Josh Dylan

Vision has been walking around in a dead hero's body since 1968, and Marvel just showed you whose it was. Comic writers spent 31 years fighting over it. His name is Jim Hammond. He's the original Human Torch, older than Captain America and older than pretty much every Marvel hero you could name. He was on the cover of the very first comic Marvel ever put out, back in October 1939, when it cost a dime. He's also an android. A scientist named Phineas Horton built him to look exactly like a person, and the first time he hit open air he burst into flames. So when Hammond tells Vision "No, you wear mine," he means it literally. Getting the comics to agree on that took four different writers. Roy Thomas created Vision in 1968 and secretly decided the body was Hammond's. He never got around to writing it. He dropped a vague hint in Avengers #93, left the book, and his replacement Steve Englehart finally paid it off in 1975 with Roy's blessing. Ultron had kidnapped Horton and made him rebuild the old Torch into Vision. That stuck for 14 years, until John Byrne took over West Coast Avengers in 1989 and wanted none of it. He thought giving an android feelings and a wife was a mistake, so he had Vision taken apart, wiped his memories, and rebuilt him chalk white with no emotions. A few issues later he dug the Human Torch out of a grave, alive, and went through the old comics point by point to prove Vision had never been him. He called that storyline Vision Quest. Yeah, same name as the show. Kurt Busiek cleaned up the mess in 1999 with a time travel fix so neat that fans just went with it. In Avengers Forever #8, the villain Immortus splits the Torch into two identical bodies, so one could end up in that grave while Ultron turned the other one into Vision. Which means they're both right. Hammond had the face first, Vision has been wearing a copy of it for 58 years, and that one line is basically Hammond quoting half a century of comics back at him. Marvel even snuck him into a movie 15 years ago and almost nobody noticed. Go back to Captain America: The First Avenger and there's a red suit in a glass tube labeled "Synthetic Man" at the 1943 Stark Expo. The guy who drew Hammond never got to see any of it. Carl Burgos was 23 when he came up with the Torch, and by 1966 he was trying to sue Marvel to get the character back. That summer his daughter watched him throw out every comic he'd ever made for them. He died in 1984, and 35 years later a single copy of the 10-cent comic he drew the Torch for sold at auction for $1.26 million.