"I am Aarkus, Destroyer of Evil. I've crossed the great cold into your world. I Am Here!"
Science discovers smoke to be the long-sought gateway to the supernatural. Professor Enoch Mason's "Dimension Smasher" blasts a path into the beyond, and through the breach that once separated the material world from the supernatural steps the Vision! All perpetrators of evil rue the day the Vision appears. For to them he is "Nemesis"--death and disaster befell all enemies of society who behold him in his true form. Though smoke brings the Vision to our world, it is also needed to return him to the supernatural realm, and a lack of smoke will trap him as effectively as iron bars will trap a mortal! With his freezing touch and heroic strength the Vision battles the evils that beset mankind. "There are others on Earth who struggle against a storm of evil...It is those I hurry to aid! Goodbye, my friends!"
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The Vision, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, was another of Marvel’s non-human characters and its first non-white hero. Odd as he was the Vision, was one of Timely’s better sellers, appearing in over forty issues of Marvel Mystery Comics. After Simon and Kirby left the strip, Stan Lee and Syd Shores wrote and drew the Vision’s adventures.
It’s been speculated that the Vision was intended to be Timely’s answer to the Spectre. Both are non-human and hairless (one is a ghost and the other vaguely supernatural), both have weird adventures and undefined powers, and neither shied away from killing their enemies. But the Spectre had an earthly identity and ties as Detective Jim Corrigan, while the Vision lived almost entirely in another realm, except for brief forays to Earth to fight evil, thus affording him little human interest. And while the Spectre is the most powerful superhero, the Vision’s powers were much more limited. For a hero who appeared coming out of smoke, he did relatively little flying. Sometimes he seemed to have no powers at all, except for the smoke gimmick.
In the Vision’s origin, Professor Enoch Mason postulates that the Vision’s mist-dimension is the home of creatures that are the basis for our ghosts and other mythical creatures. Thus the origin combines Timely’s fondness for other worlds and lost races, the ghost angle from the Spectre, and Jack Kirby’s love of myths and legends. Sadly, the Smoke World was never developed much but one story says that its ruler was named the Law-Giver.
The Vision’s adventures involved the supernatural and horror angles. Werewolves, asteroid monsters, wizards, and other turned up as his foes. He also fought the Plant Man; Khor the black sorcerer; the Cyclops, ruler of a lost race in the sewers; and Kai-Mak the Shark God. Later in the strip, the Vision’s adventures got more pedestrian (a common fate to magic and supernatural heroes in the Golden Age) and he ended fighting ordinary crooks. There was no supporting cast to the strip and the Vision never had any recurring enemies.
The Vision appeared in the 1993 Invaders miniseries, but has not appeared in the current Marvel Universe, perhaps because his name has been taken by the Avengers’ android Vision.
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