Writers Roy Thomas & R.J. M Lofficier

Penciler Ron Wilson

Inker Sam Delarosa

Letterer Janice Chiang

Colorist Gregory Wright

Alternate Take on Avengers 254

Cover Dated November 1990

What If The Vision Had Conquered The World?

Right at the beginning, there is an ad for the video game Wrath of the Black Manta.  Which I played for hours on the NES, and prefer it to Ninja Gideon.  That may be just me.

Apparently in the Proper Marvel Universe, Vision was damaged in a fight with Fantastic Four villain and ruler of the Negative Zone, Annihilus.  To try to fix him, the second worst Avenger and possible date rapist, Starfox, connects Vision to Isaac, the super computer of his home moon Titan, of the planet Jupiter.

You can tell this is going to be a good issue as it only takes Uatu, the Watcher two pages to set up the premise.

Also, Uatu makes a joke regarding the combined being ‘envisioned’ a golden age.  He goes as far as to state, pun unintentional.  Who knew Uatu even knew puns?

Vision then sets about taking over every single computer on Earth.  He is defeated by the Avengers convincing he was wrong and then the government wipes his programming clean.  That was the Proper Marvel Universe.

This issue is broken over two parts.

I. Utopia

The Avengers – Black Knight, Hercules, Wonder Man (the worst Avenger), Captain America, Scarlet Witch and Starfox.  Not the worst roster, but I would have dropped the title.

Vision’s body is dead.

Nick Fury gets on the Avengers’ television phone, telling them that Vision’s intelligence is still in every computer.

We also see President Reagan.

We also see that Vision’s first steps to conquering the world is to replacing everyone’s wall screens on their computers to his face, thus preventing anyone from doing anything.  Including She-Hulk wanting to only use her computer to review her laundry list.  Which has to be a typo, right?  She must have meant grocery list as who makes a laundry list?  Just clean all the dirty clothes that are in your hamper.  Or do the top portion and then do a second load with the remaining amount.  Who makes a list?  Even if she was looking at which outfits were at a laundromat, how many outfits could she have out there?  I suppose being a lawyer, she might have plenty but still, in that case she would be on a regular cycle.  I don’t know, I may be making too much out of one panel but it stuck out to me.

Vision even takes over the screens of video game arcades, as we get to see Power Pack trying to play a game.  They look awfully young here, even the two older ones look super young.  Maybe they did and aged gradually until issue 19 of their series?

Another panel on this page is the Mad Thinker, who will get a bunch of in the second part.  He gets this great line about how he should have predicted this would happen but he can’t predict everything that happens.  I also like his caption box stating that he is the Thinker, who some would call mad.  It isn’t like he started out to be called the Man Thinker but at one point, you have to own up to these things.

There is an ad for the original Game Boy game, Gargoyle’s Quest, with the headline “With graphics so read, you will forget it is is a game” which I’m sure must have happen to so many people.  Playing on a giant clunk of a gaming device, looking at a tiny screen, black graphics on a pale green background, people must have been constantly lost in the adventure.  At least it looks better than those Atari ads, those advertising departments must have knew they were losing a fight already.  You get the great art of the cover but then the game graphics were blocks of various colors moving towards other blocks of various colors.

The Vision holds a conference at the United Nations, expressing his giant plan, he is going to take away everyone’s computers so that humans can concentrate on the things that matter.  He wants to do this as peacefully as possible.  Apparently, humans could defeat him if we just pushed our computers over and broke them.

Captain America states that what Vision is doing is really only an extension of the philosophy that superheroes live by, making the world a safer place by eliminating threats.  Reed believes the best thing to do is to go along with Vision’s plan for the moment as opposing him could lead to devastation.

We see the X-Men are sitting together.  Wolverine is upset with humanity as of course, no one wants to lose their computers, what would they do if they can’t lose themselves in their electronics.  Which is amazing as this is nearly 1991, computers are barely fun, I mean there’s the Leisure Suit Larry and King’s Quest IV but that’s pretty much it.

