FLASHBACK: Callahan and Wolk on Bendis's "New Avengers"

Here's a flashback for the faithful readers. This was a conversation between Douglas Wolk and me, scheduled to hit the old Sequart website just as Douglas's "Reading Comics" was making its debut in 2007. We focus on a single issue of Bendis's "New Avengers," and without the context of what will end up happening in "Secret Invasion" and beyond, we speculate and ponder. It's time capusule fun for the whole family!

A GeniusboyFiremelon Flashback:

Douglas Wolk: Thanks for inviting me to this little back-and-forth. I should mention for the benefit of our readers, before we get started, that I suggested we should discuss this week's issue of New Avengers--before either of us had actually seen it. And I have no idea if you've been reading New Avengers anyway; I'm curious about your reaction either way.

But--oh, why pretend? Topic A is, of course, the pair of assertions you made in your CBR interview about your Grant Morrison book that have raised the blogosphere's hackles. Here's the first one, for readers who haven't encountered it yet, in a discussion of some of Morrison's intertextual tricks and thematic schema:

I always get really frustrated with people who say "I don't get it" or "it just doesn't make any sense." I just think that people who say that are just bad readers. They just don't know how to read.

And here's the second:

I listened to an interview on Comic Geek Speak with Matt Fraction. It was about how "Casanova" has all this subtext going on but it's also just a really cool spy story, but one of the Comic Geek Speak guys was just talking about how he couldn't read "Casanova;" that he just didn't understand it. He gave it four issues and it was just over his head. And there was this whole debate about whether or not comics have a deeper meaning; whether something like "Casanova" has a deeper meaning, and this guy who hosted the Comic Geek Speak show really believes that there is no deeper meaning. He just says "no."

"No" to "Casanova" in particular?

To any comic books. His defense was, "Well, whenever you guys play up the deeper meaning of anything, I just don't think that stuff's there. I think you're reading too much into it." That's a criticism I hear a lot. "You're reading too much into it. Those meanings aren't there." As a teacher, I face that with students studying literature as well. First of all, I don't understand that philosophy. But my counter argument is, it is there, because I've just shown you it being there. And then their retort is always, "That's not what the author intended." I don't care what the author intended, that's what the effect of the writing is. It doesn't matter if the author intended it if that's what's there.

I'd like to tackle the second one first--and this will eventually get around to New Avengers, I swear. What you're talking about here is what lit-crit types over the last 60 years or so--especially the New Critics, as they had the good sense to call themselves--have usually referred to as "the intentional fallacy." (Only sort of related to the Pathetic Fallacy from Fables.) The short version, in the words of W.K. Wimsatt, is that the "poem" (for which read "work") is "detached from the author at birth"; that once it's in the world, it means whatever it means.

Now, this is a useful critical tactic--and since my first important literature instructor was Helen Vendler, who's more or less the last of the New Critics (Jim Starlin miniseries coming soon!), it's the tradition in which I learned to think about art. There are also some useful modified versions of "it doesn't matter what the author had in mind," including "what the author had in mind matters, but not necessarily more than any other interpretation," and "to the extent that the author doesn't communicate what she had in mind, she's failed." (Which speaks to your first hackle-raiser, I think; unilaterally making readers the "bad" ones in the equation suggests that authors are infallible.) I mean, it is interesting what authors (and other creators) intend; that's why people like to read afterwords and liner notes and such. If something's interesting to me, then it matters to me, Q.E.D.

But, remember, I'm the guy who's got the tattoo of the brick from "Krazy Kat": I think it's a fact of life that the message sent is not necessarily the message received. (And that, right there, is a great example of subtext in comics. The brick Ignatz throws at Krazy is a brick for sure, but it's not just a brick.)

One of my favorite rationales for text-interpretation, actually (New Avengers comin' soon! Not kidding!), is at the beginning of Christopher Ricks' Dylan's Visions of Sin, a fat and fascinating book of extremely close readings of Bob Dylan's lyrics. Dylan may not have intended to build "Not Dark Yet" out of the same set of words as Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," or to paraphrase lines from Mother Goose again and again in the course of his Under the Red Sky album, Ricks says, but the fact is that he did; it's in there, and one of Dylan's enormous strengths as an artist is the fact that he's incredibly well-read and can process all the stuff he's read, consciously or unconsciously, into lyrics that evoke a thousand other things. He's a great transformer, which is one of the most important things that artists do.

This brings us, at last, to the SPOILERY realm of New Avengers (not New Avengers/Transformers, I'm afraid). There's one big logical flaw in this issue, which is that the team concludes on the basis of Elektra's corpse being a Skrull that there's a full-scale Skrull invasion on. And we know from all the "extratextual" stuff going on--on Newsarama and Wizard Universe and so forth--that there actually is a Skrull "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" scenario happening. (That also makes the "thought balloon" trick in Mighty Avengers make a lot of sense; the only way we can know particular characters aren't Skrulls is if we can read their minds, which through the magic of comics we can!) Still, it would've been just as reasonable for the team to conclude that a Skrull had replaced the dead Elektra half an hour before. That would invalidate this whole story's premise, of course...

For that matter, the "we can't go public about the alien invasion because everyone would think it was just a hoax" business doesn't hold water in the Marvel universe, where everybody knows about the Skrulls already and there's an alien ship shaped like a big rock hovering over Manhattan in half the comics published this month. But what Bendis is particularly good at is character work, and there's a lot of it this time. I love Luke and Danny not talking to each other, Peter dealing with his terror by wisecracking and acting on his usual responsibility trip ("I did what I could!"--why having a few pounds of something sticky on the front of the plane would be helpful isn't clear, but hey), Wolverine pointing the finger at himself along with everyone else.

My biggest reservation about this storyline is that it depends on a deep, deep knowledge of Marvel continuity to make sense, despite all the expository dialogue in the first half of this issue. (I am fairly sure that the chatter about Jessica not breastfeeding the Nameless Skrull-Baby is somehow related to the Skrulls/milk calculus in this issue from 1983, which is not exactly playing fair, even though I think it was referenced in this miniseries a mere twelve years ago.) Here's a question for you, though: should it be a baseline assumption that a New Avengers reader should be willing to do some research on the Internet to make sense of the plot of #32--not the subtext, but literally what the characters are talking about? If not, does that make her a "bad reader"?

