1.We've discussed the page scanned in above before, and in some depth too, both here on the blog proper and in the comments section as well. (*1) We've talked of how frustratingly static these panels might seem to be to a reader brought up in the paternalistic tradition of storytelling, and also of how that very stillness might work to focus the reader's attention more closely on both the content and the meaning of what's going on in such panels, serving to push Mr Bendis's words to the very forefront of the audience's attention. And we've also touched upon something of the role that the page as a whole plays in the pacing of the story being told, serving as a still and quiet interlude between the tension of the preceding scene and the grimly intense super-violence of the ninja punch-up which follows.
But what we've not touched upon is perhaps the very cleverest aspect of this page, namely how it uses the expected conventions of Mr Bendis's writerly style to achieve far more than is initially obvious. At an initial glance, this page may appear to be nothing other than a typical example of one key aspect of "decompression" (*2), presenting as it does a fairly dense amount of information in a relatively static scene. But there's far more going on here than simply the matter of one character lecturing another about the details of a coming mission, just as there's far more going on in both the form and content of "Ronin Part 1" as a whole than it first appears. For, yes, "The New Avengers # 11" is indeed divided up into sections dominated by wordy talking heads and text-light scenes of derring-do presented against spectacular backgrounds. But despite, perhaps, the expectations of our more cynical preconceptions, these various components of Mr Bendis's style are being used here to do much more than simply dump an alternating pattern of information-rich but movement-starved pages and hectic but data-thin action scenes before the reader's gaze.
Because, put simply, what the reader is also being given in the scene of Captain America and Ronin, and indeed right the way through the contents of this particular comic book, is something of the sense of what it might be like to be a deaf super-heroine engaged on a mission to work with The Avengers. It's not always an obvious business, and in places Mr Bendis and Mr Finch are exceptionally careful to obscure what they're doing at the very same moment as they're actually doing it, as I'll try to explain. But in addition to all those typical ingredients that we might expect to find in a Brian Michael Bendis script, "Ronin Part 1" uses the opportunities presented by what we might call, for want of a better term, "decompression" to present something quite other than what's at first explicitly on the page.
And this depiction of the experience of the world by a deaf super-heroine is one which it would be exceptionally hard to present and yet not cause a great deal of attention to be paid to if Mr Bendis were using the paternalistic style of story-telling instead.
*1:- Especially in "Making Sense Of Brian Michael Bendis's "Avengers", in the December 2010 archive to your left.
*2:- I know, no-one really refers to "decompression" anymore, and there are of course serious problems with the term. But it's grand shorthand for what's happening to a degree on the page here, and so I use it as I use "paternalism", to save having to constantly redefine what I'm babbling on about as I go. Mea culpa.
2.
The again-above page that we're focusing on is of course designed around quite different principles to those which grounded and drove Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's work on The Avengers 45 years ago, when the property was first developed. And we've spent some time recently discussing the many advantages that that paternalistic approach which they so wonderfully developed offered to creators of superhero books. But there are effects which Mr Bendis's less traditional approach can achieve which would be far more difficult to manage using the groundrules of 1963, and the way that the above panels describe something of Ronin's experience of deafness would be an example of one of those. For what initially seems to be a rather lazy and repetitious organisation of figures within these panels is soon revealed to have a quite specific and deliberate purpose. Or, to put it another way, this page isn't organised this way because neither Mr Bendis nor Mr Finch could be bothered to present panels which contained action, movement, and a sense of how both participants in the scene are reacting to the situation. It's not an example of work by two complacent creators who believe their work to be so splendid even in its least-exciting form, that they're not concerned to entertain their readers. Instead, what we're seeing here is a deliberate choice designed to create a specific effect.
For in the stillness and focus of this sequence of panels is something of how Maya Lopez, the second Ronin, experiences the world. And this isn't achieved despite the audience seeing nothing but the back of Ms Lopez's head, but because of it. For the fixed camera angle, if you will, of these panels forces us to accept Maya's experience of the meeting as the defining one. She's our point-of-view character, and our gaze is fixed unchangeably on Steve Rogers, just as is hers. And so her stillness and her silence isn't an indulgence or an example of laziness on Mr Bendis's part at all. Rather, he's striving with Mr Finch to find new and productive ways of having his characters interact on the page: it's the opposite of complacency, it's experimentation. And here, the interaction is all one way because, firstly, Maya is deaf. She's unmoving because she's focusing on Steve Rogers, on his mouth to tell her what he's saying, and upon his body language to inform his language with a greater breadth of meaning. We're being shown how the world for Maya collapses to a specific point when she's communicating with others. Skyscrapers might collapse outside the building, but Maya will remain still, receiving the Captain's precise and fixed orders, interpreting his communication, remaining in control of a challenging situation through discipline and focus.
3.
