If some are called to Curmudgeonhood, then others surely have it thrust upon them. David Fiore has directed to my attention a post by Adam at Completely Futile excoriating a recent Brian Michael Bendis Daredevil issue for its astonishing lack of Bendis's much-vaunted realism. Dave counters with the reasonable point that comics are rarely if ever naturalistic, in dialogue or otherwise.
Reasonable, but I don't think it accounts for Bendis's writing or the problems Adam identifies with it. Adam's primary gripe, as I read him, is not with the lack of realism per se but with the lack of realism in a book that advertises gritty realism as its primary selling point:
Bendis' dialogue seems realistic at first glance, but in fact it's as stilted and artificial as any 60s DC comic, just with a thin layer of "realistic" mannerisms spread on top. This pattern, as we will see, applies to the plot as well.
The examples he provides are too copious to mention, but suffice it to say that Bendis's Ben Urich talks, interviews, and narrates like the worst reporter ever. (In fact, Urich makes a clumsy chorus for this issue; shouldn't he either be asking the questions, or giving the answers to a character who wouldn't already know most of them?) Apparently the Daily Bugle has its own Jayson Blair problem.
Adam also voices a gripe I've long had with Bendis's vision of Hell's Kitchen:
"What difference does it make?" you may ask. "So a superhero story isn't one hundred percent accurate. So what?" It matters to me, not because I'm particularly attached to my former neighborhood, but because the story pretends to be connected to the real world, and yet Bendis hasn't done the research (or if he did, he ignored it), but slapped a preconceived stereotype of a "bad neighborhood" onto Hell's Kitchen.
Again, more good material there than I can reasonably summarize. And finally, in a nutshell:
The bottom line is that virtually every aspect of this [comic] is dishonest.
David might identify all this faux-naturalism as "defamiliarization," but Bendis isn't writing some Brechtian drama of alienation effects and bitter self-reflection; this is escapism, and the lazy plotting, setting, and dialogue make it poorly realized escapism.
I was more inclined to cut Bendis some slack at the start of this last arc, the same issue Adam so thoroughly eviscerates. The dialogue isn't naturalistic, but then, what good dialogue is? When have people ever sounded like Aaron Sorkin characters, or Raymond Chandler, or Ernest Hemingway, or Oscar Wilde? Well, I suppose Oscar Wilde did, but only because he was so ebulliently fake. A fully naturalistic dialogue would be so clotted with "um"s and "uh"s and pointless gropings for elusive meanings that I wouldn't want to read it.
The rest of the comic, of the story arc, offers no such excuse. No shortcut is left untaken, from Alex Maleev's murky photostatted art to Bendis's padded, minimalist plotting. Urich's investigation to locate Daredevil - which takes about half an issue, after two issues of retrospective narration and plot summary and static, illegible fight scene - is so laughably easy that you wonder why half a dozen vengeful gangsters haven't lined up ahead of him at the hospital.
The greatest appeal of Bendis's run on Daredevil has been his brazen destruction of the status quo: he toppled the Kingpin, outed Matt Murdock, and later, in an otherwise dismal and forgettable story arc, made Murdock the new Kingpin. (Adam obliterates this claim to novelty as well.) Yet by the end of this arc, all the familiar pieces are back in place; Daredevil is single and wearing the red costume again, and worse yet, we haven't once seen him do anything that any other superhero wouldn't have done. Indeed, his first and final action is accomplished with a squad of superheroes, including the ultimate Marvel superhero, Spider-Man, whose presence surely legitimizes the proceedings as superhero business-as-usual. Not only is Daredevil returning to normal, he's never really been away.
Finally, Greg's recent comments remind me that Bendis doesn't play well with others, either. In the previous Bendis arc - the one whose only virtue was taking Daredevil to a new place that he has yet to inhabit - Daredevil casually demolishes Bullseye and the Kingpin in an issue apiece, not simply vanquishing them but leaching any menace out from either of them. It's an especially odd choice given that Bendis had just spent four issues bringing the Kingpin back, itself too quick a return following a scant year-and-a-half absence and the meticulous six-issue takedown that set Bendis's run afire.
