I like a lot of his work – his creator-owned stuff is great, I love his run on Ultimate Spiderman, and even some of his newer Marvel stuff like All-New X-Men – but I think he’s got some flaws as a writer that become much more visible when he writes a team book or an event.
The first flaw that bothers me is that Bendis has a tendency to escalate the stakes way too fast and too high, rather than giving the status quo a chance to breathe and have its potentials explored. One of these days, I want to write some essays about Comics in Parallel, where I explore two series on the same topic or theme – which was inspired by reading Powers and Gotham Central at the same time. And the thing I really noticed is that Bendis went to Roland Emmerich-levels of city, world, and status quo destruction so quickly that there was nowhere to go from there.
The second flaw that bothers me – and it’s related to the first – is that Bendis is much better at innovative setups than carefully-constructed payoffs. Take All-New X-Men for example: bringing the Original Five from the 60s into the present to confront their adult selves is a great idea, but as the series went on, it became very clear that Bendis hadn’t thought of some big questions when he started. Like, what was the bad thing the X-Men were brought from the past to prevent? Did they actually prevent it? Could they go back, and if not, why?
And you see much the same phenomenon with a lot of Bendis’ events – Secret Wars, House of M, Secret Invasion, Siege, Age of Ultron – which all start with a high-concept idea (what if Nick Fury got us into a quasi-Iraq? What if mutants ruled the world? What if Skrulls were among us? What if super-villains ruled the world) but lose the plot rather quickly and have unintended negative consequences for the status quo of the line or various books in the line.
So while I like much of Bendis’ work, he’s also one of the main reasons why I stopped reading Marvel for a decade.
People bring up Bendis as editor as a boogeyman but I would like to see what would happen if he just sort of took his ideas and worked with/let other creative teams execute them.
And let me just say, part of the reason why I didn’t want to come down too hard on him is that one of the main reasons I stopped writing fiction is that I have the same problem when it comes to setup and payoff, i.e with story structure. I can come up with really great premises or story seeds, but I am terrible at working out how to get from Beginning to End.
So I sympathize.
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