The Vision Gambit

Book: Marvel Two-in-One

Issue No.: 39

Published: February 2, 1978

Title: “The Vision Gambit”

A lot of modern superhero comic books are “written for the trade paperback.” That is to say the stories are conceived in four- or five-issue arcs that can later be neatly collected in a trade paperback (or the electronic version of a trade paperback). One of the things I dig about comics from the late 1970s and early 1980s (my personal comics golden age) is their freewheeling nature. Several titles had been running for more than a decade at this point, so their plots and sub-plots had sprawled nearly two hundred issues. Instead of writing for the trade, comic book creators of this era were just trying to tell an entertaining story over the course of 22 or so pages and also convince the reader to come back for the next issue of the book. So when you’d pick up the new issue of a comic book, you’d often be dropped into the aftermath of whatever cliffhanger the writer had devised to wrap up the previous issue.

Such is the case with Marvel Two-in-One (a team-up book starring the Thing plus a different guest hero every issue) number 39, that opens with the Thing and Daredevil in the clutches of the Mad Thinker. I don’t know exactly how we got here, but there are enough contextual clues provided by the book’s creative team for me to get a general idea. And it isn’t long before the Mad Thinker reveals his scheme — he has a civilian hostage he’s using as leverage to force the Thing and Daredevil to kidnap android superhero the Vision. You see, the Mad Thinker wants to use the Vision as the prototype to build an unstoppable army of androids. Also, in case the hostage situation doesn’t give the Thinker enough leverage, he has the Thing hypnotized.

The Mad Thinker’s whole deal is being smarter than everybody else, so it’s fun to see Daredevil win the day not with brawn but by outthinking the Thinker. He gets some help from Yellowjacket (Hank Pym, who has also been known as Ant-Man and Giant-Man), so this issue of Two-in-One actually delivers four-in-one, for the low, low price (at the time, at least) of 35 cents! Quite a bargain.

Next time — I’ll be back Tuesday (we’re having a three-day weekend here in the States) with more Daredevil, taking a look at his solo book!