The Four Color Media Monitor

The Cleveland Plain Dealer paid lip service to Brian Bendis, who's paying a visit to his native city, calling it a "triumphant" return. What's so triumphant about a guy who spent nearly a decade demolishing the Avengers beginning with the awful depiction of Scarlet Witch? Now, here's more from the article:

Bendis, now living in Portland, Ore., will first appear at his alma mater, the Cleveland Institute of Art, in the 600-seat Aiken Auditorium, 11141 East Blvd., from 5 p.m. to 6:30 where the most asked question from art students will be, “How can I get a job at Marvel?”

Easy: just toe their editorial line like Bendis did, by padding out the stories for trade paperbacks, writing the heroes out of character and otherwise unheroically, all laced with plenty of sleaze and ignorance for past continuity, or reliance on the worst of past storylines to build your new one, and hype the story with the demise of 2nd or 3rd tier heroes just because it's easy.

“I'm pulling out all the old Bendis books I have, which are pretty hard to find, and I hope we are not flooded with people,” said Williams. “Brian does not understand how many people want his autograph, especially people in Cleveland.”

Are they serious? I wouldn't want his autograph if I lived there. Yet the interviewee's comment about crowds is odd: surely they wouldn't want the auditorium he's visiting flooded with many people? All the same, nobody who cares about good storytelling should pay Bendis a visit.

Bendis said he wrote about 400 stories, and illustrated most of them himself, before he was tapped to be the writer of a new version of Spider-Man in 2000. His “Ultimate Spider-Man” was a character in a different universe than the better-known Marvel Universe Spider-Man, who was married by then. The new Spider-Man was younger, brasher and the title was an immediate hit.

But for how long? It may not have been as jarringly violent as Mark Millar's take on Ultimate X-Men, but still, it's not hard to guess it wasn't so entry level either.

He [Bendis] is a consultant for many of the Marvel/Disney movies, including “Marvel's The Avengers” and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which opens Friday.

No matter how good or bad any movie he's been consulting to date is, his position there was unearned, and on the Capt. America sequel, I won't be surprised if his contributions are really bad.

He has a new series starting in May from Marvel's exclusive Icon imprint called “The United States of Murder,” and still finds time to write X-Men and “Guardians of the Galaxy,” which is soon to be released as a movie. And, his series “Powers,” about cops trying to work in a world where some have superpowers, will be a live action series, the first offering from Play Station, which is releasing original program ala Netflix. He also teaches a course in comics at the University of Oregon.

Well if his work on GotG serves as the screenplay for the movie, I think I'll pass, and I wouldn't want to attend his university courses either. The article says nothing about how pretentious Powers really is, and in the end, it's just another example of unobjective coverage of the medium.

Labels: Avengers, dreadful writers, marvel comics, msm propaganda, Spider-Man, X-Men