The Four Color Media Monitor

Newsarama interviewed Brian Bendis about his relaunching of the Ultimate line, and he continues his sleazy act:

Nrama: Yeah, I'm not sure what to make of Ben being a purple guy now, but let's save that for later because we'll get to Ultimate Enemy in a minute. So what I'm hearing is, with Ultimatum, you guys all worked in conjunction with Jeph Loeb on who was going to die, who was going to live, and it was all a big set up with what you were going to do with the Ultimate books?

Bendis: Yes. But you know, that's always a weird conversation too, "who will live and who will die." There were a couple who died that I'm personally bummed out about because I personally liked them. Daredevil is one. But at the same time, I got to write a great send-off for the character. So you have to give a little, take a little. You can't just do, "Let's kill everyone we don't like." It doesn't have any kind of gravitas to it.

The best thing about Ultimatum, to me, was I got to do the most bullshitty writing moment I've ever gotten to do. When I was writing it, I was laughing, because I knew there was a tidal wave coming. So I could write these, like, I got to have Aunt May get arrested. Aunt May gets put in a box, and the cops are working her over, then... tidal wave!

In any other place, if you wrote a story where your character was going through this traumatic thing and you just all of the sudden dropped a tidal wave on her, that would have been the worst writing in the history of the world. But it's not my tidal wave, so I get away with it.

But he can't get away with the very sleazy tone he puts on in this interview. And to think we wondered why much of the wider public doesn't take comic books seriously. This even suggests that the relaunched Ultimate line will be less appealing than when it first began in late 1999. At least they do remind that Jeph Loeb is otherwise a terrible, weak writer, and the Ultimate line was where he really went off the rails.

And Ben Grimm is colored purple now? Yuck.

Labels: Daredevil, dreadful writers, golden calf of death, marvel comics, violence