Tim O'Neil on Brian Michael Bendis:
The most impressive aspect of his superhero work is the formalistic rigor with which he approaches every script.
Because nothing demonstrates formalistic rigor like forgetting who your narrator is addressing, repeating lines of dialogue from issue to issue, writing issue-long expository dialogues, filling scripts with typos and grammatical errors, or cribbing scenes from Independence Day.
Much of what Tim says in the following paragraphs makes quite a bit of sense in terms of Bendis's approach to temporality and pacing (although even there I'm not certain whether discovering an author tends to use the same patterns for every two-page spread is a sign of formal mastery or indolence), but let's not pretend that "rigor" is among his signal virtues.
A little later, Tim says
The creation of the �arc� as the dominant storytelling mode has allowed the majority of mainstream comics to place a premium on once-forgotten virtues such as mood and pacing, two disciplines at which Bendis excels.
I'll grant the latter for the sake of argument, but as for the arc and the forgotten virtues of mood and pacing, let's remember that Will Eisner mastered both in The Spirit, and those stories averaged seven pages.
It's not the only way to do comics noir, but it's a lot more impressive than attenuated 110-page arcs that rely almost solely on visual and verbal repetition, and it has a much better claim to formalistic rigor.
Posted by Marc at August 29, 2004 6:09 PM