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.
Posted by Marc at June 8, 2004 2:56 PM