The Four Color Media Monitor

Wow, Brian Bendis continues to show how creative he really is. Reducing Doctor Doom, usually a villain with masterfully comic-book dialect, to a rude-mouthed juvenile, as seen in the picture here from Mighty Avengers #11 that came from ICV2 (via Precocious Curmudgeon and Newsarama blog), that really is draining everything that makes a costumed criminal so appealing. It's also insulting to Ms. Marvel, and her fans.

Certainly male villains like Dr. Doom could consider women inferior to themselves, but if he's ever said anything that could be sexist, it'd usually be in ways that are more restrained, and with more eloquence. That's what made him so popular since his creation in the Silver Age, because he was suitably different from real life villains. If it were a non-costumed criminal saying what's seen in the panel, like some of the ones Denny O'Neil featured in his runs on Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Batman in the 1970s, I could believe it, but for a costumed crook, and an established one at that, not at all.

This latest letdown is the third one of its sort I know of that was written by a writer who also resorted to turning Scarlet Witch insane, and beat up on Tigra in a contrived assault scene, so I'm not really surprised he would do this as well. Would people just understand that a]Bendis is not the expert writer some seem to think he is, b]knows nothing about what made Marvel and DC work in the past, and c]is not worth spending money on? Fortunately, if recent sales figures are any indication, they are, and it figures that Bendis would eventually lose momentum. Sales are still dropping slowly though.

Even if that were a Skrull, or a Doombot programmed by a Skrull, that were depicted insulting Ms. Marvel, it still wouldn't work, because the Skrulls usually had more class than to sink to Bendis' juvenile rendition too.

Labels: Avengers, marvel comics, misogyny and racism