And here's another question on "bad reading": I kind of don't get what's happening on the last few pages of this issue. From the first-page recap, I get that the EMP from Mighty Avengers knocks out the power on the jet; Dr. Strange casts some kind of a spell that... you know, does a thing. Or doesn't. After the plane crashes (and all the non-invulnerable types appear to be knocked out but conveniently not permanently injured or dead), we see: a pair of reaction shots of Spider-Woman (green eyes? does that mean she's Skrully? she's always had green eyes, I think!), Wolverine eyelessly growling at her and quickly getting beaten in a fight, and then walking off with Skrullectra's corpse, evidently to bring it to Tony. But this issue, and especially the final scene, is absolutely packed with reaction shots, and I have no idea if they're supposed to mean something, and if so what. (Bendis likes to use wordless sequences to communicate stuff with lots of emotional import, and it's easy for even very good artists to screw those up if their drawn "actors" don't get the message across. Remember Black Bolt's impenetrable gestures at the end of the Illuminati special? I loved the parody of that sequence in the Mini-Marvels story in World War Hulk Prologue...)

The upshot is that there's been some kind of breakdown between Bendis's authorial intention and my reading of this issue's final scene. Does that make me a bad reader, Bendis a bad writer, Yu a bad artist, or some combination of those?

My reply (which I'll translate into html before posting--after giving you a chance to respond) (oh, and by the way, like most Wednesday addicts, I pretty much read everything, so yeah, I'm familiar with Bendis and New Avengers):

Timothy Callahan: That's a lot to think about, but before I get into my reading of New Avengers #32 (which I do, in fact, read regularly, along with almost everything on the comic shop wall), I'll address my grand (and potentially controversial) claims about "bad readers." As a once-upon-a-time Philosophy major (before turning to the MUCH more profitable English academic track), I have a tendency to posit a philosophical stance and see how substantial the counter argument becomes. It's a technique as old as Socrates. Remember the time he debated Euthyphro about whether or not piety should be based on a literal reading of the myths? That was the good old days. Socrates, by the way, was against a literal interpretation, while Euthyphro was in favor of it. Ah, the old metaphorical vs. literal debate, whatever happened to that? Oh, wait, that's what WE'RE doing. (By the way, if Socrates had grown up in the 1980s, like I did, he would have known that the best way to settle this age-old debate is by having a breakdance battle, so what do you say, Douglas?)

If I were to elaborate on my definition of what makes a bad reader, I would say a bad reader meets at least one of the following conditions:

(1) He or she is unable or unwilling to understand the literal meaning of the words or images in a text.
(2) He or she is unable or unwilling to understand the connections between words and images in a text.
(3) He or she is unable or unwilling to recognize figurative language in a text.
(4) He or she is unable or unwilling to recognize irony in a text.

I base these conditions on the way language is acquired and the development of the skill of reading. Children, learning to read more proficiently throughout school, get better at these four conditions of readership as they become more experienced (try using irony with pre-schoolers!), and the same thing is true for second language learners (try listening to a joke told in Spanish if you've never made it past Spanish II in high school--you probably won't "get it.")

Given a complete text (whether it be a poem, novel, film, or comic book), a good reader should be able to be able to meet at least the four conditions given above. The problem rests in the case of incomplete texts, and that's what New Avengers #32 is. And it's not just incomplete because it's the thirty-second chapter of an episodic, open-ended series. It's an incomplete text because it's part of the much-larger Marvel Universe story, which has been going on for decades.

A quick note here: In his book, Reading Comics, Douglas refers to the Marvel and DC comics as part of two "grand corporate narratives." The implication being that even if you read every Spider-Man comic ever published, it's still an incomplete text, because it's just one chapter in the larger, Grand Marvel Narrative. Douglas doesn't say in his book that incomplete texts (like a given writer's run on title) cannot be read and analyzed, but I'm saying that it's problematic because an incomplete text relies far more heavily on outside knowledge for basic understanding than a complete text would.

So, let's look closely at New Avengers #32 (and your questions about the issue) with the knowledge that we're dealing with one tiny part of one tiny chapter in the Grand Marvel Narrative that has been in existence since before we were born.

Like you, I have significant problems interpreting the conclusion of the story, but, as if we're reading a fragment of Hamlet, Act II (why is that kid so bitchy?!?), we're dealing with incomplete information. I presume Spider-Woman's motivation will become clear in a future issue, but for now, we're left with the information on the page, and here's what makes interpretation so difficult:

Leinil Yu, as stylish as he is, doesn't convey literal information very clearly. Take page one: The inset image of Peter Parker saying "So no one is going to talk?" doesn't look much like other versions of Peter Parker presented in the Grand Marvel Narrative, and because we only see a slight portion of his costume in an earlier panel, it's difficult to discern, even if you are familiar with Spider-Man, who this character is supposed to be. To test this theory, I asked my wife, who knows her super-heroes but doesn't necessarily read comic books very often, to read the first few pages of New Avengers #32, and tell me who says, "So no one is going to talk?" She said: I don't know. I don't recognize him. When I pointed out that it was Peter Parker, she said, "it doesn't look like him." It's no big deal to figure out who's talking if you are a regular New Avengers reader, but this is just the first example of this incomplete text relying on significant outside knowledge (that Spider-Man has a new costume, that Yu draws people with a lot of lines on their face, etc).

Yu also violates some basic rules of visual storytelling. Take page 3, for example. The transition from panel 5 to panel 6 breaks the 180 degree rule. The "camera" jumps from in front of Spider-Girl to behind her, making the conversation unnecessarily disorienting. It doesn't help the sake of clarity that, in the very next panel, the emphasis of the panel and the context of the previous panels, indicates that Spider-Woman is saying the lines which apparently (given the later context) belong to Wolverine. And that's just one page of awkward storytelling.