It's something that the reader may not be able to pick up on at first reading, because Maya's identity is undisclosed, though some in the audience may be able to deduce who she is from the clues present in what Captain America is saying. In this, the scene, and indeed the whole book, serves as an example of something which Mr Bendis is always keen to achieve, namely the comic book which reads well and entertainingly while still offering something more than just 5 minutes of speedy flicking from one well-designed page to the next. In "Ronin Part 1", for example, much of that extra value is offered by the fact that the comic can be read in two distinct ways. Firstly, as a relatively quick read along decompressed lines, and, secondly, as a comic which presents a measure of how a deaf super-heroine might experience the Marvel Universe. Initially, it would be impossible for most readers to understand the relationship between the storytelling choices and Maya's deafness, because those same choices also serve to keep the identity of Captain America's colleague secret. But once that fact is known, the scene has a more touching and informing meaning to it beyond the functional one of keeping one participant's identity, and indeed gender, secret.
So what's particularly impressive is that Mr Bendis and Mr Finch achieve this evocation of defaness while keeping two apparently separate mysteries running in the text at that same time, namely "Who is the person that Captain America is talking to?", and "Who is Ronin?". The fact that the answer to each question is Maya means that both writer and artist have to tread extremely carefully, but they are assisted by the fact that Mr Bendis had, in all good faith but mistakenly, informed his audience that Daredevil would soon be joining the Avengers, and by the classic misdirection of having Matt Murdock in "The New Avengers # 11" appear to consider taking on a second costumed identity so he could fight with Steve Rogers and company. Yet the success in keeping the two enigmas separate can be shown by the fact that the page we've been discussing above is followed by a largely wordless fight sequence starring Ronin, and yet the connection between Cap's guest and superhero/heroine is never obvious. And this despite the fact that the continuity-wise reader might well suspect that that was a woman talking to Cap, and that that woman is the character previously known as "Echo", a suspicion which the largely soundless pages which follow might be expected to reinforce.
In truth, Mr Bendis is actually playing with the decompressed style in pulling off this mixture of snare and enigma, because he knows his readers will expect a relatively text-light fight scene, meaning that he can present the soundless adventures of the deaf Ronin in Tokyo from her point of view to an audience that isn't expecting a great many words on the page in the first place. That these pages are actually almost entirely-wordless is a fact which can therefore pass unnoticed, and, later, once Maya's identity is revealed, the same pages can be read in a quite different light according to the new knowledge of her identity and disability.
This in itself is, surely, evidence that flatly contradicts the opinion expressed in some quarters that Mr Bendis's scripts are simply the result of a writer who ad-libs plots and dialogue without any significant measure of craft and control. For here he hides the real identity of Ronin in plain sight. In doing so, Mr Bendis lives up to the first responsibility of the creator of a mystery, by presenting the reader with all the data they need to understand what's going on, while also just turning the reader's eyes away slightly from the point that they should be focusing on in order to make sense of events. And to do so while representing Maya's deafness without giving away essential plot details or patronising her disability is a clever business indeed.
4.
How is this matter of representing deafness achieved? If we look again at the scan above, for example, we can note again how Maya's head is held absolutely still at panel-left as she focuses on Steve's lips, while his words are crowded towards the right-hand edge of each frame. Each panel is therefore on a second, informed reading concerned with Maya's need to make sense of the words in a far more deliberate and challenging, if on occasion also advantageous, manner than those with typical hearing. Captain America and his words don't appear to her as they might to someone with typical hearing, for no matter how fast she is at lip-reading, and we can assume it's exceptionally fast indeed, she still has to focus on what the words are as well as their meaning, where others don't. What's more, Mr Finch is making it obvious that Rogers is himself focusing on Maya's situation in order to make himself as clear as possible, emphasising his points with deliberate hand gestures. And so, what seems on the one hand to be almost a caricature of a decompressed page, and what appeared at first to offer hardly any visual information at all, is actually something quite different, is a page that's intense instead of stilted, is quietly incident-packed rather than a static indulgence. Indeed, contrary to initial impressions, it's a page which reveals as much visually as it does through dialogue, and it expresses what text would struggle to achieve in such an illuminating fashion.
This attempt to represent the world through the POV of a deaf heroine without compromising the central mystery of the book can surely also be seen in the wordless pages relating Ronin's adventures in Tokyo. Again, at first reading, these appear to be typically text-light "Bendis" action scenes conforming to the tradition of the "illustrated screenplay", and they certainly do function as that. They follow the conventions of "widescreen" storytelling as synthesised by Ellis and Hitch on the first volume of The Authority in 1999, and present the superheroic deeds of recognisably human characters set against spectacular and detailed backdrops. And to those who are both more familiar with and more comfortable with traditional comic-book storytelling, the question seems to be "Why haven't these admittedly beautiful and often thrilling visuals not had text added to them?".