Presumably the Bullseye and Kingpin appearances were mandated by the movie - which had already been out for three or four months before the arc even started - and presumably Bendis was eager to shuffle them offstage again, but neither one excuses demolishing Daredevil's two greatest villains for some cheap gravitas. Happily, it's the sort of demolition that can be readily undone by the first writer willing to forget Bendis's easily forgettable work.
Meanwhile the real changes, the alterations to decades of the Daredevil state of grace, are undone by Bendis himself, if they're ever even initiated. There's a great idea for a comic in here somewhere, about a superhero who loses his private life, boxes himself into a corner, and comes out of it becoming the man he most hates. But, except for a few beautiful moments here and there, Bendis hasn't written it.
Ok, so the Bendis backlash begins.
First, I should admit that I don't have the issue in front of me. But from what I remember, here's how I feel about some of the comments I've read.
1). Urich sounds uncomfortable because he is uncomfortable. It might not revealed until the end of the issue, but the subject he is speaking to, Milla, is someone he barely knows. After all, Urich has been pushed out of Matt's life for the last year, as he later remarks. Milla's not an interview subject but a total stranger who contacted him for an unknown reason. This issue is an info-dump, but Urich doing the info-dump to avoid having to deal with this stranger who knows more about Matt(as it turns out) than he has for the last year.
2) Sure, we don't really see what Matt has been up to other than fights. However, I took his status as "Kingpin" to mean a new proactive approach to crimefighting, which, though not as original as Urich makes it out to be, is pretty different for a street-level crime-fighter. I also assumed that Matt took over some of the duties a Godfather or Kingpin has i.e.extending protection to his followers/supporters, doing favors. Bendis probably should have shown more of this, but I feel he suggested it.
3) Finally, yes, I think Bendis could have done more with this before returning to status quo. However, I think everyone is jumping the gun saying that Matt and Milla are divorced again. I do see strain in their marriage in the final pages, and the threat of divorce, but Bendis might try to play this out more. Of course, I could be completely wrong. But we haven't seen whether the Black Widow is to be used to create more tension between Milla and Matt or just replace her.
Gee. How could I have been such a gullible idiot for so long. To think that bastard Bendis fooled me into thinking I was being entertained and reading a comics which was head and shoulders above most superhero fare, especially Marvel superhero fare. HOW could I have been so BLIND! Pride goeth before a fall, I suppose, and now I shall go listen to that old Who song and repent me of my sins.
"...reading a COMIC", not "comics". See, he's even got me typing incorrectly. That friggin' Bendis!
Marc wrote:
"David might identify all this faux-naturalism as "defamiliarization," but Bendis isn't writing some Brechtian drama of alienation effects and bitter self-reflection; this is escapism, and the lazy plotting, setting, and dialogue make it poorly realized escapism."
I beg to differ my friend! As I just wrote in my comment thread, Bendis is a noir romancer, and, as such, atmosphere is everything! "Gritty realism" has nothing whatever to do with fidelity to the surface details of the world we think we know. I haven't read the DD and I'm not planning to! But I think you have to judge the success or failure of romance based upon its ability to foster a sense of alienation and moral confusion in the reader--not upon whether a reporter would really introduce himself as "Ben Urich etc. etc." It's quite possible that Bendis isn't very good. I didn't like Powers #1-6 very much. But if he's bad--it isn't for the reasons that Adam gives!
Dave
I'm not crazy about most of Bendis's Marvel work, but I like Daredevil an awful lot, so I didn't find myself persuaded by that review. I'm not sure I can muster up much of a defense though but let's give that a shot:
1. Saying the book has a "lack of realism in a book that advertises gritty realism as its primary selling point" seems to me a straw man. I think that's a reader assumption because so many superhero comics have trained us into accepting Style A, that when we see Style B we sniff "Realism" and regard it with suspicion.