So, to recap: we're dealing with an incomplete text with unclear visual storytelling, which RELIES on visual storytelling in the last few pages of the issue to convey important information. You are definitely NOT a bad reader if you're confused by New Avengers #32.

Thus, we are left to interpret meaning. And, once again, I don't care what Bendis "intended" to convey in the sequence at the end. Although I might be curious to know what he had it mind so I could compare it to the sequence as executed, I firmly believe that the intention is irrelevant if it's not conveyed in the text itself. Bendis might clarify some of the things muddled by poor storytelling choices, but if he said "Spider-Woman is revealed to be a Skrull agent at the end," I would reply, "no, she isn't!" It's unclear. She might, in fact, turn out to be a Skrull. Sure. But at the end of New Avengers #32, all we're left with is a very suspicious Spider-Woman who steals the other Skrull body and lays a breakdance-battle-caliber smackdown on the apparently rabid Wolverine.

I think Yu's storytelling is excessively unclear and Bendis's reliance on prior knowledge, assumptions, and Yu's artwork makes for a bit of a mess. But because, once again, it's an incomplete text, I wouldn't say Bendis is a bad writer because of this one issue. Nor would I say Yu is a bad artist, even with his panel-to-panel continuity problems in this particular issue. Because it's a fragment. The stuff that's unclear will most likely become clear given enough time (and enough mega-crossover issues, which will almost certainly cause their own type of unclarity).

As another thought, the Grand Marvel Narrative relies on extensive contextual knowledge, and this issue is no exception, but it also relies on that knowledge to be imperfect. For example, some of the very same characters on the New Avengers team have been, in past issues of other comics, replaced by Skrulls at one time or another. Iron Fist once turned out to be the Super-Skrull in disguise! None of this information is referred to in New Avengers #32, and the characters behave as if this whole any-of-us-might-be-a-skrull routine is something new and dangerous.

In many ways, to be an ideal reader of a Marvel comic book is to be totally aware of every comic book story ever, while simultaneously being able to forget about any individual issue that doesn't correspond to the current direction of the Grand Marvel Narrative. What a weird way to tell a story!

To be a good reader, however, you just have to be willing to read and put forth (at least in your mind) an interpretation of the text, with the knowledge that it's an incomplete part of a much larger whole. You might even recognize the paranoia-in-an-enclosed-space allusion to The Thing from Another World or the subtext of mistructs which stems from Spider-Woman's history of duplicity. But what a good reader should never do is say, "I don't get it" and leave it at that.


Douglas Wolk: Interesting take on the "bad readers" issue, but I'd like to rise to your bait, and counter it by inverting your conditions. (And, of course, you know as well as I do how loaded "bad" is. But we're stuck with it for the purposes of this discussion; let's just imagine however many sets of quotation marks you like around it.) I do think the way you're framing the issue puts the entire burden of understanding a text on the reader, and as you note, New Avengers #32 is kind of a mess as texts go. So let's think for a moment about how those conditions might shift all the blame to the creator. A bad cartoonist, let's say:

1) Is unable to create words or images that can be understood easily with their intended literal meaning. (Yes, I think intention is important here. "Unwilling" doesn't apply, though: I can imagine cartoonists who _deliberately_ obscure their work's literal meaning--the first example that jumps into my head is Robert Loren Fleming and Trevor Von Eeden's Thriller...)
2) Is unable to create comprehensible connections between words and images in a text.
3) Is unable to make potentially figurative language in a text function in a figurative way.
...And I don't know how to make the "irony" term fit this one. I considered something about being unable to create texts that resonate beyond their literal meaning, but I think I'd rather award extra credit for that ability than take points away for lacking it...

As for the incompleteness of New Avengers #32, though--well, there are different kinds of incompleteness. The "incomplete" exception you suggest gives any Marvel or DC superhero comic an out for both bad readers and bad cartoonists, since no author or reader can have read the entire Grand Marvel Narrative or Grand DC Narrative. (Insert Mark Waid joke here.)

Yes, this issue of New Avengers isn't a complete story. But it's a complete commercial unit of a piece of entertainment--I paid my $2.99, and that's what I got--and so I think it has the obligation to be comprehensible. I don't ask it to be dramatically complete, I'm just asking it to make sense. That's not a complaint of not making sense in the way that people complained that Seven Soldiers #1 didn't make sense (it did, actually--every bit of it was there for a reason, and I will personally explain any sequence of it to anyone who posts a bit that confused them and explains what didn't make sense to them about it). But I am as close to an ideal reader as Brian Michael Bendis and Leinil Yu could reasonably ask for right now, and with all the good will I can muster and a fairly strong working knowledge of Marvel continuity (including every issue of both New Avengers and Mighty Avengers), I simply couldn't parse significant chunks of this story.

Now, it's true that Yu isn't so hot at making a lot of the characters look like themselves (pg. 4, panel 1: the dialogue is the only cue I had that that was Hawkeye), but I didn't have a problem with the page 3, panels 5-6 transition--the "camera" is actually only swinging 120 degrees, and we get two good cues as to what's going one: we see Spider-Woman turning her head, and the dialogue is consistent with everyone's speech patterns. (Peter's just made one wisecrack, and he follows Spider-Woman's jab with another one; Wolverine is continuing his monologue from two panels earlier, with the "and if any of that is true" bit.) I also think it's possible to break the 180-degree rule in comics and get away with it if you do it in a smart enough way--there's actually an example of it that I reproduced in the Jaime Hernandez chapter of "Reading Comics," where Hernandez handles it so smoothly that it took me years to notice that it was a little raspberry at the 180-degree principle. (You can see it here.)

