Why Is Brian Michael Bendis' Writing Popular?

Believe it or not, that subject line is not meant to be inflammatory (but will no doubt be read that way).

With the release of the final issue of "Age of Ultron," and the ensuing beat down the finale and the series have gotten, it seemed like a good time to figure out why Bendis is such a popular writer.  He's arguably the most popular comic book writer today; he certainly has the sales numbers to back that up.  And while the internet might have us believe that his work is polarizing, that's obviously not the case.

The rain of criticism coming down on "Age of Ultron" is well deserved.  It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good story.  I realize that these things are subjective, but this could be one of those cases where on the delusional will claim they felt like their $40+ was money well spent.

"Age of Ultron" ultimately broke down into three different stories and, in Bendis' defense, he's said that it was his intention to flip preconceptions of the story half way through.  Here's what we get:

1) Post-apocalyptic story
2) Time travel adventure
3) Marketing book

I don't find any one of those stories problematic, to be honest.  I love a good post-apocalyptic story, "Lost in Space/Time" from West Coast Avengers is one of my favorite comic book tales of all time, and I can't fault Marvel wanting to generate interest in other titles with the end of their big event.  The problem is that none of them are fully realized, so when combined, none of them really work.

Personally, I feel like there's one very big reason why this is the case: Bendis was the wrong writer for this story.

(I would add that Hitch was the wrong artist for the first half, and Pacheco the wrong artist for the second half, but let's stay on topic here)

Ideally, I'd start talking about Bendis' work by go over his early, creator owned stories, but let's be realistic: Bendis became immensely popular because of his work for Marvel.  So if we're digging into his popularity, we should start there, specifically with Ultimate Spider-man.

One of the Bendis' two biggest strengths as a writer is humanizing his characters, and we saw a lot of that in Bendis almost single handedly reframed mainstream comics or, more specifically, reframed Marvel comics to what they were when they started: stories about regular people in extraordinary circumstances.
both Ultimate Spider-man and Daredevil.  His focus has always clearly been on character over plot which, particularly when he made his splash with Marvel, was a huge deal.  Remember, Ultimate Spider-man #1 came out in October of 2000.  The comics industry was still recovering from the swath of destruction that had been caused by the 90's boom.  For a good 8 years, we'd gotten nothing but extreme comics that were focused entirely on action, with little attention spent on characters. 

It was hard not to love Ultimate Spider-man, particularly over the first few years.  The changes Bendis made to the mythos weren't drastic, or, if they were, they were tempered by the fact that there was another, 40 year old Spider-man book for the purists.  Ultimate Spider-man was the perfect book for Bendis and it shows.  Yes, it was eventually weighed down by decompressed and redundant stories, but Bendis always seemed able to save it by focusing on the characters.  Ultimate Spider-man #13 was an instant classic.

The other side of the coin to Bendis focusing on characters is the fact that all of his characters sound the same.  It's actually a fairly delightful way of speaking, particularly when coming from teenagers, but it is absolutely not how every single character in the Marvel universe talks.  The frustrating thing about it is that it's a simple fix, and something that the editor should always catch.

Bendis' run on Daredevil was the first time we saw his second biggest strength: he's not beholden to convention.  Look at it this way, while Didio and Johns were busy taking the necessary steps to recreate the Silver Age at DC, Bendis was outing Daredevil and reforming the Avengers with characters fans considered to be anything but Avengers material.  Sure, his decisions often defy logic, but at the very least he's willing to take risks.  Serialized superhero stories thrive on the illusion of change, but Bendis has gone farther to produce long standing change than perhaps any writer working for the Big Two in the last ten years.

At a high level, you never really know what Bendis is going to do next.  There's a certain degree of unpredictability with his writing.  A lot of that is undercut, however, by the fact that these unpredictable stories take far longer to play out than they should.  The momentum gained by upending convention dwindles when that change is the extent of the story for months.

Perhaps it's because of the difficulties with telling a decompressed story that Bendis often resorts to cliffhangers.  Sure, that's pretty much standard for monthly comics, but the problem is that his cliffhangers are often not very good.  They either a) aren't suspenseful or b) have resolutions that are unfair to the reader.

The perfect example of the latter is an early issue of Ultimate Spider-man.  Peter gets home late after skipping class and Aunt May is understandably upset.  He's vague about where he's been and seems to be clinging to his backpack.  Aunt May takes it away from him and opens it up.  Now, we've seen in earlier issues that Peter often keeps his Spider-man costume in his bag, so this is a big deal.  Aunt May opens his bag to find...

...a book.  It's Peter Pan.  Apparently, it's Peter's father's book (note: honest to god, I'm having the hardest time remember if it's really Peter Pan or not and I can't find any confirmation online, so I'm going with it -- I'll update it later if need be), and Peter has been going off by himself to read the book.  It's a wonderful character moment, full of emotion.  But it's also a cop-out.  We follow Peter around constantly and we've never even seen a hint that he spends time alone reading this book.  The resolution of the cliffhanger is unfair to the reader.

The perfect example of a bad cliffhanger comes at the end of Age of Ultron #4, when the hellicarrier crashesUltron, since it's quickly erased.  But there had to be a cliffhanger to end the issue, so that's what we got.  This is what happens when you spread four issues of story over ten issues.
into New York.  The problem is that this is a story in the future, and only a possible future, at that.  We also know that this future is going to be rewritten over the course of this series.  There is absolutely no investment in New York being destroyed.  Why would a reader care?  Nothing in that scene is going to impact anything.  In fact, it barely has an impact on Age of

Which brings me back to the fact that Bendis was the wrong writer for Age of Ultron.  He doesn't do action, he does interaction, it's why his stories worked on New Avengers but fell flat on Avengers; the former was focused on his hand picked team of characters and how they interacted, the latter focused more on big, plot driven superhero battles.

Bendis obviously has his strengths as a writer, and when he's telling a story that plays to those strengths, his work is really quite good.  But when he doesn't...

Well, we get Age of Ultron.