“The Vision,” by the writer Tom King, the artist Gabriel Hernandez Walta, and the colorist Jordie Bellaire, opens with an ordinary scene of tentative integration. A longtime member of the superhero team the Avengers, the Vision has just moved with his family into a neighborhood in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. A pair of married neighbors, George and Nora, come calling with introductions and baked goods. After they ring the doorbell, they bicker.

“They’re robots, Nora,” George tells his wife, irritated. “They don’t want cookies.”

“They’re not robots,” she replies. “I went online. They’re something else. Like a synthe-something.”

“They’re toasters,” George snarls at his wife. “Fancy red toasters.”

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At that moment, the Vision and his family answer the door, wearing broad crimson smiles. Their faces are red not from embarrassment or anger—though they certainly heard George’s slur—but because they were made that way. Like the good neighbors that they want to be, the Visions of Arlington, Virginia, invite George and Nora inside for a tour.

A Marvel comic released in 2015, for a twelve-issue run, “The Vision” won an Eisner Award, the comic world’s highest honor, last year, and was recently published in a deluxe hardbound edition. On the back cover, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has spent the past couple of years writing the latest print version of “Black Panther”—and who, Marvel has just announced, will also take over “Captain America”—declares, “ ‘The Vision’ is the best comic going right now.” It’s high praise, but perhaps still not high enough. Even in an era when our pop-cultural skies are more jammed with Zeitgeist-powered superheroes than ever before, “The Vision” goes down as one of the great comic-book stories—an examination of the limits built into each of us, a superhero tale not about saving the world but about simply fighting to make sure that you, and your family, fit into it.

Much of the credit for that goes to King, perhaps the most critically acclaimed comic writer of the past decade or so. He has his own striking backstory: after interning at both Marvel and DC Comics, in the nineties, King joined the C.I.A. following 9/11, eventually working in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Since returning to comics, he has published the superhero-themed novel “A Once Crowded Sky,” and he’s been behind several highly regarded DC Comics titles, including “Mister Miracle,” “The Omega Men,” and, for the past two years, “Batman.” His limited series “Sheriff of Babylon,” an Iraq War-based comic for the DC imprint Vertigo, will see the release of its own deluxe edition later this month.

With “The Vision,” King hasn’t so much reinvented as reinvigorated a Marvel character, one with a history nearly as long and as complicated as that of such better-known heroes as Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. Created by the writer Roy Thomas and the artist John Buscema, the Vision débuted in “The Avengers”—not the film franchise but the comic book—fifty years ago this October. As his Avenger teammates explain to him, the Vision is a type of android, “basically human in every way except that your body is made of synthetic parts.” (The word Nora is searching for on the doorstep is “synthezoid.”) He was created by the evil Ultron, who actually is a robot, not to become part of the Avengers but to murder them. Instead, he helps them defeat Ultron and is invited to join the team. The story concludes with a full-page image, one of Marvel’s most famous: the Vision, his own synthetic heart swelling, posed elegantly, delicately, fingers to his brow, and a single tear scarring his plastic cheek—“Even an android can cry.”

I didn’t discover the Vision myself until the mid-seventies, but I made it my nerdy junior-high-school mission to track down every comic book in which he’d appeared. In the stories that followed that first run, the Vision repeatedly fights his “father,” Ultron, and is hounded by his insane half brother, the Grim Reaper, whose own brother, Wonder Man, has provided him with the Vision’s brain patterns. Each issue of “The Avengers” made it clear to readers like me that, although the Vision could resist these origins, he wasn’t ever going to be entirely free of them. As with all of us, like it or not, his family was in his programming.

I also thought that the Vision just had the coolest powers. Chief among these, as Jonathan Lethem put it, in a short story inspired by the character, from 2004, is “the power to vary the density of his body, becoming a ghost if he wished to float through walls or doors, becoming diamond hard if he wished to stop bullets like Superman.” The Vision’s signature move is to pass an immaterial fist into a villain’s chest, then rematerialize it. This is apparently quite painful.