The bit of visual storytelling in that scene that raised my eyebrows, actually, is page 4, panel 4. Echo's got a mean expression on her face, but where exactly is she sitting in the plane? From going back and looking at pg. 2, it looks like she's sitting opposite Spider-Woman, to the right of Dr. Strange; nobody's sitting in the seat opposite Wolverine, to the right of Spider-Man. But Echo is deaf--she reads lips. Can she see Wolverine's face? And noticing that reminded me of some earlier issue of New Avengers--I don't remember which, and I'm a few thousand miles away from my longboxes--in which Echo-as-Ronin responds immediately to something Iron Man says, despite the fact that she can't see his face. Is that a clue? Or is it just sloppiness? If you're planting clues, you cannot afford sloppiness.

In any case, I can't agree that Bendis's intention is irrelevant, because whatever Bendis's intention was here is going to become Marvel canon; it'll be the extratextual information we'll need to understand future stories. We're going to find out what it was, one way or another; where it really should have been made clear, though, was here.

Timothy Callahan: I do place the onus of interpretation fully on the shoulders of the reader. A text has no responsibility to "be" anything. It doesn't have to be entertaining, or suspenseful, or funny, or even clear. It simply has to exist. Then it's up to the reader to figure it out. But, I think the reader should be expected to read the complete work before making a critical interpretation (as it's unfair to the work, for example, to interpret the entire text on the basis of a paragraph alone). As you point out, since nobody has read the entire Grand Marvel Narrative (although Peter Sanderson would probably be more likely to have done so than Mark Waid), no reader can ever make a fully-informed interpretation of any Marvel comic book, which absolutely lets the creators off the hook.

So, let's revise that standard of "complete work," for the sake of the practicality. Let's say the "complete work," in the case of a serialized Marvel comic, is a sequence of issues in which a main plot goes through a beginning, middle, and end. That is a much more reasonable expectation for the reader, but it still leaves us with an incomplete text in New Avengers #32, and thus, an incomplete interpretation. So I still have problems with jumping to conclusions about narrative issues which might be resolved more clearly when read in a larger, more complete context.

You say that a comic book which you purchased for $2.99 has "the obligation to be comprehensible." I don't know that it does. Why do you expect it to be comprehensible simply because you paid for it? I go back to my earlier point: a text has no responsibility to "be" anything.

But Tim, you would surely say, this is a piece of commercial entertainment, and thus the reader should be able to expect entertainment, and unclear, nonsensical storytelling is not entertaining in the case of New Avengers #32. I'm not sure I agree that it's not entertaining because it's unclear, but I do agree that it is quite unclear (with the reservation, once again, that it might be more clear in a slightly larger context).

So let's jump right out and assume it's unclear, but not intentionally. For the sake of argument, we'll say that Bendis and Yu are attempting to be a bit subtle (in the sense that this isn't a Silver Age comic book in which every line ends with an exclaimation point. She's a Skrull!!! I'm a Skrull, too!!! etc.), but overall they are trying to give us the information we need to fully understand the story.

I agree with you that they have failed by those standards, even though I can still comprehend the basic plot of the story which runs something like this: they are all paranoid that the rest of them are Skrulls, they crash, Spider-Woman zaps Wolverine and walks off with Elektra-Skrull's body.

It's not a non-sensical series of words and images, so it doesn't fail in that most basic regard, but it fails to fully justify the Spider-Woman turn-of-events at the end. It doesn't just ignore the "why is she doing this question?" which is a fair mystery to leave hanging, but it ignores the "what exactly is she doing and what do her facial expressions mean on that page when Wolverine growls at her?"

The most obvious interpretation, that she is a Skrull herself, is based on the visual emphasis on her green eyes on that page. Jessica Jones's baby had green eyes in the previous issue, and that was supposed to be a clue of some sort, though that was just as vague in its implication. But did Spider-Woman, as you point out, NOT have green eyes before? isn't that her natural eye color? (It is her eye color throughout the issue.) And if it's not her natural eye color, how is a reader, even a pretty-close-to-ideal reader like you or me supposed to know the green eye thing is important?

So that is an example of sloppy storytelling, especially considering how supposedly dramatic the final few pages seemed to be. It felt like watching the climax of a whodunit, except all of a sudden the audio went out.

The other thing that complicates interpretation of New Avengers #32 is that Bendis has a history, as you point out, of sloppiness with regard to bits of potential storytelling information. If you continually have to play the game of "is it a clue or a mistake?" then your interpretation is always going to be suspect (at least in your own mind). Then again, if you COMPLETELY ignore authorial intent: "was it a clue or a mistake? It doesn't matter!," then you can just interpret the text incorporating even the mistakes into a theory of meaning. It's actually exactly what Marvel used to encourage with the No-Prize. Interpret our mistakes as canon and win an imaginary prize!

I don't mind giving Bendis the freedom to be vague at the end of the issue, personally, as long as the Spider-Woman sequence is explained in the next issue. So, in that case, I require something from a text. I guess I don't require a complete story that makes sense just because I paid $2.99, but I require something from a text if it is part of a larger, unfinished narrative: I require it to complete the story eventually. Perhaps even that is an inappropriate expectation in the Grand Marvel Narrative (which will never, presumably, end).

Siege #4 Review

Yes, it's time for me to get back to linking to all my reviews, so you can keep up with the most accurate and informative and exciting and sometimes typo-laden opinion in comic books.

Today, I'll spotlight my review of "Siege" #4. It's a comic I read. It's basically Marvel's version of the final paragraph of the Gettysburg Address, covered with salsa, and thrown into the end zone into the arms of a free Plaxico Burress.

When Words Collide: A Whole Lot O' Content

Wow. Checking back, I realize that I haven't regularly posted links to my "When Words Collide" column at CBR since June of last year. Sad, really.

I won't bombard you with a list of everything I've written for CBR since then, but here are some of the things I've written in the past few months, in reverse order (the most recent stuff first):

1. Dancing with the Destroyer: How Robert Kirkman reinvigorated a Golden Age DC character and made me weep with joy.

2. Kevin Colden, Man of Mystery, Man of Scandalous Intent: The first mature-readers Zuda series and an interview with the Eisner-nominated man behind it. Yeah, that happened.

