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Ringing In The New Year With Seventies Marvel

Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Sáu, 31 tháng 12, 2010

In which the blogger briefly interrupts our look at Mr Bendis's "The Avengers" to ponder the New Year in the company of the Marvel superheroes of a rather different world;1.I don't recall ever having had an enjoyable New [...]

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Trade Perspectives: The Invisible But Flexible Zenith of Collecting

Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Năm, 30 tháng 12, 2010

[This guest post from Kevin Pasquino, who blogs at Words Flow Like Chocolate, notes a singular impediment to waiting for the trade: Grant Morrison]Here are three great reasons why I should make a complete and irrevocable [...]

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Making Sense of Brian Michael Bendis's "Avengers" (Part 5, & yet Part 1 too!):-"I Have No Idea What Is Going On Here Or What You People Want From Me."

Người đăng: Unknown

continued from yesterday;19.It's easy to stereotype Brian Michael Bendis's work on the "Avengers", or, at least it is until the slightest effort is made to engage with the almost seven years of scripts that he's provided [...]

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Ringing In The New Year With Seventies Marvel

In which the blogger briefly interrupts our look at Mr Bendis's "The Avengers" to ponder the New Year in the company of the Marvel superheroes of a rather different world;

1.

I don't recall ever having had an enjoyable New Year's Eve before I met the Splendid Wife. Even then, it took me a good while to realise that I could leave my well-honed angst behind for a few hours at the end of each December and, rather shockingly, simply enjoy myself.

It's not that I now approach the end of the year with any excessive measure of optimism, but I don't assume that catastrophe will inevitably follow disaster anymore. After thirteen years of consistently undisastrous New Years, I feel pretty confident that folks will gather pleasantly around a bonfire, spirits will be imbibed, laughter will be heard, the peels of Big Ben conveyed through the crackling analogue speakers of someone's far-off car stereo, and the world will generally continue to turn as it generally always does.

Now I can look at the likes of these representations of an incredibly depressed Fantastic Four, by the unexpected and quite enchanting artistic team of Ramona Fradon and Joe Sinnot in collaboration with scripter Gerry Conway, and feel sorry for the characters and wish them better fortune, rather than thinking how they're expressing my own particular lack of the season's greetings and goodwill. (FF 133, 1973) At least at this moment in my life, for fate is something that I refuse to believe in and which I'm reluctant to tempt, I'm far more likely to be associating with the celebrating citizenry than the poor disconsolate superheroes.

Yet it might be said that the Marvel Comics of the early to mid Seventies were often peculiarly mournful. Over the years since Stan, Steve and Jack had reinvented the superhero genre in the early Sixties, comic books had evolved to a state where it often seemed as if the only break in the constant misery of a crimefighter's existence was the regular appearance of absolute despair to break up all that ongoing unhappiness. At the time, being a rather gloomy young man, I took the presence of so much woe in my beloved comics to reflect what I thought was the undeniable unhappiness of a world characterised by homework, incompetent struggles to talk to girls, and a family kind enough to buy me a record player and yet unfair enough to object to my playing it at excessive volume in the small hours of the morning.

"Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?" asks the narrator of Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity", and it's a question that might be asked of those wonderful and yet often utterly forlorn superhero books of the long-lost Seventies. Was it possible that these stories of super-powered characters in skin-tight costumes fighting criminals local and inter-galactic weren't actually realistic, that they weren't always entirely literal, accurate and productive guides as to how to live a worthwhile life?

2.

In so many ways, there's just no time for this New Year's lark any more, beyond a brief pause to trigger the vague sense of belonging that accompanies a group of friends and neighbours joining hands and trying to remember those words to "Auld Lang Syne" which aren't "Auld Lang Syne". For there really does come a time when every day's a new year's day, because every day seems rather more perilously closer to being the last one of all. Eventually, there's just not the time to worry about change and opportunity over the coming 365 days, because the demands of the next 24 hours are immediate and precious enough. This is not a bad thing, and it's certainly not a matter for self-pity. Quite the opposite, in fact. Days matter so much now that they're too rare and valuable to wish away thinking about which worthy resolution to carry into January 1st, and perhaps even for an hour or two beyond that. Change is, as the Byrds once sang, now. Write that book, finish that novel, try to write one decent sentence on the blog, help the Splendid Wife with her birthday party arrangements, loose weight, study more of the work of Dudley D Watkins, save money, deep breath, go!