Daredevil, to my mind, isn't realism; its aiming for a stylistic operatic vein. It NODS to realism, so I think attacking the underlying logic is a valid complaint, but not any moreso than any other story. I don't know- do you consider a gangster movie or a cop show "realistic?" I don't know that I do- i think there's an inherent larger-than-life quality to those things, even especially good ones like Homicide or what have you.
Moreover, just because its taking stylistic tropes from gangster movies and cop shows- its not taking much else. its still a superhero comic, and still largely fascinated with superhero comic fixations- secret identities, the superhero not being able to be with girls who the superhero likes, bad guys, etc. i think other people saw that as a failing- I think Dirk Deppey had said some things in that direction. I don't know- its still Daredevil.
moreover, some of the complaints about the arc seem to be that its very obviously a "jumping-on" point and a reminder after however many fill-in issues from David Mack, so... not sure I care about those complaints...
anyway "Readers who buy Bendis's "realism" can believe that they've been tough-mindedly grappling with real-world issues of crime and ethics" - that bit of mind-reading wasn't so endearing, so... i don't think i'm grappling with anything. its a daredevil comic. its a superhero comic, like any other marvel comic. its just got a different style to it. i would HOPE that most readers are able to discern that...
2. Yeah, like Robby said- the Ulrich scene wasn't a journalism scene. It was something else, plotwise. So... he didn't read enough. Do journalists act a certain way in GENERAL that he didn't act? Yeah, probably. So ... its sort of a valid complaint, but sort of not. Its not great writing, but its not anything i'd waste time really going after.
3. The Hell Kitchen complaints: no, no, dead wrong. Dead, dead wrong. Bendis INHERITED the marvel universe Hell's Kitchen which you and this Adam are complaining about. The unrealistic crime Hell's Kitchen is the one in every daredevil comic before Bendis got ahold of it. you read any marvel comic before- they're stopping a mugging somewhere.
What he's done is he's moved it towards the reality, he's brought in the gentrification, but he's done so by putting a superhero at the center of it, by putting a superhero as the CATALYST of it. i think its one of the best things he's done in his run, as a whole.
As for the politics of gentrification, don't know anything about that, and honestly never really cared, so... but yeah, it sort of played on my bleeding-heart strings a bit because i think crime and economics are closely tied together, so seeing an acknowledgment of that in a VIGILANTE superhero book- i dug that...
4. Calling Alex Maleev's art lazy - wildly disagree, again. If its a snobbery towards photo reference... I don't know. Attacking an artist for using photo reference is like attacking them for using a ruler. Its a tool, and tool-snobbery... it just sounds silly and ignorant, honestly.
If you want to say Maleev's a SLAVE to the photo reference... yes, he's a bit stiff on fight scenes, the fights in the last issue weren't really so hot, but besides that, I don't see it. I've seen art that's a slave to photo reference, and Maleev- his style's evolved over the course of the time i've been looking at his art, so... at least compared to people who i DO think are a slave to it, i wouldn't put maleev on that list.
that its not to someone's taste is one thing; saying its lazy... that's a bit of mind-reading i wouldn't engage in, in this case.
And Hollingsworth's, like, amazing, so... i think the book's pretty.
5. I wasn't fond of the last issue for the reason you suggest, that the status quo seems to have been restored (it was all a bit confused, honestly). but it seems awfully premature to call that one... i'm hoping that the whole Daredevil's the Kingpin thing gets followed up on, but ... don't know where the book's headed (same goes for the hooplah with the wife).
that the bullseye and kingpin take-downs were too fast... i don't know. i just think its funny seeing anyone complain about daredevil moving too quickly...
