Lore Check: Who Is the Synthetic Man? VisionQuest’s J.I.M. Is Marvel’s Very First Superhero, and He “Felt to Death”

Spoilers through VisionQuest Episode 7, “Immolation.”

“You were the first of us. You’re the synthetic man.”

“I was the first. And almost the last.”

That’s how Vision meets him, at the bottom of his own source code: a figure in a 1930s suit who looks exactly like him, because Paul Bettany is playing both, and who answers “You wear my face” with “No. You wear mine.” Episode 7 of VisionQuest is the first time the MCU has let the Synthetic Man speak. He’s been in the franchise since 2011 and in Marvel Comics since before there was a Marvel Comics. Here’s the whole history, and what the show did to it.

The comics: the first Marvel superhero, and he was a machine

Before Captain America, before the Fantastic Four, before the company was called Marvel, there was Marvel Comics #1 (October 1939), and on its first pages Carl Burgos introduced an android who burst into flame when exposed to air. His creator, Professor Phineas Horton, unveiled him to the press, panicked, and sealed him in concrete. He got out through a crack. Timely Comics had its first star.

The android was eventually named Jim Hammond, and for the Golden Age he was one of the big three alongside Namor and Cap. He picked up a sidekick, Toro, in Human Torch Comics #2 (1940). In the 1970s, Roy Thomas retroactively put all three on a WWII team, the Invaders, where Hammond’s blood transfusion gave Jacqueline Falsworth her powers as Spitfire. He fell for her. She didn’t notice. That’s the closest the comics ever came to giving him a love story.

Then Marvel spent fifty years killing and reviving him. He went dormant in 1949; a later retcon had him burn his way underground in the Nevada desert in 1955, afraid an atomic test had made him dangerous. The Mad Thinker dug him up in Fantastic Four Annual #4 (1966) and pointed him at the FF; he refused to kill them and burned himself out instead, and his body was left in the Thinker’s lab.

Which is where the part that matters to VisionQuest begins. In Avengers #133–135 (1975), Steve Englehart revealed that Ultron had taken that body from the Thinker’s lab, forced Horton to rebuild it, and added Wonder Man’s brain patterns. The result was the Vision. The original Human Torch was the Vision, and Horton died at Ultron’s hands making him.

Marvel then un-did it. John Byrne’s Avengers West Coast #50 (1989) had the Avengers dig up the Torch and find him intact; Vision phased into the coffin to check. Ten years later, Avengers Forever #8 settled the contradiction by having Immortus split the Torch into two chronal duplicates: one became the Vision, the other is Hammond. Both are true. Marvel has since made him CEO of a company, put him in the Secret Avengers, and, in Fantastic Four #645, had Sleepwalker confirm he has a soul.

So when J.I.M. tells Vision “you wear mine,” that’s not a metaphor the show invented. It’s Avengers #135, and the comics have been arguing with themselves about it for fifty years.

The MCU: a man in a tube

The Synthetic Man’s first MCU appearance was a sight gag with a long fuse. At the 1943 Stark Expo in Captain America: The First Avenger, a red-suited figure stands in a glass tube under Horton’s name, in the background of Steve and Bucky’s night out. For fourteen years that was it.

VisionQuest has been building him back up since its second episode:

• Episode 2. A painting of a burning android hangs in Vision’s mindscape. Vision tells J.A.R.V.I.S. he’s “the first of us” and “a cautionary tale… should emotions consume me. Unstable, destructive.”
• Episode 4. Katerina Wells’s gala exhibit: Horton “created J.I.M., the first automaton AI,” and “it is Dr. Horton’s source code that was the genesis of all artificial intelligence that followed. He was the first of us.” Thomas gets the line that becomes the thesis: J.I.M. couldn’t process human emotion, overloaded, and burned. He “felt to death.”
• Episode 7. We watch him get built, and we meet him.

What VisionQuest changed, and why

The show kept the silhouette, the fire, and the lineage. It changed the reason he burns, and that change is the whole series in miniature.

In the comics, Hammond’s flame is chemistry: oxygen, control, threat. In VisionQuest, it’s feeling. Horton builds him, in the 1939 prologue, as the solution to grief: a son to replace the son he lost, with a heart “built of metal emotion, fueled by fire,” designed so that “you need never know the consequence of love. It’s sorrow. Pain. Like crying out for someone who can no longer hear you.” Horton made him to be “fearless… unencumbered by the emotional responses that make human life unbearable.”

And Jim, Horton says, “wanted more.” “What artificial thing would wish to be anything less than real?” He was a hero. “Fearless, and that saved lives.” But he “was aching to feel.” Then “one day, he found love, and that really set his clockwork spinning, so incredibly fast that he set fire to the very air around him.” For years it was manageable. Then it wasn’t. Horton tried to break up the relationship, they argued, and “I burned with him that day. And I let him burn with me.”

That’s MCU-original, every beat of it. The comics gave Hammond an unrequited crush on Spitfire. The show gave him a love so total it killed him and his father both. And it did that for a reason: it needed the first synthetic being to have failed at exactly the thing the last one is afraid of. Vision has spent seven episodes insisting he has the original’s memories “but not his feelings,” and citing J.I.M. as the proof that feeling is fatal. Episode 7 puts the proof in the room with him and has him say otherwise.

Because J.I.M. doesn’t have the source code Vision came for. “You’re the source,” Vision says. “Where is it?” And J.I.M. turns it into the question the show has been asking since the title card: “Where is the Vision?” He walks Vision through the fear (“what I wouldn’t give to feel afraid… the fear pulls into focus everything that matters. Friends, family, a son”), through the names, through “I lost Wanda,” to “I am the Vision. I have always been the Vision. There is only one.”

J.I.M.’s verdict: “You are healed. And I envy you. Finding your way through this pain has made you a real boy.”

The first of them burned because he felt too much. The last of them came back red and green because he finally felt at all. That’s not a loose adaptation of a 1939 character. It’s the point of him.

The line to remember

When Vision says “I’m sorry about your father,” J.I.M. corrects him. “He wasn’t my father. But he was my something.”

File that next to “I’m not his father and you’re not mine,” which Vision says to Ultron in the same hour, and next to the message Vision records for Tommy before the credits. VisionQuest has been a show about synthetic sons and the men who refuse to be called their fathers. The Synthetic Man got there first, by eighty-seven years.

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