The Vision

Our writers and editors have made their picks of the best comics and creators of the past year, and you, the readers of ComicsAlliance, have voted for your favorites. Check out the best writer/artist teams of 2016, including our critics’ picks and the teams you voted the runner up and winner in this category! This is the very best of 2016!

Check out the best new characters in comics in 2016, including our critics' picks and the characters you voted the runner up and winner in this category!

It’s that blessed time of the year where we all try to take stock of what we’ve done with our lives and what other people have created that we enjoyed. That's right, it's time to start putting together our "Best of 2016" lists, and today we're going to take a look at the Best Marvel Covers of 2016.

Gabriel Hernandez Walta might be the most understated artist working on a big-two book. With each issue of The Vision, written by Tom King and with colors by Jordie Bellaire, Walta gave readers a masterclass in visual storytelling. One of the elements that makes this book so strong is how Walta decides to use the locations and backgrounds to frame characters, which then informs so much of the story happening on the page. There’s an example in the fourth issue that really encapsulates the clever work going into the book.

Marvel's The Vision, by Tom King, Gabriel Hernandez Walta and Jordie Bellaire, has been one of the biggest highlights in superhero comics this year, and this week's The Vision #11 is one of the most emotionally affecting and heart-wrenching issues in the serie. It features not one, but two character deaths that may bum you out all week long.

With the recent beginning of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther, and the ongoing success of non-white characters like Kamala Khan, Miles Morales and Sam Wilson at Marvel, the publisher is eager to present itself as a strong supporter of diversity. In fact, Ms. Marvel editor Sana Amanat appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers in January and met with President Barack Obama at a White House event in March in her role as the company's director of content and character development. Ironically, at the same time, I was considering dropping all the publisher’s books from my pull list entirely over the publisher’s current line-wide problems in the representation of indigenous people.

Our judges have adjudicated; our readers have voted. We're proud to present to you the best first issue of 2015 — and five great runners up.

The last few ICYMIs on this site have featured Scooby-Doo meeting Harley Quinn, the Justice League teaming up with the Creature Commandos, and a dude taking a cinderblock to the spine. In that context, inviting the new neighbours round to show off what you've done with the place might not really seem worth celebrating. It's for that exact reason, though, that the opening scene of Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta's The Vision #1 is interesting. This is the first issue of a new superhero comic trying to sell readers on a relatively minor character --- recent movie appearances notwithstanding. You might expect the first page to feature explosions, revelations, or at least a dead supporting character to spice things up a bit.

Thanks to Avengers: Age of Ultron, the movie-going world has now been introduced to one of the stranger Marvel heroes, the synthetic android Vision, played onscreen by Paul Bettany. A sightly spooky kinda-robot with feel feelings (sometimes) and a crush on a witch, and a mechanical dad and magic babies (but not really), he's a confusing character to get to grips with, which makes him the idea subject for the recurring feature we call Comics, Everybody! Cartoonist Chris Haley of Let’s Be Friends Again and colorist Jordan Gibson are here to educate you about Vision's complicated history of upgrades, downgrades, and reboots.

Each weekday, ComicsAlliance brings you a carefully selected variety of links from around the web about comics and comics-related media, including movies, video games, toys, and whatever else might be worth noting. Quite frankly, these are items you may just need to know about to have a productive day. Take a look at today's hand-picked links after the jump.