6. And yeah, the complaints about the dialogue- Bendis falls into some self-parody in his Ultimate books from the few i've seen, but that really hasn't been a problem for me in Daredevil. Its obviously stylized dialogue- there are some big ol' clunkers in there, now and then, and sometimes a little less would be fine too, but ... again, daredevil's not the book i'd go after bendis for. that most of the complaints are for aggrandizing the events in the book- what, "It wasn't any big deal. Noone cared. But yeah, here's what happened." that's preferable???
its not a perfect book, no, but ... the review seems a bit overboard. which is fine. i like overbroad reviews so it was at least fun to read. i like it when someone comes in and wants to pass out some beat-downs. but... yeah, maybe only a couple actually hit home on anything, so...
if you wanted to grind on bendis, i'd recommend secret wars. that was really, really dreadful. or ultimate fantastic four- i thought that was pretty ridiculous, what i saw. but daredevil... i think that book works.
Wow, Bendis has himself some defenders.
All I can say was that I actually prefered Mack on the book, and that's not good, because I didn't like Mack at all. The last Daredevil story I read that got me fired up to like the character again was Miller's Man Without Fear LS: I don't think Bendis' version is going to last as long.
I do like the idea that Bendis is using Daredevil to introduce a bit of realism to the idea of Hell's Kitchen, but I have to be honest: Bendis has a tin ear for dialogue. Seriously, it's just loathsome, people. When he's not using the Monitor plotline from old issues of Teen Titans as the storyline for his Secret Wars, people are speaking as though they have big scars on their foreheads. It's just abominable.
Maleev I have no feelings about one way or the other. He reminds me of Tim Truman.
I do think, however, that Marc has a good point about how it was Bendis himself who created so many openings for interesting new directions on the character but didn't follow through... the idea of Daredevil as the new Kingpin, of an open secret as to Matt Murdock's night-time activities, even the idea of a costumed vigilante who isn't wearing the costume and may well be more effective without it (and as an aside, why hasn't anyone ever written the story where Matt Murdock finally realizes how damn enviable his life could be without Daredevil? He dates beautiful women, often rich... he's respected for his legal acumen to the point where the Fantastic Four are hiring him... he's got all the components for that life his father wanted for him, yet he throws it aside to put on funny long-johns and fight the Owl. Bendis had a chance to have Daredevil be the first street-level vigilante to say "Screw this, I'm jetting off to Rio with the Black Widow and shagging until I can't walk!") But in the end, Bendis doesn't even wait for the next creative group to come in and undo his interesting ideas... he does it himself.
That's what disturbs me the most. It's like he sets up all these fascinating what-ifs and then refuses to take us down any of them. But I certainly don't think it's the worst Daredevil ever by a long chalk... that honor would go to the run that had bio-mimetic armor and voodoo devil Daredevil clones.
What's funny to me there is, I could see fans of Maleev AND fans of Truman being enraged by the comparison.
Boys, boys, boys...
"Criticism" does not equal "backlash," or "snobbery" for that matter (as you should damn well know, Abhay). I will concede that "The King of Hell's Kitchen" may be the storyline that finally pushes too far and starts people noticing that the emperor is bare-ass nekkid, although frankly the previous Bendis story should have accomplished that.
Nor does my dislike of Bendis's comics mean you're obligated to dislike them, too, Johnny. I thought I was done offering those statements of the obvious when I left Usenet behind for good.
Do we really need to hear those disclaimers now? Or is the problem that this time the object of scorn is a fan darling, not one of those eminently safe targets like Liefeld?
A few more specific points.
1. On Urich's dialogue. Robby: "Milla's not an interview subject but a total stranger who contacted him for an unknown reason. This issue is an info-dump, but Urich doing the info-dump to avoid having to deal with this stranger who knows more about Matt(as it turns out) than he has for the last year."
Exactly. Exactly. Urich is delivering an info-dump to someone who knows more about the subject than he does. Hell, she's in half the scenes that he narrates to her.
Also, as a seasoned crime reporter, Urich had better be used to interviewing total strangers with inside information on major public figures, not stammering and self-narrating his fear like a giddy schoolgirl.
