The Four Color Media Monitor

I mentioned before that Brian Michael Bendis is sadly returning to Marvel to sully the Avengers and other comics yet again. And perhaps it's not a surprise that a supposedly feminist site, The Mary Sue, is actually giving him their support, this despite any and all steps he took in his writing that were denigrating to women, with Scarlet Witch one of his biggest victims. Their sugarcoated lauding is as follows:

Bendis’ impact on Marvel, particularly in the 2000s, can not be overstated. Not only did he co-create pop culture juggernauts Miles Morales, Jessica Jones, and Riri Williams, but he revitalized the main Daredevil title with a five-year run. And then there’s his original tenure on Avengers, which led to landmark events like Secret Invasion, House of M, and Siege.

In 2017, Bendis made shockwaves across the industry with the news that he had signed an exclusive contract with DC. He ended up writing for the publisher for several years, not only on the Superman family of books with Superman and Action Comics, but on other titles like Checkmate and Legion of Super-Heroes.

There had been chatter, as of late, about Bendis potentially returning to Marvel… which would be noteworthy in and of itself, even if he was just taking on a lesser-known solo or team book. But the notion of him coming back to Avengers is something else altogether, especially given the ongoing reverence that people still have for his time on the book. Regardless of whatever the future holds for the larger Marvel universe, Bendis and Bagley jumping onto a book like that definitely has the potential to be something special.

If they had no complaints about how WandaVision and Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness forcibly turned Scarlet Witch into a madwoman any more than Bendis did to her in Disassembled, that says all you need to know just how "feminist" they really are, and not interested in championing fictional women who could serve as inspirational figures, whether they're heroines or anti-heroines (and I can't recall they ever defended Mary Jane Watson either). Of course, "mary sue" is meant to be a figure of speech in fanfiction, either for writers inject themselves into the story where they imagine themselves in what could end up becoming a sick fantasy, or it means a character with no flaws or depth whatsoever that merely serves a selfish purpose of said writer. There may even be a figure of speech like "murphy stu" in use for similar reasons, but that's another story. For now, the puff piece at the pseudo-opinion site makes clear there's certain "feminists" who couldn't care less if Stan Lee's creations dropped off the face of the earth, competely forgotten. Also, curious how the writer makes no mention of the Disassembled event; it's probably no accident she didn't, because that could undermine the narrative she's pushing here.

Interestingly enough, a writer for ComicBook, by contrast, was not so sugarcoated, though he still has a moment of lenience in the following item. First:

Marvel is in something of a rut right now. The Ultimate Universe was the biggest thing in comics in 2023, but DC was hot on the publisher’s tail, and the 2024 one-two punch of the DC All-In publishing initiative and the Absolute Universe destroyed that. Add in the underperforming X-Men line, no one caring about the Avengers, Spider-Man languishing (despite The Amazing Spider-Man finally being pretty good), the latest volume of Daredevil getting panned by everyone and then cancelled, and the rest of the publisher’s output not impressing enough people (besides Zdarksy’s Captain America and Immortal/Mortal Thor), and it’s a dark time for the bestselling superhero publisher.

It's been a dark situation for over 20 years now, and sugarcoating what became of Marvel and even DC is unhelpful. Besides, what's so great about DC's alternate universe line that's got leftist political metaphors sullying its impact? Predictably, this isn't brought up by the columnist, who even has the gall to downplay the continuing disaster in Spidey, whose marriage to Mary Jane Watson, if still decanonized, is a prime reason - and not the only one - why it won't be good.

Marvel is in a bad place, and rumors have been circulating that a familiar name may be returning to the publisher: Brian Michael Bendis. Bendis was responsible for Marvel becoming an unassailable titan in the ’00s, and was beloved by fans for years. He left the company in 2018, working for DC before going to the indies. The writer could be a game-changer for Marvel in 2026, but there’s no real reason he should come back. In fact, he almost certainly shouldn’t, for several important reasons.

Brian Michael Bendis Is Overrated

Bendis started getting attention at Image in the late ’90s with his crime book Torso, based on a real-life Elliot Ness case. He’d end up writing Sam and Twitch for Todd McFarlane and would start getting work at Marvel. In the year 2000, he was given The Ultimate Spider-Man, and that, combined with runs on Daredevil and Elektra, made him a superstar. Soon, he was writing the Avengers and became Marvel’s go-to guy for just about everything, writing the first event of the Marvel event cycle, Secret War, as well as House of M and Secret Invasion. He wrote the Avengers for seven years, the X-Men for three years, and then bummed around the Marvel Universe until 2018.

Many look at Marvel in the ’00s as awesome, but I believe it’s an overrated era. And frankly, Bendis is a big part of that. His overly wordy style did a great job of setting up drama, but his approach to action is far less accomplished. Hate the drawn-out nature of modern stories? That’s Bendis. No matter how acclaimed it might be, House of M was boring, and so was the vast majority of his Avengers run: stories that should have been three or four issues stretched to six to eight. The less said about his X-Men, the better, and his last couple of years at Marvel were a huge failure, with him writing the maligned Civil War II, which ruined Captain Marvel.