There's no trusting to the future of course, the knowledge of which is, again, no bad thing. Today's all there is, so make the very best of it, is a truism which was undoubtedly delivered time and time again in Seventies Marvel comics, but I never noticed it for the tragically lovelorn heroes struggling to get a break from a cruel and ungrateful world. And Carpe Diem is as obvious a point as it is of profound importance, of course, but it so easily escapes the impressionable and regrettably stupid young mind trying to focus on the really important matters of who would make a more splendid girlfriend - Jean Grey or Gwen Stacey? - or who's stronger, Thor or the Hulk?

Yet one careful look at Kyle Richmond's trusting and indeed rather guileless face as it shone out from the splash page from 1975's Giant Size Defenders # 4 might have encouraged me to consider just a trace element of the matter of fate's transitory and often cruel progression. Now I study Nighthawk's brief moment of celebrity happiness and I want to grab him by the shoulder and ask him why he expects any such bountiful good fortune to last, especially in the Marvel Universe? For as one of Marvel's most irredeemable losers celebrates his own fine luck, terrible things are lurking just one more page and seven panels away, though, as is too often the way with these things, it'll be Kyle Richmond's lovely and endearingly-caring partner Trish Starr who'll be maimed by the experience and Nighthawk who'll be left to try to nobly learn from her suffering.

Still, perhaps there's evidence in "Too Cold A Night For Dying" that a new year can bring with it quite unexpected riches in the form of the exquisite art by Don Heck and Vince Colletta, surely the two least-well thought-of artists at Marvel Comics during that period. And yet, despite expectations, their work here is often exceptionally fine, complimenting as it does an untypically melodramatic and yet characteristically individual tale by Steve Gerber. From the sterling clarity of their splash page's composition, to the shiversome evocation of a freezing winter's night in New York City, to the daft, I can't-believe-I'm-so-lucky smile on Kyle's face, to the detail of the reporter's macs and sideburns, it's a piece of art that I'd be more than proud to own. Staring at that splash page was one of the first moments that I can recall realising that I knew nothing about comic book art, and that my prejudices were exactly that: I'd expected a train-wreck when I'd bought the book and seen who'd produced the artwork, but how wrong was I? I still barely do know anything about art, of course, but I've managed to retain the knowledge that a team of Don Keck and Vince Colletta could catch the spirit of romance and tragedy and the chill of mid-winter like few others before or since in the superhero genre.

3.

I'm not wanting to sound at all like the patron Scrooge of New Years. I'm not meaning to intimate that good things never happen, that all hopes will be dashed, and that grand emotions and longterm ambitions are a waste of time. Of course not. There's more to life than stoicism, admirable discipline that it is, and pessimism is a corrosive business at the best of times. And it's with something of a pleasurable palpitation of an adolescent heartbeat that I note how the panels posted above and below from The Amazing Spider-Man #143, by Gerry Conway and Ross Andru, can still make me feel as if anything were possible, as if tomorrow might see world peace achieved and lottery tickets redeemable for very large amounts of life-transforming cash indeed.

Ah, was there any adolescent British boy who read Marvel Comics in the Seventies and didn't ache to be in some way Peter Parker, with his down-at-heel pad in NYC, with his life which always, for all of its tragedy, seemed downright exciting and profoundly romantic? And I've never read a superhero book which dealt with the unexpected blossoming of love in as restrained and touching a fashion as here, where Mr Conway and Mr Andru utterly convinced me that if I could just get to JFK airport in a snowstorm, a beautiful woman might discover that she loved me. It's a book that I'm determined to return to and discuss in a little greater detail at some time in the future, for I'm convinced that the Conway/Andru team produced the very finest run on Spider-Man after that of the Lee/Ditko years. But for the moment, and in the spirit of the day, I will say that the awkwardness of Peter and Mary-Jane here as their relationship tips from friendship into something far more challenging is captured with a skill that's so restrained and to an effect that's so touching that it never fails to make me feel as if in some way a part of my own life is being described on the page. After all, we've all been caught in that breathless moment when things are said in a unplanned and irrevocable fashion, when impossible success suddenly appears and it seems as if it were obvious to anyone but a fool that this was where a fortunate life was always headed.