Yet, it seems to me that such a question on the reader's part assumes that Mr Bendis, when he's writing, simply doesn't ask himself whether text should or shouldn't be presented to the reader. To wonder why text is absent is to presume that a great deal more text is necessary, or at the very least desirable, and that can result in the reader missing the potential on the page for other methods of communicating information to come into play. (*3) And that's certainly what's happening here, as I'm sure many folks have mentioned before, although I must admit I've neither noticed the matter previously nor read the words of anyone else who has. I'm very late to the party, I know, but I can't help that. What I can do is emphasise what seems to me to be a technically impressive use of the conventions associated with decompression to attain effects which the paternalistic approach couldn't so effectively achieve. For to read, for example, the double-page spread showing Ronin crossing Tokyo at night and to grasp that the panels are silent because Maya can't hear a single thing is to experience an action sequence like no other in comics. All of sudden, as the penny drops, the isolation and bravery, determination and capability, of this Ronin are emphasised to a phenomenal degree, and a sequence which at first seemed to suggest to the reader that Daredevil might be back in a familiar far-Eastern setting becomes something quite else, something quite magical, and silent, as shown in Mr Finch's panel depicting a horde of Miller-esque ninjas attacking Ronin from behind under a ghostly bright, night-sky-dominating full moon.
Ultimately, the creation of a soundless world for Ronin to move through presents the reader with an environment that's far more frightening than a typical and equivalent scene of jeopardy in any other superhero comic book, because this one takes place in a setting that this brave and supremely capable deaf girl always lives in, a world unlike the one that most of the audience inhabit. It's a world where our protagonist can't rely on sound to warn her of approaching danger or to guide her movements in perilous situations, and it's a stage where the typical reader would struggle to survive in for a moment. And so, what seems to be nothing more than yet another post-Claremont, post-Miller trip to Japan is transformed into something quite else, and this reader's regard for Maya/Ronin is increased every time I re-read these pages. For she can not only survive, if at first only just, but eventually prosper in these most challenging of circumstances with a profound disability, and both text and art accentuate this achievement time after time.
Take a look, if you would, at Mr Finch's panels of Ronin's Tokyo sojourn and note how they're so often concerned with the experience of sound. The wind in the trees in the foreground as Ronin leaps from one rooftop to another, the silence of a garden and temple complex on a rooftop, the roar and rattle of a Tokyo train and the slipstream that roars around it, the hub-bub of a capital city's centre at night, the conversation between the Samurai and Madame Hydra which is blocked from her gaze. These are aspects of the world which Ronin navigates through with skill and determination, but all those different textures of sound, both subtle and extreme, are completely unknown to her. She's of the world, undoubtedly, but not as someone with typical hearing would be.
*3:- I hasten to say that, regretfully, that was how I at first read this book. It seemed to me to be careless of the reader's needs and dismissive of decades of comic-book storytelling techniques. Obviously, I've changed my mind quite considerably.
5.
This surely isn't the work of a writer who churns out scripts in a careless style as so many seem happy to argue. It's certainly not the achievement of a "Hollywood reject" as one embittered, and deleted, commenter felt compelled to state to me earlier this week. Rather, it's a comic book that's been produced by a craftsman who has fused some specifically selected aspects of film writing with others more traditionally designed for the telling of stories on the printed page in comic books. Indeed, "Ronin Part 1" is the work of a storyteller applying his knowledge to a series of quite specific effects and doing so, in collaboration with Mr Finch, in an utterly successful fashion. And it's a job done well, and modestly too; there's nothing in the text that shouts at the reader of how well the experience of a deaf superheroine has been represented here. The whole matter is left in the reader's hands, to recognise or not according to taste and reading style. And the success of the work is every bit as much the result of the kind of fusion of control and innovation that marked Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's achievements, though of course their skills and their results were very different things.
Yes, Mr Bendis's work isn't often paternalistic, but it also isn't empty in any way of incident, information and value. It just often delivers those vital matters through different styles of storytelling to those pioneered by Stan and Jack in the early Sixties. And so much of his work does have to be read in a quite consciously different way to how theirs could be, but then, so did those very first radical books of Marvel's Sixties revolution when considered in comparison to the Silver Age DC comics which preceded them.
And just as today we've long since learned to love and admire the writing styles of Lee and Broome, and Eisner and Moore and a thousand others too, so it surely might well be time for some of today's more fractious comic book fans to recognise that it isn't a question of paternalism or decompression, as if it ever were, but a matter of how the two approaches, and a thousand more, might be respected and hybridised, one with the other, so that we can experience, enjoy and learn from the results of more and more dead smart fusions of craft and innovation.
To be continued, and concluded too.
My sincere thanks to everyone who's paid a visit to this piece. I wish you a splendid night, and, as always, the very best measure of sticking together!
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