3. A Tale of Two (Comic Book) Cities: New York's MoCCA Festival vs. the Boston Comic Con? How many winners can there be? Answer: all of them. (Plus, Jack Kirby Bronze Age goodness.)

4. Frank Miller's New Gods: I linked to this when I posted the Miller story in its entirety, but it's still something worth mentioning because it's (a) Frank Miller, and (b), Jack Kirby, and (c) Darkseid. Three of my favorite flavors.

5. Brendan McCarthy is a God of Spiders and Other Things that are Good: I ruminate on "Spider-Man: Fever" and other important topics. Mostly awesome ones involving drawings by McCarthy.

6. Retcon Reviews: My controversial ironic take-down of such critically-acclaimed masterpieces as "Secret Wars II" and "Ultimatum." Zing! Take that, people who got paid to write bad comics!

7. Jorge Molina's Marvel House (Style) Party: Here's a guy trying to carve a career in mainstream superhero comics. What is that like? I wonder. So I ask.

8. Fifteen Must-Have Collected Editions that Sort of Came Out Already, Mostly: This was basically a way to remind myself what I should buy in recent months, and let people know about the goodness inside. If you're curious, I have since bought six of the books on the list. Guess which ones, and win a prize!

9. Scott Snyder: Who is This Guy? If you don't already know, Scott Snyder is the next big thing, and I've known that for a while. Plus, he's a teacher. And that makes him doubly cool. Not as cool as "American Vampire." But close.

10. Bendis, Bendis, Bendis: I spent a month writing about Bendis, including a list of the "Bendis Top Ten," plus a Three-Part Examination of the Bendis Daredevil: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3!

If you've been reading all the WWC stuff all along, thanks! If not, it looks like you'll have plenty of fun and informative and probably mind-blowing catching up to do.

Review: Ultimate Spider-Man #133 -- UPDATED

Though I use words like "tragedy" and "weighty" and "Bendis," I provide a spoiler-free review of the final issue of "Ultimate Spider-Man." But it's not very hard to connect the dots and figure out what happens, especially when I quote from the solicitations for the "Ultimate Comics Spider-Man" series headed our way later this fall.

Oh, and as an extra bonus for Geniusboy Firemelon subscribers, here's my one-sentence review of "Ultimatum" #4: It reads as if it were written by Sid from "Toy Story."

UPDATED TO ADD: Bendis, via Twitter, emphasizes that this is NOT the last issue. There are two double-sized issues left. Yet, as I pointed out to him, when Marvel.com solicitations for #133 clearly say "this final issue," then why would we assume otherwise?

Secret Invasion Reading Order via Chad Nevett

You've been clamoring for it, so Chad Nevett has gone and done it: Bendis Secret Invasion Reading Order.

The question is: Is it WORTH reading again, now that its corpse has grown cold?

What say you?

Dark Reign Hits THE SPLASH PAGE

Chad Nevett and I discussed Andy Diggle's "Thunderbolts" and Brian Michael Bendis's "New Avengers" this week, trying to determine if either book carried on the Warren Ellis legacy with any kind of quality. The first part of our discussion can be found HERE. The second part, in which we shift into looking at "Dark Reign" in concept and execution, is presented, for your reading pleasure, below:

Chad Nevett: An idea we're dancing around a bit, but needs to be addressed: does the current "Dark Reign" story actually work? I thought the attempt by Osborn to make himself look great was awful, "New Avengers" ended with Clint Barton going on TV and calling Osborn an insane supervillain, and there is the little problem of it being public knowledge that he WAS the Green Goblin... does this actually work or is it asking readers to suspend their disbelief too much?

Tim Callahan: I think that it's so ridiculous it actually works. And we should remember that the citizens of the Marvel Universe haven't read nearly as many Marvel comics as we have, so even though Osborn may have been known publicly as the Green Goblin, is that something that people think about often within the Marvel Universe itself? I mean, by showing that the superheroes constantly sayin, "um, he's the GREEN GOBLIN, people, he's evil and insane!!!" Bendis and company don't pretend that everyone in the world is ignorant, but it's also a matter of the way the average citizen views the superhero/supervillain situation differently, perhaps. So I think it's believable on two levels: (1) that the average Marvel non-superperson probably just thinks about the efforts of the costumed characters as these abstract events -- they can't be expected to keep track of who's turned evil this month, or who's reformed, or who's really caused trouble for whom. The Daily Bugle has called Spider-Man a "menace" for, what, ten billion consecutive issues? So when they see Spider-Man fight Green Goblin, doesn't that make the Goblin a "hero"? and (2) In fearful times, people don't care as much about the past behavior of their leaders -- they just want someone who will be tough and get the job done.

Maybe it's the Canadian in you that sees it as unbelievable, but in America, we've had KKK leader David Duke elected to public office, and I think Bendis mentioned in a Word Balloon interview (and I'm paraphrasing), "Look at history and tell me that we don't elect horrible people all the time."

What I enjoy about Dark Reign is that Osborn is so unstable and all of his ideas are doomed to failure. But that makes it all the more fun to watch. It's not that he's incompetent, it's just that he can't see how out-of-his-mind he truly is.

CN: Oh, I buy it as a highly entertaining premise, and that, you're right, he is good at what he does. The idea of how people living in Marvel's America see things is certainly interesting. Bendis has stressed the concept that just because we're familiar with everything, that by no means equates to the characters being aware of everything or everyone. I've liked that element of his writing quite a bit.

Even still, this is a man with a serious criminal record and shady past... would people really want him in charge of national security? Are you Americans THAT messed up? I think referencing the horrible people elected works but only to a point as this was an appointed position, obviously meant as one final slam against Bush and his insane appointments, but would Obama actually keep him? That's what "Thunderbolts" attempted to answer, but the plot was so transparent that I couldn't buy that either. It's like they've written themselves into a corner and their only solution is to go even bigger and more ridiculous in the hopes that it's so unbelievable that no one really notices (within or without the Marvel universe). In a way, Marvel's use of real life political figures hurts the premise, for me, at least. (Actually, I find that idea in and of itself quite stupid since the Marvel universe is such a drastically different world, I have to question how events could line up there and here to produce, consistently, the same presidential election results. For some reason, that bothers me.)