2. David - I think you're being awfully generous in extending to Bendis the title of noir romancer (is that just because it would fit your thesis about superheroes and American romance?), but even by that standard he falls far short. Bendis was building towards a storyline that could potentially "foster a sense of alienation and moral confusion in the reader," but that opportunity is squandered when Bendis skimps on showing us DD as Kingpin (or Matt as mayoral candidate - a tantalizing idea that has, thus far, gone nowhere) to give us instead the bold, morally confusing new direction of - Daredevil versus a bunch of Yakuza.
Frankly, I think you're lending Bendis a dignity and complexity he hasn't earned. He keeps brushing against it, and pulling back - that's the frustrating thing about his run.
3. Abhay - photostatting. You spend half of your comment complaining about Adam's "mind-reading" and then say criticism of Maleev's art is "snobbery"? Pot/kettle, dude.
To clarify, my criticism wasn't of Maleev's using photo reference, but photostatting. This is a somewhat outdated term - I'm sure it's all done with computers nowadays, not a Photostat - but the net result is the same, images composed of copied, glossed-over montages of photographs. There are artists who've used this tool well (the only two examples I can think of at the moment are Kirby and Steranko, neither of whom makes a good comparison to Maleev as they use it for completely different, surrealist effects), but Maleev uses it as a crutch.
Look at the two-page "montage" Adam guts, the one that's our only glimpse of DD's supposed Kingpin activities - it's fucking unreadable. (It's also typical of Maleev's shortcuts that he'd produce a big, static, unexpressive double-page spread to convey something that's supposed to be hyperkinetic, but that goes beyond his endemic photocopying. Every padded two-page spread, every fight scene is static.)
Look at the many conversations that rely on exactly the same poses, exactly the same headshots (the Night Nurse scene is a particularly egregious example). The problem isn't the tool, it's the lazy overuse of the tool to cover up his obvious deficiencies as an artist.
As an aside, how is it that Bendis's Daredevil - a book featuring a fluid, graceful, acrobatic hero and written by a man with a reputation for scripting long and frequent conversations - ended up with an artist who can do neither kineticism nor conversation well?
Ah, but he drapes everything in ink and creates the "noir romance" atmosphere, or a cheap and obvious facsimile thereof. Sorry, it's not enough for me.
4. Aggrandizement. Abhay reminded me of something that I forgot to work into my last post, namely that Bendis has also fallen into the trap of writing asskissing superheroes.
SPIDER-MAN: You're really good at this.
SPIDER-MAN: Damn, Cage, you didn't even raise a hand. You beat him up with a look. ... I gotta get a look.
LUKE CAGE: Gotta tell ya, Devilboy, you haven't lost a step.
You'd think Bendis, who writes Spider-Man every month, could write a better Spider-Man.
I probably wouldn't even have noticed this stupid and increasingly common technique if it weren't for Kurt Busiek, but now I can't escape it. Let's just say that I question Bendis's commitment to creating an atmosphere of noirish moral confusion when he has all the superheroes endorsing each other and telling Murdock how great he is. As with Busiek's brown-nosing Justice Leaguers, it reads like a transparent attempt to program the audience's reaction.
Marc,
See, now I completely agree with you! Bendis--from what I've read--does "keep brushing against it and pulling back"! In my opinion, he's not a very interesting "noir romancer", and that's why I haven't bothered with him since my encounter with Who Killed Retro Girl? several months ago. But my calling him a "noir romancer" has nothing to do with dignifying his project--it's a sincere effort, on my part, to identify the tradition in which he is working and to judge him by the standards that his predecessors have established. As I say--I found his work wanting, but not for the reasons that Adam gives!
Dave
Oh, sorry if I sounded upset- hurried.
