Love in Strange Places

#5 "Love of a 'Life' Time"

Sequential Tart has a great pro roundtable of responses up by everyone from Shannon Wheeler to Mike Carey recalling their favorite comic romances over the years. Looking over the list, you'll find everything from the played out Lois & Clarks and Peter & Mary Janes to Little Dot & Little Lotta and Terry & Rachel Dodson. As touching as all of these examples are, only a handful identified the truly bizarre dynamics of comics that have shown me time and again better than any Jane Austen novel or Shakespeare sonnet just how simultaneously ludicrous and claw-sniktingly, air-punchingly exciting love can truly be. So in honor of Valentine's Day and all of you out there who like me will be celebrating Feb. 14 by curling up with a good book and beverage of choice or cultivating the strictly platonic relationships in your life, here is part one of my own counted-down list of the five most interesting relationships in comics--based solely on absurdity, passion, level of circumstancial complications, sheer uncontrolled story momentum, and (often consequential) verisimilitude.

Vision and Scarlet Witch hold a dear place in the hearts of Steve Niles, Rafael Nieves, and myself. Like the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Data proved to Tasha Yar that he was in fact "fully functional," this relationship from its realization in The Avengers #108 through their trials and tribulations ending in Vision's deconstruction and everything after (including Wanda's House of M prelude dinner with Vision and their children) has been underlined by the indefensibly hilarious notion that the "he" is a robot and she is a woman. Aside from their Philip K. Dick soap opera foundation, these two are a classic example of two lovers struggling to contend with existence apart from one another when cosmic circumstance just won't allow them to be together. Oh, and did I mention that he's an android?

These two caught my number five spot because I believe there to be no better developed robot/live organism couple in comics. In my book, they're sort of the Luke and Laura of the Marvel Universe, who while not together symbolize the great heights to which superhero love can rise. She's a mutant. He's a robot. They've both dealt with their own brands of adversity and prejudice. And let's not forget about Vision's jealously over Wonder Man. They're epic.

The story of Vision and Scarlet Witch really starts back in the early days of comics (as Vision was put together of the remains of the original Human Torch) and has continued to reverberate on up through the recent House of M events, where it may in fact finally have been laid to rest -- depending on Wanda's actual state of mind now. Somehow, I doubt we've heard the last of it though.

But seriously, who didn't shed a little tear when she created that little family dinner setting with the two of them and their children last year? I know it tugged on my heart strings.