And there's that New York snow again, and JFK International Airport in the evening light, and the sense of unexpected romance rooted in the most recognisably mundane of circumstances. It's still all so moving for me that I think I'll choose to believe, for awhile, that Peter and Mary-Jane's romance still hangs in the balance as it's shown here, with Mr Parker staring down on a world of possibilities while MJ wanders through an empty airport dwarfed not just by the concrete architecture and the night-time, but by her awareness of what might be happening to her and May Parker's son.

May all our New Year Eves find us similarly pulling away from whatever was the worst of the past, and facing the prospect of the very good things which might yet happen to us, though, of course, unlike Peter Parker in ASM # 143, may we all avoid the immediate comeuppance of a French supervillain dropping a house on our head.

For just awhile, anyway.

A splendid New Year's Eve is wished to one and all, and my fondest wish is for anybody who stumbles upon these words to have the privilege of "sticking together!" tonight.

.

Number 870

The Dover Boys

Goodbye, 2010! Tomorrow morning we wake up, bleary-eyed and cotton-mouthed, to the second decade of the 21st Century. It's been an eventful first decade, that's for sure.

We wrap up the decade here at Pappy's with an obscure comic from the folks at Archie, Adventures of The Dover Boys #1, from 1950. The title is a knock-off of a popular series of boys' books from the early part of the 20th Century, The Rover Boys, who did their roving from 1899 to 1926 in thirty novels written by Edward E. Stratemeyer, using the pen-name Arthur M. Winfield.

I haven't read any of the original Rover Boys novels, but have read many books from Stratemeyer's syndicate, as a boy supplementing my comic book reading with the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift Jr. books. I'm not sure the comic book Dover Boys lasted only two issues because it didn't sell, or was a little too close to the original title for the Stratemeyer syndicate. By 1950 with founder Edward Stratemeyer dead, his company was run by his daughters. It was still doing well, even with the competition for juvenile readers tipped toward comic books.

Adventures of the Dover Boys is drawn by Harry Lucey.

Happy New Year, and I hope we'll see each other in 2011.

Trade Perspectives: The Invisible But Flexible Zenith of Collecting

[This guest post from Kevin Pasquino, who blogs at Words Flow Like Chocolate, notes a singular impediment to waiting for the trade: Grant Morrison]

Here are three great reasons why I should make a complete and irrevocable switch to collected editions of comic books: convenience, economics and, my personal favorite, common sense.

Because, let’s be honest, there really isn’t a good reason for me to continue to make my weekly journey to my local comic shop: the best of the week’s releases will be collected in hardcover or trade paperback within six months, the price for the collection inevitably seems to be slightly cheaper than buying all of the individual issues, and it’s much more cozy and comfortable to curl up with a collected edition of some 168 pages than it is to read six individual issues of a comic book.

Yet I still find myself going to my shop every single Wednesday.

And the more I think about it, the more I blame Grant Morrison for my on-going addiction.

There are a lot of great writers currently doing monthly comic books. Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Geoff Johns, Robert Kirkman and others all do terrific work, but I do my best not to double dip and I can usually resist the weekly temptation of their books. Captain America, Iron Man, The Flash and The Walking Dead can wait for the publication of the collections before they see my cash.

As a matter of fact, Kirkman’s The Walking Dead is perhaps the greatest monthly series ever when it comes to waiting for the trade: it is a completely self-contained story, internet spoilers are easy to avoid and the book is a tremendous treat to read in its collected form. And the Walking Dead Compendium? – That book is pure gold. After finishing the massively thick collection, it’s almost impossible not to want more. And yet I manage to avoid the monthly temptation because it reads so damn well in its collected form. On top of all that, I don’t care if the book sees any delays in its monthly schedule as long as the trades keep coming out.

With other creators I live in hope (and fear) that what they write is allowed to stand on its own without a massive company-wide crossover meddling with their stories. I have little interest in the characters outside of the books that my favorite writers are handling. So I don’t care if Captain America has a major role in next summer’s Civil Secret Siege War as long as I don't have to purchase some extraneous book in order to understand what's going on with Brubaker’s work.

