90 percent of golden age stories are basically the same. Our hero is introduced; some generic mobsters commit some generic crime; the crime overlaps with our hero in some absurd way; and finally, inevitably, our hero defeats the mobsters with his patented power—that’s mostly it, except every third time a circus is involved. As we should, we spend a lot of time remembering and celebrating the exceptions to this formula (the Cap war issues, the origin stories, the team-ups, etc.); but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact those moments of creative genius were buried under a mess of repetitive repetitiveness. What is interesting about David Lapham’s take on the golden age Vision is his unflinching embrace of this old time way of writing comics. Beat for beat, overwritten narrative moment for overwritten narrative moment, Lapham recreates that golden age feel, and that seems a perfect way to celebrate a hero like Vision who exists for the most part only in the golden age. First we are introduced to our hero, The Vision, an apparition from another world trapped here to do good. Then, just like in the old stories, a random mobster runs afoul of our hero and, well, I don’t want to spoil it, but I will reveal that this time there isn’t a circus involved. Overall, within the parameters of the genre, the story is told well; there’s even some minor modernizations: characters are made a hair deeper, the gore is a slight more shocking, the action is fairly clean and concise. It’s all just enough to make the comic readable without sacrificing the conceit that this is a classic, boring golden age book striving to remind us that Marvel’s house of origin was built with a thousand thrilling thrills that were not always that.