Time to make myself even that much less popular... I'm done with Bendis.You know, Brian Michael Bendis? Big, hot-shot writer for Marvel? He and Mark Bagley just broke Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's record for longest continuous stint on a Marvel comic? Yeah, that Bendis.
Let me back up a bit...
My first reading of Bendis' work was Ultimate Spider-Man #1. I knew I liked Bagley, and thought the then-new idea of an "ultimate" Spider-Man was interesting. It was good and I started reading the book regularly. I was already getting Daredevil and was impressed again when Bendis started working on that book. I started picking up Alias and enjoyed that. I thought Bendis was doing some good work, and I was genuinely pleased with what I was seeing from him. I continued to think he was turning in decent quality work even through things like the "Avengers Disassembled" storyline. I felt it was an intriguing idea, and seemed to be handled reasonably well, given the huge number of characters involved.
But, it's been downhill since then.
Setting aside the general direction he seems to be taking much of his work, the quality has seemed to have been on the decline. I liked his ear for dialogue when I first started reading his work, but it's become more stilted of late. Like when you read those old issues of Luke Cage, Power Man and knew even back then that his "jive" sounded a little too stereotypical? And his plots have become more convoluted and explaining them seems to require more extended effort on his part. It's like he's trying to play in a sandbox that's so large, he's purposefully trying to create masterpieces that fill the entire thing, only to find that you simply can't see the finished structure as a whole and the individual parts aren't all that great by themselves.
Anyway, I read his New Avengers #30 last night and I have to say, "What the heck was that?" It just didn't make much sense. I'd been hoping to keep reading New Avengers because it looked to be turning into a kind of modern-day Defenders kind of thing, which sounded promising, but the past several issues haven't been very good, and this latest one was just bad. So I'm scratching the title from my pull list -- I'm not going to willingly buy bad comics.
I will be continuing to buy Ultimate Spider-Man for at least a little while longer however, based almost exclusively on the strength of Stuart Immonen's artwork. I've always liked Immonen's work, but it took me a while to get to the point where I'll buy a book simply because he's drawing it.
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