid aloofness one moment, and full-bore, in-your-face attitude the next. Some measure of this, certainly, managed to "rub off" on the lovesick (to say nothing of horrendously conflicted) construct, in turn, over the years.
(The above-referenced scene, incidentally -- still every bit as visceral and shocking, a full twenty-five years after the fact -- was the first time the readership of the day was forced to confront the notion that the [heretofore] stolid and imperturbable Vision was carrying something a bit more than a mere schoolboy-ish "torch" for his scarlet-spandexed teammate. Once that particular stretch of emotional "ice" had finally been well and truly cracked... the resultant bubbling-up of long-repressed, human-style passions, during the months which followed, was almost tsunami-like in its sweep and totality.)
Hard on the heels of the erstwhile Thomas, writer Steve Englehart picked up the storytelling ball and ran it way, waaaaaaay into the end-zone. The most exemplary example, here, would be issue #113's "... And Your Young Men Shall Slay Visions," in which a violently militant "fringe" political group -- enraged by the notion of an android actually professing to possess the full compliment of human emotions, "just like us real HUMANS" -- stages a kamikaze-style "human bomb" attack on Avengers Mansion, in a vainglorious attempt to blow their particular plasticene idee fixe right the hell off the face of the planet.
That the Vision survived this concerted "suicide run" assault was due, in no small measure, to the love and steadfastness shown him by not only his mutant paramour, the Scarlet Witch, but the other Avengers, as well... including a coldly furious Captain America.
It made for a significant and effective coda, within the larger storytelling symphony that was (and still is) the saga of the single character most uniquely alone, within the entirety of the Marvel Comics universe...
... even when surrounded by a dozen (or more) of his similarly- spandexed comrades-in-arms.
The Silver Age AVENGERS
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PAGE TWO
PAGE THREE
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