Avengers #8 is, like, 22 pages of people asking questions and answering questions with questions before then repeating those questions, repeatedly.
Brian Michael Bendis, an author who has written some of the best, cleverest, most creative comic books of the last ten years, has become a motherfucking parody of himself. It makes me sad. He was always known for his crude attempts at comic-book-channeling David Mamet, to varying degrees of success, but recently, the man has gone too far.
Case in point:
Iron Man wants to wait for the others. If you couldn’t tell!
The thing is, any one of these strings of dialogue, where somebody says something and then says it again, would be fine by itself. But that’s not the issue here. The issue is that everybody talks exactly like this, over and over and over again. Everybody repeats themselves, over and over and over again. Tiny speech bubble after tiny speech bubble. Dialogue staccato. Verbal vomit. It makes me not want to read the adjectiveless Avengers anymore, but then I realize that bad comics are what this blog is all about.
Will somebody please tell Dr. Strange and Namor what has happened???
“No.” “No?” “NO!” “No??” “NOOOOOOO.” “No….?” “NO! NO! NO!” “No, no, no?”
Whereas normal human beings would just say “What has happened?” a single time, followed by the person with the answer to that question laying out all the deets for however damn long that would take, here we have a bunch of OCD assholes asking variations of the same goddamn question repeatedly between bits and pieces of the answer. Strange has moved on from asking “What has happened” to “when” and “which one.” Thankfully, Blackbolt’s lady has taken up Dr. Strange’s original quest and is now asking “What has happened?” in his stead. Twice over! Even when Reed Richards gives them information, like, “I’ve got the red gem,” Iron Man has to repeat it. “The red one? Is that what you just said? Is the red one the one that you have or had or whatever whatever whatever? Oh, my! The red one! Red! Red! Red! Reeeeedddddd.” No, please, let’s keep wasting all this time talking while the Earth’s survival is at stake.
“We took the infinity gems out of circulation” followed by the Medusa creepily repeating “Infinity gems.” Just in case you didn’t catch it when Reed said it the first time. Reed Richards says: “Blablabla Infinity Gems give the user complete control of everything.” Namor: “Everythiiinnnnng.” Richards: “We each took one.” Professor X: ”For safekeeping.” Medusa: “You took them?” Me: “What, are you fucking deaf?! He just said that!! That’s what we’ve been talking about this whole fucking time!!!” Followed by Richards: “For safekeeping.” We know, Reed! We know it was for safekeeping! Professor X just fucking said it was for safekeeping! YOU DON’T NEED TO DO THAT TOO GODDAMMIT!!!!!
Iron Man and Professor X refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer.
Reed Richards explains that no alarm went off when his Gem was stolen. Followed by Professor X saying, “No alarm?” Jesus Christ, Xavier. Not you, too, man. NOT YOU TOO. When Iron Man asks him if they got the intruder on camera, Richards says, straight up, NO. Couldn’t be more clear than a simple, straight up NOOOO. But that’s not good enough for Iron Man! He hasn’t gotten to the bottom of this barrel! The Iron Dickheaded Detective’s on the case! So he digs and digs and digs because that’s what detectives do and then throws everyone for a loop by asking: “No?”
NO, Iron Man. NO, the intruder didn’t get caught on camera. Do you not understand how this question and answer shit works? Someone says NO to your question, it means no! There needn’t be a follow-up!!!!!!!!!
THAT’S THE SAME MOTHERFUCKING QUESTION, DR. STRANGE!!! YOU’RE ASKING THE SAME MOTHERFUCKING THING!!!! TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE! A MAN HAS STOLEN MAGIC GEMS THAT CAN CONTROL THE VERY REALITY AROUND YOU, CAN DESTROY THE WHOLE OF THE UNIVERSE, AND YOU’RE JUST REPEATING THE SAME SHIT OVER AND OVER AGAIN AD NAUSEUM!!! GAHHHHAHAHAHAHGHGHGHGHGH!! SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GO DO SOME SUPERHERO UNIVERSE SAVING BUSINESS YOU LAZY SONSABITCHES.
In real life, people repeat things. A lot. Sometimes too much. I agree with this, and I agree that fiction should reflect that to a great extent (though probably less so in an Avengers comic, but whatever). The truth is, I’m a huge fan of colloquial dialogue. But there’s a point where colloquial writing turns into just plain lazy, hackneyed horseshit. Bendis has crossed over from the former to the latter. Did he just insert the names “Iron Man,” “Dr. Strange,” “Namor, “Professor X,” “Reed Richards,” and “Medusa,” as well as “Infinity Gems,” into a random comic book dialogue generator? Because that’s what this feels like.
The best possible course of action for Bendis, in my opinion, is to stop writing Avengers books. Just stop, man. For the longest time, I was okay with you writing New Avengers, but that time has come and gone. Move on. Even Dark Avengers was good until The Sentry had the weakest resolution of any superhero/villain ever. There’s no reason Brian Michael Bendis shouldn’t be able to write one or two books at Marvel, but when he’s writing so many, and so many flagship books at that, he’s just spreading himself too thin and tainting the waters of Marvel, A.K.A. the Bendis-verse. It makes everything so…boring. And stale. And now, what with all the repeating, really fucking annoying, too.
P.S. The best part about this comic is Lockjaw: “Mrrrfff.” In fact, I would go as far as to say that it’s the only dialogue Bendis does right. (Though he had a lot of help from the awesome John Romita Jr.)