So now somebody tells us the real picture of the mid-2000s, which is when things really went downhill, and let's not forget J. Michael Straczynski's bottom of the barrel run on Spider-Man, another horrid example of what's wrong with that specific era. I seem to recall there was a moment where Bendis made Dr. Doom sound juvenile too, though what's really irritating in hindsight has to be a moment where he wrote Hawkeye insulting Hank Pym by asking "don't you got a wife to beat?" This was at the beginning of his Avengers run, and things got worse from there. But unsurprisingly, nobody at the time was willing to admit Bendis is a bad, overrated writer, and if he were beginning with Avengers today, it's a foregone conclusion they'd continue with the code of silence. Unfortunately, the writer goes soft on criticism with the following:

One of the most annoying issues for me is Bendis’ tendency to not use the character’s individual voices that had been built up by creators over the decades. Let me list the characters he was able to write correctly: Spider-Man, Daredevil, Captain America, Wolverine, Luke Cage, and I guess Spider-Woman. Every other Bendis character was basically just Spider-Man (you could probably count Jessica Jones, but he created her, so that doesn’t count to me). If you hate the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s quippy sense of humor, thank Bendis.

All of that is before we even get to his DC run, where he wrote a few good books, with most of his work at the publisher not landing. Ironically, in my opinion, he was actually a better superhero writer at DC than Marvel, but that’s not saying much. Marvel fans had started getting tired of Bendis during his X-Men run, and only got worse as things went on. Bendis did some great stuff at the House of Ideas — Daredevil, The Ultimate Spider-Man, his work on Miles Morales, Dark Avengers — but he’s not the one that is going to fix the tailspin in quality that Marvel is currently in.

Sorry, but even at DC, he wrote crude, juvenile dialogue, and went increasingly woke in scripting the Legion of Super-Heroes. He also caved to a petty complaint about a Superman story where a villain used a slur, even if it was depicted negatively. And of course, the way Bendis had the Man of Steel cast aside his secret ID was contrived and forced. Come to think of it, even the similar direction Bendis took with Daredevil was the same. One more reason it's actually rather late to be acknowledging Bendis isn't a talented writer, and as the article makes clear, even that's conveyed weakly, which is unfortunate. If Bendis did a bad job at DC, just say so, and don't go soft by saying he wrote superheroes better there than at Marvel. Because if his LOSH work is any clue, he didn't. And it's unwise to say he did good work on DD and the Ultimate line either.

Marvel Needs New Blood, Not the Past

Marvel has a lot of problems right now, but the biggest is their hindbound attitudes. Their editorial is run by the same people that have been running things since the ’00s. Names like Brevoort, Lowe, and Cebulski aren’t exactly favorites of fans. The publisher needs something, but they don’t need yet another person from the ’00s. If the company wants to get some heat back — NYCC was a failure for them, with DC running the show — they need to move forward, not backward.

Brian Michael Bendis hasn’t been a superstar in a long time. He’s a great crime writer, but he was pushed into a place where he wasn’t very good, and while a lot of fans liked him, a lot of his work and writing style is now mocked by fans. Marvel has depended too much on inertia and fans buying by rote. Bendis might do numbers on a Daredevil comic, but he’s not going to be the killer application that makes the company hot again.

Gee, do these propagandists really think that, with leftists like the above editors running Marvel ever still, they'll be hot stuff again? Nope. And the way they say fans "liked" Bendis, and then say they mock his style is also awkward. Especially when he himself insulted fanbases by refusing to acknowledge the reasons any fans don't like his work is because of where he took Scarlet Witch for starters, and that he relied on an irritatingly drawn out form of writing where he'd pad out his stories for the sake of 6-plus issues, which only made his writing all the more boring and lethargic. If Marvel and DC still rely on that kind of approach to storytelling, padding out their scripts ad nauseum, how do they expect anybody to be engaged in the stories?

The writer at ComicBook might admit Bendis was a bad writer, and might admit more than the Mary Sue's more biased article does. But it's still very lenient on Bendis' past mistakes, and leaves room to wonder if the 2nd writer really even wants any improvement. So long as Marvel's run by such dreadful management that since turned to wokeness, nothing will improve. And why not suggest Marvel/DC's time to close down business in their current format might be for the best? Even if they do cease publishing, that doesn't mean they can't be revived one day. And so long as it's under a more reliable ownership, that's why if they close and later reopen, then it'll be worth looking forward to. Certainly so long as they don't hire bad writers like Bendis.

Labels: Avengers, bad editors, dc comics, golden calf of death, golden calf of villainy, history, Legion of Super-Heroes, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, Superman, violence, women of marvel, X-Men