On the big screen, the Vision has been played, by the English actor Paul Bettany, primarily for comic relief: he startles people by phasing through walls instead of knocking at the door; he stumbles about the kitchen preparing meals that he neither needs nor wants. But what made me fall in love with the character four decades ago was the personal weightiness of his adventures—particularly the ways that his battles became entwined with his persistent identity crises. The synthezoid Avenger was at once coldly logical and all up in his feelings. He wasn’t a human, not technically, but, like Pinocchio, he wanted to be a real boy. At the climax of one years-long narrative arc in “The Avengers,” written primarily by Steve Englehart, the Vision marries Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, a mutant and fellow-Avenger. But the pair’s romantic relationship was not universally celebrated: Wanda was estranged from her brother, Quicksilver, for years, because he wouldn’t accept her love for “that thing,” and in one memorable issue, from 1973, a supremacist hate group deploys a squad of suicide bombers to assassinate the Vision, that “plastic scum.”

The Scarlet Witch may have been a mutant, but she was still a white lady; the Vision was an android but also a literal person of color. At the time, the Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision on interracial marriage was only a few years old. I was too young and uninformed when I first read the comic to cite that particular precedent, but, growing up in working-class south Kansas City, Missouri, I couldn’t miss the racial subtext. My two best friends at the time were fellow comic-book weirdos: Bobby, whose dad was white and whose mom was a Filipino immigrant, and Reggie, an African-American who, on account of parental decrees, was not welcome in the homes of some of his white friends. It’s often said that so-called nerds and weirdos are drawn to comic books because they feature characters who want to fit in but can’t. The Vision helped me begin clarifying why I didn’t fit in, and why I was O.K. with that.

King foregrounds these old struggles in ways that will flatter those already familiar with the character’s history; “The Vision” expertly navigates what fangirls and fanboys call “continuity.” (The deluxe version, in addition to providing bits of original script, essays, and variant art, points to specific issues to track down to learn more.) But King also updates the story so that it can appeal as powerfully to readers who don’t know its hero from Adam. The very twenty-first-century question of whether anyone can possibly transcend their programming, digital or genetic, hangs over the tale. King focusses on his main character’s fight not only for an essential humanity but also for an elusive and perhaps problematic goal: he wants to be normal.

To that end, King has created a Vision who will tell you that he has worked hard for everything he has—he’s saved the world thirty-seven times, at a minimum—and now commutes from his beige cookie-cutter home into Washington most days, transitioning from active duty in the Avengers to serving as a kind of defense analyst for the President. He’s on his second marriage, to his wife Virginia, a synthezoid whom he designed to operate independently of himself—that is, to possess what might be called free will. The couple have twin teen-agers whom he also designed, Vin and Viv, who attend the local high school, and a little synthezoid dog. Vision and Virginia argue often, sometimes amusingly: when she calls him at work one day, the Vision replies, “No, I am listening. It is just that I am also fighting Giganto.” But they quickly make up. The kids are what matters. They would do anything to protect them. Normal.

Of course, the Visions are forever being reminded that normal is one thing that they aren’t. A supervillain may occasionally drop by the house. Neighborhood kids spray-paint “socket lovers” (hate speech they find after Googling “bad names for robots”) on their garage. Vic, who becomes obsessed with Shylock’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech from “The Merchant of Venice”—in part because he knows that he does not—is suspended for using his heightened strength to bully a fellow-student. “The Vision” takes its time building characters, laying out opportunities, and setting its traps, but you sense in every frame that the story can’t help but end terribly. Lies are told and secrets are kept, which lead to fatal coverups, and more lies. By the end, the Vision determines that he must battle his fellow-Avengers for the most normal of reasons: to defend his family. King’s prose is lean, and he deploys multiple narrators, who all know more than we do. Walta’s haunting though cartoonish figures render the action like the grimmest fairy tale; Bellaire’s colors flame bright, then out, like leaves in fall. A sense of tragedy permeates each panel.

About midway through the collection, in a chapter drawn by the guest artist Michael Walsh and devoted to a flashback, the Vision and the Scarlet Witch are toasted by friends as newlyweds. Four consecutive panels show the Vision, beaming with joy, his eyes and smile growing subtly wider with each shot, the frames closing in around him. “Tomorrow does not always come,” the Vision likes to remind people, a life lesson that he’ll one day pass on to his children. But here, for just a moment, he has forgotten.