Thursday, November 9, 2017

Day 2179 - Brian Michael Bendis - My favorite comic book writer

So, early warning - This is my full-blown comic nerd-dom on display.  If you don't know comic books (and maybe if you do), you might be hopelessly lost.  I'm gonna be throwing around names of writers, artists and characters like nobody's business.  But hopefully we all have a good time.

I work part-time at Csarol and John's Comic Shop in Cleveland, Ohio.  I've been there since... well, none of us really know when I started, but I'm guessing around 1996 or 1997.  I've always loved comic books and Spider-Man in particular.  I tell people I started collecting comic books with the release of Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars by Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck (with additional art by Bob Layton).  Up until that series, I was just reading comic books.  But when that series came out, I made it my mission to get all the issues.  I started with issue #3, because the cover showed Spider-Man fighting the X-Men, and the inside didn't disappoint, as he wiped the floor with them.  The next issue had the bad guys drop a whole mountain top on the good guys, and from that point on, I begged and pleaded with my dad to get me the first two issues.  And we went to the comic shops in Parma, and he paid the exorbitant sum of $5 for issue one (cover price of 75 cents), just to make me happy.  I don't think he realized that would lead me down my current path of thousands and thousands of comics.

I didn't realize that people actually drew comics until I read Amazing Spider-Man #298.  That was the first issue drawn by Todd McFarlane.  I guess I realized the difference between Steve Ditko's Spider-Man and John Romita's, but I never gave it much thought.  McFarlane changed everything for me.  I went back and searched for everything he drew, from Infinity Inc., to The Incredible Hulk, to Coyote, to Detective Comics, and so on.  I have a comic box in my house devoted to just his comics. 

All this is just to say that when Brian Michael Bendis showed up in my life, I was fully immersed in comics and Spider-Man in particular.

For those of you who don't know, Bendis is from Cleveland.  He worked at a comic shop, he produced his own self-published crime comics (AKA Goldfish, Jinx, etc - fine, they were from Caliber, but close enough), and he was always on his bike.  And in the late '90's he started coming into Carol and John's looking for his comic book fix.  At this point he was writing Sam and Twitch (a spin-off of Todd McFarlane's Spawn).  It was a comic that I was personally enamored with because the writing was so dense, the characters so well-defined, and the situations so dark. 

But then came the day when he came in and was able to tell us that he got a new job in which he was going to be able to write a Spider-Man title set in a different universe, telling the story of how he got his powers, and bringing him back to being a teenager.  The original Spider-Man would still exist (and still be married to Mary Jane), but this would be a way for new and younger readers to be able to read Spider-Man without the weight of all that history.  It would be called "Ultimate Spider-Man."  For the past 17 years, throughout all its name changes, this has been my favorite comic book.

The first issue blew out of the shop.  It sold like gangbusters.  A combination of local boy makes good, and a great comic book helped.  Honestly, I couldn't wait for him to come into the shop when I was working during this time.  We shared a lot of the same interests (movies, comics, and creators), and I truly, truly loved his writing.  I would get excited for every new project he would talk about about (Ultimate Marvel Team-Up - great, Daredevil: Ninja - not so much).  And then he started writing Daredevil, too.  If you thought Sam and Twitch was a dense book, Daredevil put that one to shame.  The amount of words in each issue made his whole run feel like a Charles Dickens epic.  But the thing about his writing was that it flowed.  It sounded like real people talking.  In more recent years, he's toned that down a lot, but I miss those early years of just two characters talking to each other.  And talking.  And talking.  In fact, I would use Daredevil as my in-store example to customers as how to have a lot of dialogue correctly.  At the same time, Chris Claremont was writing a comic called Extreme X-Men, with just as much dialogue as Daredevil.  The problem, and I would actually read passages out loud from each book, was that Bendis' dialogue felt real and Claremont's did not.  I sold a lot of Daredevil comics by reading them out loud.

Around the same time as Daredevil, Bendis, with Michael Gaydos, created one of my most favorite characters ever - Jessica Jones.  She was a foul-mouthed private investigator with lower-tier superpowers.  I (still) describe the series by telling people that when the book starts out, she's at the lowest point a person can really be, and by the end of the series, she's made her way up to normal.  Her journey is one of the most compelling stories you'll read.

And during this time, Bendis bid Cleveland a fond farewell, and moved out to Portland where a number of other comic creators reside, and he could ride his bike to his heart's content.  But we would catch up at different conventions over the years.  Whether he knows my name or not off the top if his head is up for debate, but he does recognize me from the Carol and John's.  And through all these years, I've read everything he's written.  His Avengers run is one I can read over and over.  His X-Men is solid entertainment, Guardians of the Galaxy is fine, and Spider-Woman and Moon Knight are good stories that seem like they could have been better had they lasted longer. 

But through all that he's been writing Ultimate Spider-Man.  He had Peter Parker tell Mary Jane he was Spider-Man, he had Spidey and Kitty Pryde date, he killed and brought back Gwen Stacy, and he even killed off Peter Parker in an epic battle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin (with an assist from Kraven, Electro, and Sandman).  From there, he introduced Miles Morales as the new Spider-Man.  Miles' first issue was good, but his second issue was great.  (I still contend that Marvel should have just combined issue 1 and 2 into an oversized first issue, and I would haven't had any of those early reservations, but that's long in the past.)  Bendis has been writing the adventures of Miles Morales for about six years now.  I still love it.  In fact, just about every year, I reread the entire series of Ultimate Spider-Man, because I love it just that much.

And now he's leaving Marvel for DC.  My initial reaction when I was told this was one of "Ah, you're playing a joke on me."  No.  No they weren't.  My second reaction was that there would be some sort of special dispensation that would allow him to keep writing books like Jessica Jones while over at DC.  Nope.  A full break.  I'm not going to lie - I'm scared.  These are characters that Bendis has put a very special stamp down on, and I fear for their future.  But it's been a loooong time that he's been writing those characters.  Maybe somebody will write then just as well. (I'm not holding my breath, but let's see who steps up.)  But... now I get to see his take on DC characters.  They're not my favorite (I'm a Marvel Zombie for life), but I do read a lot of DC.  I know he's been itching to write Plastic Man and Batman.  And early speculation is that he might be writing Zatanna.  If any of those happen, I will be happy.  After close to 20 years, you have nothing really to prove to me, sir.  Just keep writing good comics and I'll keep giving you my money.  2018 is going to be a crazy year comics-wise.  And maybe, just maybe, I'll see a sequel to my favorite non-Marvel Bendis story - Fortune and Glory.



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