By snobbery, I misunderstood and thought people were complaining about the use of photoref, which comic fans can be unusually hostile towards. As for same poses-same headshots, I don't think that's lazy so much as an intended effect, for the "cinematic" feel or whatever, but... and yeah, the double-page spread isn't great. they were going for something graphic and failed. same time, issue ends with a double-page spread that works fine... i prefer oeming who works in a similar mood but with a more unique style, but ... i think many of the effects aren't out of a sloppiness, but with an intended goal. whether that goal's a good one... that's a weird question, but...
the aggrandizement point's interesting. i hadn't noticed that trend. (and this adam's criticism is coming from a certain place when its of a half-issue preview of a book he doesn't read... its a place i like, i like hearing people coming from that place, so i liked reading the review, but that's a certain context...)
i guess the reason i'm not concerned about the plotting is the pleasure i take in the book more than anything is the sense that its in a constant state of upheavel. storylines pop up and dissapear, and they're good ideas, but i like that the "Appearance of change" if not change is sort of at volume 11 and taken over the other aspects of the book. i was dissapointed that the last issue seemingly restoring the status quo (and was boring), but given the book's prior constant wriggling, i'm not particularly worried it'll stay that way for long.
that and with morrison's x-men finished, and marvel turning back the clock otherwise, its become one of the last books in which someone takes a superhero comic and applies any sort of different style to it, except for whatever's left of the eye of the storm books, i suppose, none of which i think are as successful (or... at all successful, actually). which is unrelated to the criticism being offered, but if it explains my "defensiveness"... again, just hurried. sorry about the kettle???
I know what you mean about the hostility to photo reference - although when artists are swiping cover poses wholesale from Sports Illustrated I can kind of see that hostility as well - but no, that isn't what bothers me about Maleev's work. I don't mind seeing the photos, I mind seeing the same photos and the same head shots six times on the same page.
I wonder, and this is pure idle speculation, if the disappointing turnout of this arc is in some way related to Marvel's current turning back of the clock. (Not that I think that excuses Bendis from any of his shortcuts and cop-outs.) I also liked the appearance of change more than any other feature of this book, and if Marvel's trying to turn Daredevil back into some Ben Affleck-friendly character then I'll have little reason to stick around.
Finally, I don't agree with every point Adam makes, but he hits more often than he misses, and he hits on all the details, which matters most to me. His reading of the montage alone (Daredevil's been punching out pizzarias?) earns him a place of respect.
"Backlash" probably wasn't the right word to use in this case. However, is it right to accuse Bendis of writing "ass-kissing" superheroes. They're not that buddy-buddy in the preview issue. I see what you mean about JLA/Avengers, but I don't see why in Daredevil, superheroes working the same area of New York wouldn't be friendly to each other. And it's not as if it really lasted all issue. Plus, I think it makes sense for Spidey to do say stuff like that at least. He's got so many self-worth issues he'd probably be complimenting fellow heroes until they told him to shut up.
Spidey's the original wiseacre, one whose relationship with his fellow heroes is probably best captured by his long-running feud with the Human Torch. He's been much friendlier with Daredevil, of course, and they've got a history, but that still doesn't mean someone who's been a superhero since high school would gush over Murdock and Cage like a starstruck fanboy. This isn't a continuity or character problem, though, but a writing problem; Bendis's Spider-Man doesn't sound like Spider-Man, he sounds like a) every other Bendis character and b) a rather too transparent audience-projection vehicle.
That's small potatoes compared to the previously enumerated problems, however. The discussion has gotten me rereading "The King of Hell's Kitchen" as an arc, something Bendis should pray his fans never do. Lord help those who come to it as a TPB.
In part one, Urich tells his mystery auditor that "Matt's new girlfriend, Milla Donovan, actually works at the Hell's Kitchen housing commission."
I think I've figured out why Urich's career never took off the way his wife wanted - because in part two, we learn that he's talking to Milla Donovan. What the fuck?
In part four, Foggy asks Milla if "Matt ever talked to you about Karen Page" and in part five she tells Matt that Foggy told her "you never got over the death of this Karen Page person." This Karen Page person, as if she's just heard about her that evening.