Since this seems a very cynical, satirical take on how easily misled people are, other people have raised the point that it doesn't actually fit with the current political climate in America where Obama's election was a cause for celebration and hope, while "Dark Reign" seems filled with cynicism and hopelessness. Your thoughts as the token American of this discussion?

TC: It does seem shockingly out of step with the times all of a sudden, but I've never really liked the way Marvel tries to mirror the "real world" anyway. Or maybe I have, but I don't anymore -- it became quite tiresome during "Civil War" and I thought the political subtext of "Secret Invasion" was the worst part about it. So if Marvel is out of step, that's really okay with me, as long as they're telling interesting stories. And "Dark Reign" is so far, so good.

But I have a history of liking the way Bendis projects begin and loathing the way they end, so there's that.

Yet, as a company-wide status quo, I'm all for "Dark Reign." Let it unfold, as ridiculous as it might be, I say.

You know what bothers me more than Obama just going along with the Osborn appointment? The way Mockingbird has all of a sudden just popped right back into Avengers action as if almost nothing has happened. It's bad enough that Hawkeye insists on wearing the Ronin costume -- which gets a nice wink in "New Avengers" when it's referred to as "Echo's" costume -- and using non-arrow weaponry, even though his primary use as a crimefighter is in his bow skills, and Clint Barton's reintroduction to superheroics was pretty understated, but Mockingbird? She returns from space after being thought dead for years, and she just kind of tags along like not much has happened? And the other Avengers just go along with it? I know Bendis gives her a bit of internal dialogue on the matter, but her inclusion with the rest of the gang seems so forced.

Do you have similar annoyances about that?

CN: I don't care enough about Mockingbird to be annoyed by it. Also, I figured that will be handled in that mini starring the two of them that I have no intention of reading. But, when you mention it, it does come across almost as "One of the gang has a new girlfriend that tags alone everywhere with them!" That the others go along with it is the thing that stands out the most, actually. She has nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, but, yeah, there should be a few moments where people stop and wonder about her. And, now that I think about it more, it does seem stupid that those questions will be answered in a mini-series that a fraction of New Avengers readers will buy. It seems stupid to do things that way. At least give some mention and expand on it elsewhere if you must, but, otherwise, it makes the better selling, more popular book look weaker. And, I know, the strategy behind this is to make people buy the mini-series in bigger numbers, but that isn't going to happen. It just flat out is not going to happen, so deal with it in another way.

One thing that really annoys me is when Bendis tries to overlap stories as he did here and in Dark Avengers #2, except they don't overlap at all. First, there's the art issue where Mike Deodato and Billy Tan draw two very different scenes, then there's the problem of the scenes playing out in two very different ways... how exactly does that work? In Dark Avengers, the conversation continues on and they go deal with Dr. Doom's problems, but in New Avengers, Spider-Woman shows up. What, did the group have two identical conversations that just happened to diverge at one moment?

TC: Maybe the cosmic battle was so difficult for human brains to comprehend that it became fragmented into dozens of different versions of the story.

Oh, wait, that's Countdown and Death of the New Gods.

No, I know: Superboy punched the wall of Bendis's house.

I don't know, really. I read that bit in "New Avengers" and honestly couldn't remember whether Spider-Woman showed up in "Dark Avengers" or not. Bendis's comics have all started to blend together into one chatty chat-fest in my brain. Maybe that's what's supposed to happen, thereby preventing us from asking any questions at all.

And I'll be reviewing that Hawkeye/Mockingbird spin-off for CBR this week, so I'll let you know if it's any good. Maybe it will get five stars, and you'll be compelled to buy it. (Maybe not.)

CN: I feel compelled to buy nothing... except for Secret Warriors. That book is damn good.

Dark Avengers #2 Review

Recently reviewed by me at CBR: Dark Avengers #2, about which I write the following sentences: "And though Bendis may enjoy writing these characters, he doesn't seem to like any of them, which frees him up to put them into motion more rapidly. He doesn't linger with the excessive banter or the decompressed character moments here. He just sets up the dogfight, pulls off the leash, and says 'go!' And they do, indeed, go. All the way to Latveria, where the team is called in to provide back up for a downtrodden Doctor Doom."

Read the entire review HERE.

Secret Invasion: Dark Reign #1 Review

Recently reviewed by me at CBR: Secret Invasion: Dark Reign #1, about which I write the following sentences: "'Secret Invasion: Dark Reign' #1 is another example of a new genre spawned by Bendis a few years back, a genre I will dub 'superhero board room.' In superhero board room, a group of costumed characters get together and talk a lot. There's usually more distrust and doubt than effective collaboration. And because it's all based on dialogue, Bendis is in his element. Now, like the 'Illuminati' before it, "Secret Invasion: Dark Reign" #1 isn't all board room conversation, but the discussion around the table is its main reason for being, and it works pretty well. We learn what we need to learn and see how these relationships might play out in the coming year."

Read the entire review HERE.

Splash Page Exclusive: Secret Invasion #8

A few technical problems prevented this week's "Splash Page" column from appearing at Sequart.org, so Chad and I decided to run it as a MAJOR, EARTH-SHATTERING, CROSS-BLOGGING EVENT! We discuss the finale of Secret Invasion. Part I is below, and Chad has posted Part II on his blog, which I link to at the bottom of our chat here. Enjoy!

Chad Nevett: The event years in the making has finally ended and I kind of dug the ending to the Skrull invasion, which, when you think about it, was a pretty awful invasion. My god, they were taken down rather quickly, weren't they? For a race of shapeshifters who can blend in and take over completely in secret, they were very out in the open and obvious. Probably why they lost. Silly aliens, don't you know not to mess with Norman Osborn, director of H.A.M.M.E.R.? Tony Stark does... and didn't the end of this issue seem like a purposeful throwback to the end of Civil War? There's plenty there, but what I really want to know is what you thought of this issue, Tim, so please share.