But all of my self-restraint gets tossed out the window when it comes to Grant Morrison’s work. I find myself unable to resist his monthly books even though I know that I will eventually be buying them again in their collected form.

And the irony is that Grant Morrison’s work is among the most collected of modern comic book creators. A person may argue with the schedule of hardcovers vs. paperbacks or worry that all of his Batman stories may not be reprinted in the same format, but it’s almost guaranteed that everything he currently writes will be collected. It’s not as if I risk missing one of his stories by waiting six months.

So, why am I unable to wait? Why this sense of urgency when it comes to Morrison’s monthly comics?

Much of the appeal is because Morrison is currently creating a huge mosaic for Batman which will act as a springboard that other creators can build upon. Rather than just reboot the character (a la Wonder Woman) or send him walking across America (a la Superman), Morrison is revamping and energizing the character by methodically revealing the parts of a puzzle that he’s been developing for years. It’s incredibly entertaining to see all of the pieces as they come together rather than wait to see the completed picture.

Seeing Morrison’s ideas unfold in individual issues is like having a new Harry Potter movie debut every month: I love the sense of anticipation and mystery as I wait for each issue. I’m not sure where the story is going, but I trust that Morrison will deliver. And there’s also a sense of community created as I delve into the various annotations of the stories and read what other people think of the story. The same thrill isn't there when a collected edition is printed.

This is not to say that my addiction to Morrison does not have its negative aspects. Editorial errors and publication delays have made the past couple of months frustrating, especially when one story concludes before its tie-in mini-series is completed. Waiting for the trades would eliminate the annoyance that these snafus create.

It has also become apparent with the most recent issues and their need for various artists to assist in completing the stories that Morrison is writing his scripts right up to (and perhaps past) deadline. And if multiple artists are needed to finish an issue it’s not unreasonable to infer that the artists who did single-handedly complete their issues were working at a hurried pace. None of this suggests that what’s being produced is anyone’s best or most polished work.

But unless DC decides to create new pages for the collected editions (which they have done for Infinite Crisis and The Invisibles, so it’s not unheard of) what’s being currently being published is as good as it gets. Morrison’s next major work is supposed to be a multi-artist mini-series that explores DC’s Multiverse. I can only hope that the editor will have the scripts in-hand and the artists have the opportunity to be well ahead of schedule before the books are solicited.

Having said all of that, I still find myself hooked on Morrison’s work. When he doesn’t have a (supposedly) monthly book coming out, my enthusiasm for serialized stories dwindles. So I’m thrilled that he’s going to keep writing the series with Batman Inc.

And because of Morrison and his Batman stories, I find myself buying other books on my weekly trip. Because, let’s be honest, there’s no point in going to the comic shop just to buy one book.

So his work acts like a gateway drug to further comic book addiction. Jonah Hex is a terrific monthly book, Freedom Fighters gets a try-out for at least a couple of issues, Knight and Squire gets a look, both of Paul Levitz’ Legion books are being purchased, and others comics are also being bought.

And, completely shattering my resolution, I also find myself buying Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Incognito even though I know that I’m going to eventually buy the collection. After all, if I’m going to buy Batman & Robin, The Return of Bruce Wayne and the upcoming Batman Inc. in individual issues and then in trades, I may as well break that rule for other creators as well.

I blame Grant Morrison for my lack of resolve. And, to be honest, it feels good.

[If you're not subscribed to the Collected Editions comment feed, you're missing great tips on how to wait-for-trade in style! Have a happy new year -- new reviews coming next week!]

Making Sense of Brian Michael Bendis's "Avengers" (Part 5, & yet Part 1 too!):-"I Have No Idea What Is Going On Here Or What You People Want From Me."

continued from yesterday;

19.

