A single line in episode four of VisionQuest brings up a name most MCU viewers have never heard: Dr. Phineas Horton, billed on screen as “the great-grandfather of robotics.” Horton is tied to a robot called JIM, and what happens to JIM in the show points toward where the series intends to take Vision.
The setup is a murder subplot. Someone calling themselves the Butcher Bird has been killing the founders of a company named AI Research and Development, which Stark bought years ago, before the events of Iron Man. Vision (Paul Bettany) and the AIs that live in his head work out that the next target is the company’s last surviving founder. So Vision and Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) head to a benefit where she is scheduled to speak.
From the stage, the co-founder describes Horton as “the great-grandfather of robotics” and says he built “the first automaton AI,” known as “JIM” or “the synthetic man.” Afterward Vision tells Tommy that JIM was the first AI, “miraculous and flawed. His mind was obsolete from conception.” As Vision tells it, JIM’s “inability to process complex emotions spun his clockwork too quickly, \[and this\] flooded his solar cells with oxygen until his entire being was consumed in fire.”
On Oct. 17, Marvel released a VisionQuest promo that shows JIM: a copper-colored robot, played by Bettany, engulfed in flames.
In the 1939 comics, the synthetic man’s problem was physical: contact with oxygen made him burst into flames. The show recasts it as a problem of the mind. A machine that can’t handle complex emotions overloads, and the overload is what burns him up.
Marvel’s original Human Torch
Before it was Marvel Comics, the company was Timely Comics, started in 1939 by publisher Martin Goodman. Its debut book was Marvel Comics #1, which paired a Namor the Submariner story with the origin of a hero named the Human Torch. This is not the Human Torch of the Fantastic Four. It came out decades before that one.
A scientist, Dr. Phineas Horton, invented the original Torch. On page one of Marvel Comics #1, Horton invites the press to see what he calls a “synthetic man,” an exact copy of a human being. He admits it has one serious design flaw: exposed to oxygen, it bursts into flames. The reporters judge this a dangerous defect. Horton resists their calls to destroy the creation, but he ultimately agrees to entomb it in a cement block until he has perfected the science.
The block is buried, but Horton doesn’t know that a small leak has let air into the tomb. Once enough oxygen builds up, the synthetic man revives by catching fire and bursts out of the block. At first he has no idea who he is or why everything he touches goes up in flames. Across a few issues he becomes the hero called the Human Torch. When he learns to control his powers enough to pass as an ordinary man, he takes the human identity of Jim Hammond. (He also acquires a cornball kid sidekick named Toro, but that’s a tangent.)
Alongside Submariner and Captain America, the Human Torch ranked among Timely’s headline heroes of the 1940s. Captain America: The First Avenger even slipped in an Easter egg. When Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) visit the 1943 World Expo near the start of the film, an exhibit is labeled “Dr. Phineas Horton Presents: The Synthetic Man.” Inside is what looks like a man in a red suit sealed in a glass tube, the same sort of tube he’s shown in within the 1939 comic.
Like Cap and many other superheroes, however, the Human Torch sank into obscurity in the 1950s and stayed out of comics for over a decade. Horton faded too, though neither was finished.
Marvel Comics as we know it began in 1961 with the debut of the Fantastic Four. It was later established that Johnny Storm knew of the earlier Human Torch and chose his name in tribute. In a 1966 issue, Horton confronted Johnny for taking the name of his creation. At that point the original Torch lay buried in the Nevada desert, having burned himself out in 1954. That changed when the Thinker, a Fantastic Four villain, revived him (minus some of his memories) and set him against Johnny Storm. The original Torch lost the fight and was buried in the lab’s wreckage. Horton slipped back into obscurity and alcoholism, still stewing over his failures. Decades later it was revealed that Horton had worked for the Kang variant Victor Timely when he built the Human Torch.
In 1968, Ultron retrieved the Torch’s body. He also kidnapped the disgraced Horton to help repair it and build his perfect body. If that sounds like Ultron’s plan in Avengers: Age of Ultron, there’s a reason: in the comics, Ultron makes Vision from the original Human Torch’s body. He also kills Horton when Horton won’t fully cooperate with his plans.
In the comics, the Torch eventually returns in his own right, coming and going in various forms, yet he stays central to Vision’s history. The MCU appears to be doing the same.
The show seems to call the hero just “JIM” instead of the Human Torch, which makes sense because the two Torches are easy to confuse. Since the Torch’s human identity was Jim Hammond, and Bettany plays JIM, the character is clearly connected to Vision somehow. A figure who matters enormously to Marvel’s history, and whom many viewers may not know exists, is getting a genuine tribute.