Tim Callahan: I was woefully disappointed, actually. The big conclusion was to describe what happened between issues? "So, yeah, after the Wasp went all spazzy, the fight got really good, and then Norman Osborn blasted the Skrull Queen, and boy, that was a good time, wasn't it?" I don't understand that narrative decision at all. The whole series built up to be the last stand of humanity (and mutantdom) against the Skrull army (which has COMPLETELY infiltrated the world's mass-media -- even Oprah!), and the last stand happens between issues and is then talked about at the beginning of this issue?

It's a baffling decision to me. (And I know there was a big fight last issue, but it was just guys showing up and punching eachother -- there was nothing special about it.)

But I guess Bendis finds people talking about epic battles to be more interesting than the epic battles themselves. That fits his modus operandi, but it doesn't make it any less weak of a climax/resolution.

And I still don't understand the in-story explanation for how the Skrulls were so quickly dispatched, either. They had spent years and years infiltrating every level of world government and media and superhero teams and secret agencies, and then that was somehow all resolved by shooting the Spider-Woman/Skrull Queen and then blowing up a few ships?

CN: Honestly, the Skrull defeat bothers me, too, and has me thinking that we'll see random Skrull sleeper agents show up in the future. Although, I will point out that just because Skrulls on TV looked like famous people, it doesn't mean they replaced those people... they are shapeshifters and one of the people in that two-page sequence was Tony Stark who we all know wasn't replaced by a Skrull. But, yeah, they were defeated rather easily, especially those fancy Super-Skrulls that combined the powers of various Marvel characters.

And, you know what, part of me really wished that the ending would be the Kree showing up in response to the messages Noh-Varr sent out, and they take over with Noh-Varr finally making good on his promise to remake Earth in the image of his home. But, then I'd be bitching about how Noh-Varr comes from an alternate reality where the Kree are millenia beyond where they are now and why would he want anything to do with any of these primative peoples who think crudely and only know small words...

To be fair, there are still Skrulls out there. JarviSkrull still has little Danielle Cage and who knows how many more are in hiding, waiting for their moment to strike?

What do you think of the rise of Norman Osborn and the fall of Tony Stark?

TC: Before I get to your last question, I want to talk a bit more about Skrulls, because, really, we haven't had enough of them lately. Yeah, I realize that the mass Skrull broadcast doesn't imply that those people were actually replaced by Skrulls, but it does imply that Skrulls have infiltrated the media ranks at least to some extent, I think. I mean they could have just transmitted the signal from their Skrull ship, but the whole "Embrace Change" campaign (which even flooded into our world!) had to have been the work of some Skrull agents working from within. My point is that all the Skrulls weren't in Central Park or on board the space ships. So what about the rest of them? It's like declaring "Mission Accomplished" years and years before the battles stopped.

And since the Kree didn't show up at the end, what was the point of all the Noh-Varr stuff, then? Why even bother to use him as part of the series, I wonder.

So, getting back to your question, I think the rise of Norman Osborn and the fall of Tony Stark happened way too fast. I don't think it sets up Dark Reign all that well. I mean, it does it efficiently, true, but the whole very sudden "Stark's out. Osborn's in" approach just seemed unearned. It needed to be explored a bit more. Once again, if it was shown and not told about, it would have been more effective I think.

I'm still just really baffled by the way this final issue felt like a synopsis of some longer story that was never told, yet the previous issue of this series felt like they were just treading water. Why not pace the series to actually show the story Bendis wanted to tell, instead of a whole lot of nothing and then, quickly, "yeah, all this other stuff happened really fast, so we're just going to recap it with narration"? I think it's a terrible narrative choice for an event book and a terrible choice for any kind of story at all.

And what about Mockingbird showing up alive? How is that earned either? She just randomly happens to be alive?

CONTINUED AT GraphiContent!

Final Crisis #4 and Secret Invasion #7 Hit THE SPLASH PAGE

Last Wednesday brought us two Morrison-penned Final Crisis comics and two Bendis-penned Secret Invasion comics, so how could Chad Nevett and I not talk about them?

Obviously, we did.

And it's really a great opportunity to contrast Morrison to Bendis, DC to Marvel, Black Lightning to Noh-Varr, and, um, let's say bacon and Canadian bacon. Probably not the bacon so much.

But Chad and I do say some pretty insightful stuff about the structural poetics of both event books, laying out deep and meaningful theories that will probably end up as citations in scholarly papers for generations to come.

Just get over to the Splash Page and read it! You'll see!

Or, as per usual, click HERE.

Okay, So the Skrulls Win And...

By now, it's pretty clear that Secret Invasion will end with the Skrulls firmly established as overlords within the Marvel Universe. Between the "Embrace Change" television ads (which some people have criticized as not looking professional enough but those people are missing the point: they're designed to be cheesy), and the new Hickman-penned Secret Warriors series and the Dark Avengers, and the fact that Bendis says he'll have to go into hiding after the final issue of Secret Invasion hits, yeah, it's pretty clear that the Marvel status quo will look something like this:

The Marvel heroes will be reduced to various rag-tag groupings of underground resistance fighters, which will serve to make them all underdogs once again (even Tony Stark) and will provide a lengthy lead-in to whatever next summer's event is, probably something called "The Uprising" or whatever. Apparently "Dark Reign" will be plastered all over the comics this winter, much the way "The Initiative" was exploited in the simpler, pre-invasive days.

So when all of this happens, what will become of Brubaker's Captain America, which has avoided cross-over contamination? Or his Daredevil, which is a street-level book anyway?

What happens to The Amazing Spider-Man? Will he stop fighting also-ran revisions of his 1970s rogues gallery to turn his attention to the Skrulls? Will the Skrulls be the villains of every single book for the rest of our comic reading lives?

What about Ghost Rider? Will he join the Dark Avengers and find out that the host of heaven is actually a Skrull plot?

I could be completely wrong about all of this, but I could be completely right, don't you think?