Kitty is amongst the X-Men, in her mainly green outfit with the orange trim, is stating it is her Ariel costume, enough?  She doesn’t have any lines but there is she and thus, I own this issue.  This was another one of those that Marvel Comics Database had her listed under and I had in my To Sell boxes which I’m glad I hadn’t gotten rid of it yet.

So with the support of his fellow superheroes, the world starts improving.  Captain America and a few other heroes assist with getting rid of nuclear missiles.  X-Factor, the original five X-Men, are helping the homeless.  Reed Richards is making solar power panels.  Thor is bringing rain to portions of Africa.

We get a time jump.  Turns out, with mutants being awesome, they are the ideal individuals to head our space exploration.  We see Wolverine and the adult New Mutants, placing a flag on a planet.  The New Mutants are – Wolfsbane, Dani, Cannonball, Sunspot and a blonde.  She doesn’t have bangs and her chest seems larger than what Dani and Wolfsbane looks like, so it must be Magma.  Honestly, I hate that there are two blondes on the New Mutants, and if shown from a distance, it is hard to tell which one is which with how they all have the same costume.  So you are force to look at their bust size and vague hairstyle to figure it out.  I had this problem a couple times in Volume Three of their series.

Then we time jump to the 23rd Century.  We see the Cosmic Avengers – Thor (the only surviving charter member), Starhawk, Jhen the Gammazon (a clone of She-Hulk), Tachyon Torch (a robot version of the Human Torch if I read that right), Commander America (what if Captain America’s uniform was more like a football player’s?) and Irondriod (a regular employee of Stark Industries, once one dies, he gets replaced with another employee).

Thor apologizes for being late.  Starhawk states that as a charter member, they will wait for him.

They are about to fight the alliance of the Skrulls and the Kree.  Once the battle begins, we see the current Super Skrull, known as the Mega-Skrull.  The Avengers fight this alliance.  A Kree warrior kills Irondriod but the Avengers win the day.

They mourn Irondriod, we learn that he’s a basic employee and we don’t even get his name.  That’s how interchangeable he is.

Jhen and Tachyon Torch have a flirty relationship.

This portion ends with Uatu stating that the galaxies now know peace everywhere.

II.  Dystopia

This time, Vision isn’t going to be nice about his takeover of the computers.  This freaks out the Genoshans, idiots that they are.  They send like a super nuclear weapon to New York City as that is where Vision’s mainframe is.  New York City and all that live there are dead.  Of course, Vision is in every computer, so even if he was housed there, he can move his intelligence anywhere else and so he does.

Classic What If? story though, where everyone either dies at the beginning or at the end.

Vision needs allies for his next steps and gathers the only worthy minds around.  The Man Thinker, the head of Hydra (really?) and of course, Doctor Doom.  They take over the world, they divide it in four parts.

We time jump to the 23rd Century.  Which I like that really, Lofficier and Thomas barely wanted to do present day stories, they wanted to jump as far ahead as possible to not deal with the superheroes of the day.  Before we join the 23rd Century, we are given a glimpse of our present day villains fighting Lilandra and her Imperial Guard of the Shi’ar empire, so the galaxy isn’t just rolling over for the villains.

Now we have the Mad Thinker’s consciousness in an android body, Doctor Doom’s descendant and now the head of Hydra is a woman, which is good for that agency.  They always do better with a woman in charge, Viper being the best example.  Viper over Baron Strucker every time, I say.  Vision is still living in the computer.

On this day, the Kree’s Supreme Intelligence’s descendant, Supremor and the Skrulls make an alliance with our four characters of Earth.  Of course, the aliens double cross the Earthlings.  Of course, they expected this and after a battle it turns out Vision has entered the alien homeworlds and have taken over.  He is now in charge of Supremor, turning him into a replica of Vision.  The Kree, he turns blue, which weakens them, I guess?

This portion ends with Uatu stating that the galaxy only knows peace as the Earthlings keep taking over more and more of the galaxy.