But in part three, when she sends Urich out to find Matt, Milla delivers this long, melodramatic (and, yes, asskissing) speech about how much Matt has lost and given, culminating in "I can't stop thinking about this Elektra and that Karen woman - the women that Matt loved that died."
What was left for Foggy to tell her? Perhaps he just floated Urich's theory that Matt's had a nervous breakdown, but why does Milla keep referring to "that Karen woman" if she already knows all about her? Maybe this is just overuse of a not-so-cute device - which would be pretty typically Bendis - but could the author at least pretend he's read the other issues in his own arc? This must be what writing nineteen comics a month does to you.
Unfortunately, reading five issues of this stuff at once makes these flaws stand out in stark relief. I'm almost tempted to send Adam the inevitable trade; if he could start the demolition with a ten-page preview, who knows what he'd make of this?
well, you can spin it: Sounds like she knew minor details but not the whole story until Foggy told her. like, "oh and i loved some girls who died" kind of thing without getting into the nitty gritty(consistent with the whole nervous breakdown- he wouldn't be talking about it too much if he was mid-breakdown). then foggy gives her the whole story with a more karen page heavy spin (including that whole heroin-porn bit)... i don't know. you can spin it. its not there in the writing though, so you're right. but its at least not unspinnable.
But yeah, that line "Matt's new girlfriend, Milla Donovan, actually works at the Hell's Kitchen housing commission"...??? ha. that's messy... that... that i don't know how you spin.
Some notes: I read the bulk of Bendis's run--issues 26-50--on Tuesday and 55-59, the storyline you're mostly addressing, on Wednesday. Even before your post, I felt quite strongly that there was a significant drop in quality in the new story.
The two of you point out a lot of the specifics, ways in which Bendis's mannerisms, missteps, and, yes, sloppiness add up to a seriously flawed work, so thank you for that.
I think that large part of this problem was that Bendis painted himself into a corner in issue 50 and really had no way to deliver; now he's floundering for a followup. That's not an excuse; no one held a billy-club to Bendis's head and said "Dispose of Daredevil's three biggest enemies in five issues and then have him declare himself Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen." But it's part of the problem. I really enjoyed the buildup, but it's always easier to build to a point of "earth-shattering change" than it is to depict the shattered earth that remains after, and Bendis shouldn't have put himself in the position to have to do that unless he was sure he knew what to do.
And I agree with Adam that Bendis's view of Hell's Kitchen is completely out of synch with reality. However, it's very much in synch with how Hell's Kitchen has been presented in Daredevil over the last twenty years. So I'm very slightly inclined to cut Bendis a very tiny amount of slack on that. Very tiny. When Bendis gets specific about New York, he usually gets something important wrong--my favorite example being from issue 27, when he describes "the Courthouse" building as "six blocks" from the corner of Eighth and 44th. In reality, they're about three miles apart--the Courthouse is far downtown, near Ground Zero, and 44th Street is midtown. (The building depicted in the illustrations is the Federal Courthouse, which is not the Manhattan Civil Courthouse, but it's not clear from the story which building Matt and Foggy would have been at, so I have to grant Maleev that one.)
I do have to take direct issue with one point Adam made; infodumps are not a hallmark of bad writing. Bad infodumps are a hallmark of bad writing. It is completely possible to write a good infodump; the key is to make the infodump something that reads interestingly in its own right. Bendis is fond of having his characters lecture at each other, but they often do so in ways which are themselves narratively interesting. The failure of Urich's lecture is not primarily that it is a lecture, but that it is a bad one.
I couldn't agree more, Kevin, especially with this:
no one held a billy-club to Bendis's head and said "Dispose of Daredevil's three biggest enemies in five issues and then have him declare himself Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen."
More like the three biggest enemies in three issues, since the first two just dicked around and built up to the same cliffhanger. But I digress.