It's easy to stereotype Brian Michael Bendis's work on the "Avengers", or, at least it is until the slightest effort is made to engage with the almost seven years of scripts that he's provided for the franchise. For even a passing familiarity with that mass of work provides evidence of not so much a single Brian Michael Bendis as a whole series of them, each connected by a clear family resemblance, but each to a greater or lesser degree quite distinct from the other. One Mr Bendis is something of a traditionalist, producing time-travelling epics with John Romita Jr which quite deliberately riff off of obscure Seventies Marvel titles, while another Mr Bendis seems closer to an angst-obsessed Chris Claremont preoccupied by alternate-realities and doomed relationships. On the one hand, there's the Brian Michael Bendis who can in part be associated with decompressed storytelling, and on the other, there's a writer whose work often flatly contradicts such a judgement, producing pages and pages of text-heavy storytelling as well as notably intense superhero punch-ups.

But there is one approach to storytelling that's remarkably rare in Mr Bendis's scripts for the various Avengers titles, and that's the paternalistic one used by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the earliest days of the property. That's not to say that Mr Bendis is ever contemptuous of such a traditional approach. But it does seem that his work on "Earth's Mightiest Heroes" starts from the premise that his readers have at the very least read a fair good number of the more than 40 years of Avengers stories approached in the paternalistic manner, and that given such familiarity with the form, his playing with the formula will inevitably pay greater dividends than his merely replicating it. It surely can't be, as some folks would have it, that Mr Bendis simply doesn't want to write

more traditionally Lee/Kirby-esque stories. For all that he's obviously fascinated by narrative traditions from far beyond those of comic-books, and for all that he enjoys hybridising them with those of the superhero tale, Mr Bendis must surely be credited with recognising that forty and more years of conventional storytelling had helped paint the Avengers into something of a cosy and overly-familiar corner. In that, his determination to shake up the form as well as the content of "The Avengers" has far more in common with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's mission on the Marvel books of the early Sixties than is often recognised.

Change was necessary, and change was as stimulating for all the creators involved as it was for their audience. With three different Avengers comics currently selling almost a quarter of a million titles between them every month, it might be thought that Mr Bendis's experimentation and achievement would be granted a touch more critical attention and respect than sometimes seems to be the case.

20.

The sheer degree of radicalism in Mr Bendis's approach can be seen in the page scanned above from "New Avengers" # 11. If any single side of his work could serve as an example of everything that the paternalistic approach isn't, then this would surely be it. It's a set of panels produced in collaboration with artist David Finch in which nothing that's obviously visually enticing occurs beyond the passing subtleties of Steve Rogers everyday body language, and in which the dialogue is as prosaic and undramatic as might be imagined. The panel angle is static, the background is banal and unchanging, and the viewer is denied even the virtue of seeing the responses on the face of whoever it is that Captain America is talking to.

It is, at first glance, a page apparently designed to not attract the reader's attention. Because of that, it's certainly easy to imagine how Stan Lee might have responded to receiving such a submission in 1963, for the audience of children and precocious adolescents who were buying the Marvel Comics of the period could have no interest in anything so seemingly dull. It's almost motionless, the language is largely disconnected from any broad emotional terms, and making sense of what's being said relies on a deep knowledge of MU continuity - Fisk, Murdock, Harada - and of non-comics genre terms such as "intel" too.

Yet it's absolutely telling that this peculiar scene is followed by three pages of wordless ninja-fighting, an incredibly kinetic, brutal and bloody sequence which, although quite unlike anything ever presented by Lee and Kirby, is still recognisable as an eye-catching and thrilling spectacle. In that, it's pure comicbook-action eyecandy. We'll chat about the fight-scene itself in the new year, but for the moment, it's worth noting that Mr Bendis has obviously not abandoned the responsibility to entertain so much as reformulated the ways in which entertainment might be generated. Unlike the paternalistic approach to storytelling, where constant action, eye-catching invention and perfect clarity are the guiding principles, Mr Bendis is presenting his readers with a far more opaque and challenging approach to grabbing and holding the audience's attention.

It's obviously not an approach which would, or ever could, appeal to the young boys who served as the audience for the first issues of The Avengers, but, of course, young boys rarely read comic books such as The Avengers anymore, and the challenges faced by today's writers and artists are in so many ways quite different from those facing Mr Lee and his staff in the early Sixties.

21.

