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By Jason Bourgeois
Have I mentioned my dislike of Brian Bendis' writing style before? If not, then good. If I haven't then it fits in with his tendency to repeat himself, so I guess it all ties together. I planned it that way, really. Terribly clever, isn't it?
Don't get me wrong, his iedas have merit. I like the plots when I hear them, and I can see how they could be very cool stories, and I really want to like them. However, when the issues land in my hands, I end up, more often than not, being terribly disappointed.
Most of his verbal quirks in his writing have faded away lately, thankfully. His writing got terribly repetative, not in the plots like some writers finding a favourite sort of story to write - Claremont, we need to have a talk about you and mind control - but rather the dialogue would often repeat things it said several times. For example:
"I brought you a bagel."
"A bagel?"
"A bagel."
And he does this a lot. It's really annoying to have valuable space on a page wasted to the same line three or more times in a row. In my opinion, this is worse than Claremont's tendency to be verbose. At least Claremont is conveying new, if amazingly detailed, new information via his purple prose. Bendis is just wasting my time, and thus money.
The storytelling tendency that tends to get to me, is that his stories rarely go anywhere at an interesting pace. A storyline may be overall ok, but issues on their own are feeling very unfullfilling, again feeling like a waste.
From the title of this month's column, the latest culprit from the pencil of Brian Michael Bendis to get to me in this way is Marvel's gigantic event, House of M.
For those not following the event, and my wallet and I envy you, let me give you a brief recap. Last year, Wanda Maximoff, the Avenger known as the Scarlet Witch, went a little insane, and lost control of her reality altering powers, and ultimately destroyed the Avengers for six months. At the end of the storyline, where the Avengers stood around and did nothing but talk for four issues, they were saved by Doctor Strange, and then the mass murderer mutant terrorist Magneto showed up back from the dead inexplicably, and Captain America handed his daughter over to him without even a word.
She stayed in Genosha, where her father, still inexplicably not dead, and Charles Xavier, who knew that Magneto wasn't dead, but isn't explaining to anyone how he knew, nor how Magneto is not dead, tried to help her regain control and sanity.
That brings us up to date with just before the start of House of M. That kicks off with the Avengers and X-Men gathering to decide what to do with Wanda, since Xavier can't figure out any way to help her. We're given the delightful treat of the Avengers AND the X-Men standing around and talking about the issue, until the last few pages where they go to actually do something, and the issue ends with the world going white, and reality being rewritten on the very last page.
Issue two was nothing more than random scenes showing what everyone was doing in the new world order (Which is mutants are the ruling class, and humans are the persecuted minority). Now, some of that is ok. We should set up the new world, since we'll be spending some time here, certainly. But the problem is, there is no overlying narrative to it. I will even say I enjoyed some of the individual scenes, but that was all the issue was; nifty, individual scenes. There was no story here. The whole is definitely less than the sum of its parts. And we certainly didn't need to waste three pages of pretty art to see Colossus is now a farmer in Russia.
With issue three, some stuff actually started to happen, but this one had a separate problem all its own. This issue was hailed as having the ability to crack the internet in half. Obvious hype, and rather overblown no matter what they showed, but once it has been said, Marvel has to live with it, and take the hit for pumping the issue full of hot air. Most of the issue was Wolverine inexplicably remembering the world the way it was (There's a lot of inexplicable events and behaviour in Bendis' books, really), I have my theories, but that's all they are until we're told otherwise. Of course, it's really because Wolverine is the moneymaker, and you want him as a central figure. But at the end of the issue...the moment that would forever sunder the internet in twain...the moment Marvel declared to be so catastrophic to your gathering of free electronic porn...was the return of Hawkeye.
If you're reading this and saying, "That's it," then you are not alone.
Without all the hype, this would have been a perfectly fine ending. Part of me wanted to smile and think about how cool it was to have Hawkeye back from the dead after Wanda killed him in an incredibly lame way, but instead it ends up being overly hyped, and no one cares.
The next issue introduced a brand new character with the magical ability to give people their memories of the old world back, and they do just that with Emma Frost, waking her up to the truth. Finally, half way in, and we're finally getting somewhere!
So of course that gets scuttled all to hell with the newest issue, number five, when all we manage to do is give heroes back their memories for the entire issue. Much like issue two, this was unnecessary. And the scenes themselves were even less interesting, since it was just repeated panels of the little girl meeting the character, saying their name, and undoing the mental changes. We got the point with Emma last issue, and Spider-Man in this one. We don't need to spend the issue visiting everyone and fixing them in exactly the same way.
The way this series has gone so far, I seriously think Bendis sat down and said that these are the end points we need for each issue to have a good cliffhanger, now to just fill in the other 20 some odd pages and kill time. This has given us a bloated, slow series with lots of fluff, and very little plot advancement, until the last few pages of an issue, if then.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea. I love alternate/altered reality stories, since we get to see the heroes in new lights, and new situations, and this reality is different from most, since things actually seem to be pretty good, even for the minority of humans. Yes, there is prejudice, but even the humans don't have it all that bad. The delivery though, leaves much to be desired. The spin offs and tie ins though, have been almost entirely fun and enjoyable, exploring the characters in those new lights, and in a much tighter format than the core book, since many of them have to be no more than three or four issues long. That at least has made the event not a total wash.
I'm sure some of my plot related concerns will be addressed by the time House of M wraps up, and have been told exactly that on some of them already, but the pacing concerns aren't going to change in the issues available already, and hopefully they improve over the last three. With what has to be done, one would kind of think that they have to, no?
Jason M. Bourgeois
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