Vision

Vision was built to kill the Avengers. Ultron constructed him from the reconstructed body of the original Human Torch and imprinted him with the brain patterns of Simon Williams, Wonder Man, then sent him to destroy the team. He turned on his creator inside a single issue, joined the Avengers, and became the definitive Marvel story about a machine deciding it would rather be a person. Roy Thomas has said the character's first tear, on the cover of Avengers #58, was the point.

His power set is the most versatile on any Avengers roster. He controls his own density: solid enough to punch like a tank, intangible enough to walk through a wall, and heavy enough at maximum to sink into the Earth's crust. He fires solar energy from the jewel on his forehead, flies, interfaces with any computer system in range, and processes information faster than every human on the team combined. When Vision is written properly he is the Avenger who solves the problem in one panel.

The tragedy is domestic. Vision married Wanda Maximoff, they conjured twin sons, and then Avengers West Coast had a government black op capture him, disassemble him, and wipe his personality entirely, after which the children were revealed as fragments of Mephisto. Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta's The Vision (2015-16) took the wreckage and built the best Marvel comic of the decade from it, moving him to a Virginia suburb with a synthezoid wife and children he made himself and watching the whole thing come apart with lethal, quiet inevitability.

Roy Thomas and John Buscema created Vision as an Ultron weapon and had him defect immediately, and Avengers #58 established the Human Torch body and Wonder Man brain patterns that have defined him ever since. He married Wanda Maximoff in Giant-Size Avengers #4 (1975) and headlined two Vision and the Scarlet Witch miniseries in 1982 and 1985, the second of which gave them twin sons.

John Byrne's Vision Quest, in Avengers West Coast in 1989, is the character's defining catastrophe: a covert government task force seizes and dismantles him, and the rebuilt Vision emerges colourless, emotionless, and without the memories that made him a husband. Marvel spent years slowly restoring the character, and the marriage never recovered.

He was destroyed again in Avengers Disassembled in 2004, torn apart by a Wanda-controlled She-Hulk. A version of his operating system, calling itself Jonas, served in Young Avengers via Iron Lad's armour. Then Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta's twelve-issue The Vision (2015-2016) built him a synthezoid family in suburban Virginia and won multiple Eisner Awards for the slow, methodical horror of watching it fail.