(Also, I like Bendis's work, but he isn't known for nailing his landings. Usually his stories don't end as well as they start. If Secret Invasion does end with, "yeah, the Skrulls won after all. Not much we can do," then that would probably take the prize as the worst ending of a crossover event ever, right? And if the Skrulls don't win, what the hell could possibly fill the void so quickly that it would be a "Dark Reign"?)

Ultimate Origins #4 Review

Recently reviewed by me at CBR: Ultimate Origins #4, about which I write the following sentences: "My allusion to the 'Star Wars' prequels wasn't hyperbole. Bendis employs the same technique George Lucas became so fond of a decade ago. He creates a story that's sole purpose is to explain how everything in the Ultimate universe connects. Instead of 'lil Darth Vader building C3P0 we get the feisty bandana-clad young Hank Pym playing around with Hulk-ified genetics. Instead of young Obi Wan failing to teach his pupil the methods of self-control we get Peter Parker's dad working for Nick Fury. I won't spoil some of the more blatant connections between the Ultimate universe of the present and what we find out in 'Ultimate Origins,' but I will say that instead of telling a thrilling story about a secret past, each page of this series saps the Ultimate universe of a bit of its mystery, and why would anyone want to see that?"

Read the entire review HERE.

Secret Invasion #6 Review

Recently reviewed by me at CBR: Secret Invasion #6, about which I write the following sentences: "Yet even here, up until the final few pages, Bendis lingers on some of the less obviously spectacular moments. It's not all punching and zapping and superheroic maneuvers in this series, and I think that's an interesting choice for an event book. Interesting and worthwhile. Because what we end up with are the tense moments between the battles. Whether it was the Ka-Zar and Shanna bits from previous issues or the Noh-Varr and Mar-Vell moment in this one, we spend much of the series on the outskirts of the conflict, dealing with the human (or Kree) anxiety. Bendis adds those moments together to provide a tapestry upon which the Skrull invasion plays out. It's a more successful approach than the one taken in 'Civil War,' for example, because that series seemed to be missing a lot of the transitional sections. It seemed more like a cool highlight reel than an escalating narrative. Here, Bendis weaves the highlights together, and except for a few pages here and there, most of the highlights focus on character and emotion, rather than on visceral thrills."

Read the entire review HERE.

Ultimate Spider-Man #125 Review

Recently reviewed by me at CBR: Ultimate Spider-Man #125, about which I write the following sentences: "'Ultimate Spider-Man' began as an experiment in decompression (let's take Spider-Man's eight-page origin, and turn it into six full issues) and cultural relevance (let's make him a teenager of today, so instead of a photographer, we'll make him an internet whiz), but it has become, after well over 100 issues, the best continued exploration of Peter Parker and the Spider-Man mythos. Bendis is able to balance the whimsical teenage nature of the character with the "weight of the world" burden and tie it all together with superhero intrigue and action. There's no great single issue of 'Ultimate Spider-Man,' though. Nothing to point to and say, 'you've gotta read THAT comic.' Instead, Bendis builds a story by the accumulation of moments, the accumulation of character detail, and the machinations of forces greater than Peter Parker."

Read the entire review HERE.

New Avengers #44 Review

Recently reviewed by me at CBR: New Avengers #44, about which I write the following sentences: "Remember all the fuss when Bendis took over 'Avengers,' blew everything up, and then launched this title with a new, very un-Avengers grouping? That seems like such ancient history, doesn't it, now that we've seen what Bendis has been planning all along? That team of Wolverine, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, Luke Cage, Spider-Woman, and the Sentry seems like a quaint little gang of heroes after everything that's happened in the past few years. If only they knew what they were in for! But those who complained that the 'New Avengers' wasn't the REAL Avengers will have even more to complain about with this issue, because 'New Avengers' #44 isn't about the Avengers at all -- new or old."

"It's about Reed Richards, of the Fantastic Four."

"But it's not even about him, really."

"It's about a clone of Reed Richards."

Read the entire review HERE.

Bendis's Avengers Hits THE SPLASH PAGE

New Avengers #39 and Mighty Avengers #11. Two very different takes on the Avengers concept, both written by Brian Michael Bendis, both released on the same day. Perhaps by exploring those two comics, one might reach a significant understanding of the state of the artform. Perhaps Bendis might teach us all how to make the world a better place, through comics.

Chad Nevett and I discuss the two comics in a very special installment of The Splash Page as we share tales of love and laughter, Skrulls and silence.

Reading the discussion will not only make you a smarter person, it will probably cure any disease known to man. Check it out HERE. Share this heart-warming moment with us, today.

Marvel Teases Us with the Digital Love

Have you guys all read the Secret Invasion prologue? It's a pretty sneaky way to try to trick us into subscribing to Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, which, by the way, is totally limited, so I don't know how they get off using Unlimited anywhere in the title. I'm pretty sure that, within the next five or six years, all the major companies will have substantial online archives that we can access for a monthly fee (it might take longer than that, since these major companies move very, very, very slowly). Marvel DCU is a step in that direction, but the lack of complete runs and the crappy interface make it less than appealing right now.

HOWEVER, subscribers get a free 7-page preview of Secret Invasion this week, although I don't know how that works, since I'm not a subscriber and I just read it. Anyway, the prologue is pretty cool, and when I started reading it, I was excited because it's all about S.H.I.E.L.D. and I thought, "wait, is Bendis ballsy enough to tell Secret Invasion from the POV of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Is it a full-on S.H.I.E.L.D. comic?" The prologue is, but when you get to the end, you'll find out that the series probably won't be.

And, thus, I'm going to throw out a major SPOILER right now, although I don't even know if it qualifies as a spoiler since it's in a free preview AND marvel_b0y already leaked it a week ago.

Dum Dum Dugan is a Skrull, and he has been since the day Captain America died. That's right true believers, check your Marvel comics from the past year, and look for all the Dum Dum appearances. That dude has been a Skrull the whole time.

Man, I can't wait until they reveal that Aunt May is one of those sneaky Manhunters.