It seems to me that Brian Michael Bendis's approach to The Avengers begins with a judgement that the manner in which a modern-day superhero comic is told is at least as important as what the content of the story is. By that I don't mean that story is an unimportant matter for Mr Bendis, for that's obviously not so. But he does seem to proceed from a profoundly post-modern starting point, namely that his readers are massively familiar with both the narratives of the superhero tale and those of adventure stories from a host of competing genres and mediums too. To retell in The Avengers the familiar, fifty-year old superhero traditions seems to Mr Bendis, we might presume, a quite futile and indeed alienating business, for his audience as indeed for himself.

For in a very real sense, Mr Bendis isn't choosing to ignore the many components of the paternalistic approach as he is deliberately innovating within it. He's not so much ignoring tradition as he is relying on it to inform his development of it, just as be-bop often relied upon the deep structure of classic songs to inspire and ground its experimentation. Mr Bendis is reliant upon his readers being skilled and knowledgeable experts where the traditions of the superhero comic book is concerned, so that his audience can interpret where his playful redrafting of the form diverts from tradition, and where it does not. This reliance upon

the audience to collaborate in the storytelling process, rather than to sit back and function as passive consumers, can be seen in the four panel scene starring Cap and the back of Ronin's head which we touched upon above. The very fact of the page's stillness draws attention to the importance of the details of the scene, and that constant and unrevealing back of a mysterious head raises questions which foreshadow and inform events that will weave in and out of coming issues. And once the enigma of the unnamed subject of Captain America's briefing becomes more pressing, Steve Roger's relatively undramatic words will become important sources of data to solve the question of who the unnamed character is.

Or; the very stillness of the scene accentuates the need for the reader to focus on it, and sets up questions and partial-answers which will inform the pages to come.

More so, it's a sequence which will inevitably appeal to any reader who has, or who wants, a keen knowledge of Marvel's continuity. All those references to people and events in the Marvel Universe are there to snare the curiosity of an audience trained to want to draw connections between the different areas of their comic book knowledge.

And, finally, that excessive stillness and quiet also has a quite deliberate structural purpose. While Lee and Kirby were dedicated to maintaining two speeds - fast and very fast - throughout their tales, Mr Bendis knows that carefully rejigging the traditionally obvious progression of events in the superhero tale intensifies the reader's involvement in what otherwise would be a predictable narrative. Playing with the sequence of chronology in his tales as he does here, shifting time and place, from the past in NYC, on this page, to the present day in Tokyo, on the next, throws the reader and forces them to more actively make sense of what they're experiencing. And by unexpectedly juxtaposing the incredibly static with the disorientating action-packed, as occurs when the stillness of the interview suddenly shifts to a dust-up in Japan, surprise and enigma are introduced into "Ronin Part 1". It's a process that his readers can of course cope with, because they have a mental map of how a standard-issue, traditional superhero tale would normally progress, but it's a different enough experience to create a measure of unfamiliarity and even mild shock. In effect, Mr Bendis is playing games with his audience's expectations, giving them the promise of what they know they want to entice them in, while presenting enough of a deliberately fractured reading experience to make the familiar seem fresher than it otherwise might. It's a playfulness which draws in a knowledgeable audience and forces them to engage with a tale which in its own basic terms is absolutely conventional, and which could easily be told in a straight-forward and paternalistic, and yawningly quite predictable, fashion.

22.

One of the advantages of approaching superheroes in such a post-modern way to a willing, conspiratorial audience is that the storytelling forms can be invigorated even as they're messed with. Mr Bendis, for example, injected a substantial dose of the narrative conventions associated with the thriller genre into this run on the Avengers. To do so in a bog-standard superhero narrative would be a potentially interesting experiment. To do so in a story that's already structured around long-running mysteries and unconventional story-telling is as wry a business as it is logical. An audience who're already juggling unexplained and unexpected jumps in time and setting are far more likely to engage with the appeal of double and triple-agents, secret organisations and "intel" missions overseas. This may not be the "pure" form of the superhero team-book narrative, but that's what gives it its energy and, I've no doubt, its commercial allure. In that, form and content are far better matched in "Ronin part one" than first appears to most entrenched lover of the paternalistic form, and what's at hand is in its own way every bit as deliberate and functional as Lee and Kirby's work was in its own day. Attention is grabbed, questions are posed, a measure of intensity is created, and a mass readership engaged.