I don't think the DD-as-Kingpin development had to be an inescapable corner; at the time I felt it was the only thing redeeming the arc in 46-50, since it took Daredevil someplace new. (I still don't see why Bendis had to trash Bullseye, Typhoid Mary, and a newly-resuscitated Kingpin to get him there.) That was the only thing that kept me coming back after #50 and a long, David Mack-inspired absence (for which I thank Mr. Mack).
The problem is that Bendis was unwilling or unable to commit to the changes that development warranted. Every interesting thing Daredevil does in "The King of Hell's Kitchen" is condensed into Urich's lecture in #56; after that it's all painfully standard Daredevil antics.
As for Hell's Kitchen, you and Abhay make a good point about inheriting the slum stereotype, although even Miller's neighborhood was never as over the top as the "before" image we get in #56. But there's no excuse for the confusions between "gentrifying Hell's Kitchen" and "saving the city" that Adam points out so well. Little things like that suggest the HK stereotype comes not from a fidelity to Marvel continuity so much as a complete ignorance of the city.
Thanks, Marc, both for the favorable notice and for articulating my position much more wittily and pithily than I did.
"Adam's primary gripe, as I read him, is not with the lack of realism per se but with the lack of realism in a book that advertises gritty realism as its primary selling point": yes, exactly. And yes, having Urich's mystery interlocutor be Milla is nearly as stupid as having it be Matt would have been. You say that you didn't agree with every point I made; I'd be interested in hearing where you disagree.
I'm working on a comprehensive response to the various criticisms of my post, to be posted on my website; but it may be a few days yet.
First and foremost, I think you occasionally held the comics up to a standard of naturalism that no superhero comic, even a "realistic" one, needs to maintain:
"The fundamental dishonesty is that the story presents itself as gritty and realistic, and yet supposes that a single man using only his fists could eliminate crime from a crime-ridden urban neighborhood in which most of the criminals have guns. This might get by in an early sixties Batman comic, where criminals who captured Batman always placed him in elaborate deathtraps from which he could escape, and when readers asked why nobody ever just shot Batman, the editors replied that it was because criminals were all insane. But in a comic that claims to be saying something about the real world, it's ridiculous."
Daredevil is, for all its trappings, still a superhero comic, and this is the fundamental suspension of disbelief required of every superhero comic. Even a realistic superhero story is still going to buy into certain basic premises, one of them being that the guys in costumes don't get randomly gunned down because they're just better than their enemies. Even Watchmen follows this convention with all but a few minor characters. Nor is following a genre convention and asking for suspension of disbelief necessarily mutually exclusive with delivering commentary about the real world, as Watchmen again demonstrates. "Realism" doesn't demand a harsh documentary fidelity to the real, simply a different set of stylistic conventions. The same holds true for the dialogue, as I noted before.
My problem with Bendis's dialogue isn't that it fails to be realistic - it obviously doesn't even try - or even that it pretends and fails, but that it's poorly written even by its own chosen stylistic standards. He tries to reproduce the snappy patter of guy movies but ends up with the mangled syntaxes and overwrought devices you and John Jakala describe.
Towards its end, your essay also builds to a political argument about the comic's law-and-order politics:
"Readers who buy Bendis's 'realism' can believe that they've been tough-mindedly grappling with real-world issues of crime and ethics..."
I'm not sure this is the case. The most I might venture is that they'd say Bendis has been tough-mindedly grappling with real-world issues of crime and ethics, as a means of exalting the comic ("See, it's about Issues!") but even that may be too much to speculate. Perhaps they just believe Bendis has been writing a good crime drama in the vein of The Sopranos or GoodFellas; I disagree, but that's another isssue. While I might attribute an unsavory political message to the text, extending it imaginatively to the readers is unsupportable.
Not to dwell too much on these points, though - my main reaction to your piece was still one of applause, and as I said, your detailed, spot-on close readings mattered most to this critic.