In performing his post-modern business, Mr Bendis builds upon rather than rejects paternalism, and does so to offer his often-jaded audience the promise of the unfamiliar as well as, rather than instead of, the comfortably well-worn. The super-villains and their world-threatening schemes are still there, the heroes are still vulnerable alone and undefeatable if they stand together in the end. Much of the raw material is exactly, and respectfully, as it always was. Yet without abandoning responsibility for directing his audience's attention, he does abandon the belief that he's solely responsible for how the reader will perceive what's happening on the page. He is in fact a writer who often demands that his readers work harder than they might otherwise do in making sense of what they're reading, and the degree to which he manages to encourage them to do so is one measure of how successful Mr Bendis's work might be regarded as being.

It's not an approach without its own challenges and problems, and we'll discuss some of those soon. But it is a far more innovative, clever and functional design than labels such as "deconstruction" might indicate. As a starting point to writing the adventures of a team of superheroes in the 21st century, it offers endless possibilities, and helps to explain, perhaps, to a greater or lesser degree, why Mr Bendis apparently has so many different styles when his books are regarded over time. In the very best post-modern sense, his knowledge of the basic form allied to his determination to mess purposefully with it means that he can constantly reinvent the form that he's playing with, and thereby produce a significant range of variations on the traditional themes.

And reinventing the form without losing track of its traditions is only, after all, what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did, and regardless of how each might be ranked in importance against each other, change in 2004 was as absolutely necessary for the superhero genre's survival as it was in 1961. In the case of Brian Michael Bendis, the key to re-developing the genre was not simply to deliver more and more of what had gone before. In fact, it appears that Mr Bendis seems from the off to have identified the over-familiarity of the superhero genre as the major obstacle to the commercial success of "The Avengers". The very business of folks dressing in costumes and punching each other with super-strength in teams was no longer of itself particularly fresh or interesting. And if superheroes behaving superheroically in a post-Lee and Kirby fashion has become so by-the-numbers as to seem conservative and dull, then what is there left to focus on? If there's few ways to have one costume fight another without calling up a thousand or more similar battles from the past, then something else needs to be presented as the focus of the superhero comic.

For Mr Bendis, it seems obvious that what interested him most was not the behaviour of superheroes in combat so much as the behaviour of and interaction between superheroes as people. And for him, the evidence of his stories would argue that he's most fascinated with how superheroes get along with each other while facing the challenges of an insane world in a recognisably everyday fashion. He's just not as interested, as Lee and Kirby themselves were, in placing the superhero in front of a backdrop of a mundane everyday existence and showing in imaginative detail how their powers function and develop. Mr Bendis is rather fascinated by what it's like to live as a superhero amongst other superheroes, and by matters such as what having breakfast, lunch and dinner is like when your table-mates are mutants, aliens and super-people.

Where once action was the purpose of the superhero tale, and characterisation its essential seasoning, the Avengers stories of Brian Michael Bendis have tended to operate on quite the opposite principle. And where the rules of paternalistic storytelling once demanded constant excitement and clarity, Mr Bendis is far more concerned to break up the progress of the traditional narrative while encouraging his audience to collaborate with him on making sense of the events and enigmas that he's putting before them.

To be continued in the New Year, taking a look at how Mr Bendis approaches some of his action scenes, and considering some of the problems associated with a more post-modern approach to superhero comics too.

Stick together! And have a splendid day, as well as a Happy New Year! There'll be a little holiday best wishes expressed here tomorrow and then it's on into 2011! Gosh ....

.

videofreeandimage

Ringing In The New Year With Seventies Marvel

Trade Perspectives: The Invisible But Flexible Zenith of Collecting

Making Sense of Brian Michael Bendis's "Avengers" (Part 5, & yet Part 1 too!):-"I Have No Idea What Is Going On Here Or What You People Want From Me."

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Ringing In The New Year With Seventies Marvel

Trade Perspectives: The Invisible But Flexible Zenith of Collecting

Making Sense of Brian Michael Bendis's "Avengers" (Part 5, & yet Part 1 too!):-"I Have No Idea What Is Going On Here Or What You People Want From Me."