Brian Michael Bendis Takes Siege of New York

     Brian Michael Bendis sits in a café across from the Flatiron Building in Manhattan. It’s a rainy fall day and Bendis is high on life. In the past decade, Bendis has become the primary architect of the Marvel Universe, starting with writing Daredevil and Ultimate Spider-Man, and ending with the keys to the company built by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko in the 1960s. Part of why Bendis is in New York City, from his home city of Portland, Oregon, is to catch up with the landlords of the House of Ideas.


    “The moment I get off the plane, I feel like I’ve walked onto the set of this movie I’m writing, and it’s alive and up and running,” Bendis beams over his cup of hot tea. “It’s very surreal, actually, and then it becomes about location scouting; I was doing it while we were taking pictures, and I’ll be doing it later. It doesn’t even occur to me to get in a cab, because I walk everywhere in New York. Everything is of interest. Yesterday was pouring rain, and that was of interest. I walked home all the way. Everything’s interesting, everything’s fascinating, and it’s all good story stuff.”

    Under Bendis’ tenure, the Marvel Universe has become a more noir-ish place, as heroes question their own missions and clash over beliefs, and – every once in a while – the badguys win. Bendis’ stories are also smattered with chatty dialogue and a lack of third person captions; considering what a talkative and personable guy Bendis is in real life, it’s not surprising.
 
    "Because of the continuous nature of the monthly periodical, it allowed itself a lot of exposition, and a lot of bloatedness that would not be allowed in any other type of writing, in any other world,” Bendis points out. “Then that itself became the ‘Meanwhile’ caption…and comics have been written in a cell since.

    “I asked myself ‘What do I have to add?’ I like plays and I like when characters seem to be talking at each other rather than to each other because of a monologue. I don’t like exposition-heavy dialogue, or if it’s exposition, it’s because one of the people in the room don’t know what they’re being told (which doesn’t make it exposition anymore). It’s very, very important to me:

    “Could it be applied to Spider-Man and Daredevil? It may slow down the action elements of the story a bit, but that doesn’t mean nothing’s happening, because something just as vicious could be said. That’s my journey then, and my journey now. There are a million fights and plot devices, but an unending amount of damage people can do to each other verbally. Not all of them have been done. I love a good fight scene, writing them, looking at them, and when I do it, there’s nothing more fun for me. On the other hand, Luke Cage shitting his pants because he’s worried about his baby is something I’ve never seen before, and is of interest to me.


    “When you find things superheroes haven’t done or seen before, or interactions or friendships you haven’t seen before, that’s gold, man.”

    Brian Michael Bendis grew up in Cleveland, Ohio; aside from American Splendor writer Harvey Pekar, there isn’t much comics culture there. Luckily for Brian, a couple of examples were passing through one weekend when he was an energetic twelve year-old:

    “When I was a kid, one Sunday afternoon, my dad took me to this comics show,” Brian recalls. “The one artist at the show was Swamp Thing’s John Totleben. Genius John Totleben, an amazing illustrator. But, I was so young that when I looked at his Swamp Thing art, I didn’t get it, but five years later, it’s my favorite thing in the world. But back then, I didn’t get it. I was so hungry, because I wanted to be an artist. I remember my Dad was asking questions for me, talking to John, who was very nice and was answering.

    “My Dad went ‘This show is kind of dead.’

    “John said ‘There’s a bigger show down the street, and Walt Simonson’s the guest.’

     “‘Walt Simonson!?’” Brian perks up in imitation of his younger self. “I tore out of there. I didn’t say goodbye, John Totleben couldn’t have been cooler to me with his time, and I fucking bailed. It was years later when I was just out of college and working at a comic store. That store’s owner was friends with John Totleben, and I became friends with him, too. The first few times I met him, I didn’t think he could ever remember it, because it was so hugely embarrassing. He went ‘I remember you.’ He gave me three hours as a kid, and I couldn’t even say goodbye.

    “The point is I ran down to see Walt Simonson, and had all of my stuff with me. He took me behind the counter, sat me down, laid out my work in front of everybody, and critiqued and told me what to do and where to start. I was so young that these ideas weren’t known to me. It changed my world, and I was done, and I was in, and was going to do comics forever no matter what. He changed me. I wrote him a couple of times and he would send me textbooks, and then I left him alone because I thought I’d be bothering him.”


    Bendis did grow up into a career in the comic book industry, cutting his teeth as a writer and artist at defunct black and white comics company Caliber on crime books like Fire and the more successful Jinx . In 1999, Bendis won the Eisner Award for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition, and decided to express his gratitude to the catalyst for his success:

    “I walked up to [Walter] and told him what he did for me, and now I’d won an Eisner,” Bendis reminisces. “I was waiting for the moment when I’d done something and could come up to him and say ‘You did this, you made this happen. You changed my life.’ I got him a little misty, and I’m very happy about that.

    “He looked at me and went ‘You’re not young, and you were twelve. Shit, I’m old!’ We became friends and went to Australia together, and he was so cool to me. Even at the Baltimore show last week, he was showing me his new art, and it’s the work of a younger man. My whole life has been wanting to be Walt Simonson. I don’t do a lot of shows, and with the Internet, I go to ‘Be Walt Simonson’ on the Internet.”


    Bendis’ Jinxworld.com website and message board cranked up his accessibility level to his fans by the late ‘90s. By 1999, he jumped ship from Caliber and moved over to Image Comics, where Spawn creator Todd McFarlane tapped him to author Sam and Twitch , a crime-noir Spawn spin-off that followed the two cops from McFarlane’s then top-selling comic book. Bendis put his pencil and inking tools away to focus on shaping his distinctive writing voice, and learned several lessons that would come in handy down the road.

    “I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, particularly with collaboration, which was an art form unto itself,” Brian admits. “I worked with my friends, or without any collaborators, for a lot of years, and a lot of hours alone being the writer/letterer/colorist. If it doesn’t work, it’s my fault, and if something needed fixing I would fix it…

    “The year or two years I was on Sam and Twitch was very good in learning how to collaborate: you write for the artist, not write what you would draw, but write what they should draw and try to see the world through their eyes. I wasn’t totally there yet, but I was very close. Without those two years, I would’ve stumbled through writing Ultimate Spider-Man more than I would’ve otherwise. Also, I think it’s because I didn’t break in in my early twenties or teens, and I just started writing what I would like to read.

    “When you’re in indy comics, you just write the book you want to read: ‘No one else is making this book, so I’m going to make the book I would like to read.’ That’s what I applied to my work, and it’s done me right. I found (not just for me but for other people, as well) that if you feel ‘I would totally buy this,’ someone else will see that as a true statement of expression. Sometimes with mainstream comics or genre writing in general, the writer and characters can get lost. But if you keep to that central idea of ‘I would buy this, it means something to me,’ someone else will agree. That’s something I learned in indy comics. Also, when you’re going eight years of not making a dime, then it’s still not about money. I can honestly say that. Yeah, I get a variant cover on a book and that’s great and people like those, but that doesn’t matter to me. I don’t come at it with ‘How much money can I make on these?’”


    After a lengthy run on Sam and Twitch, McFarlane fired Bendis from the title. Bendis would be more than fine, however, as he was gearing up for the next and unexpected phase of his career.

    Marvel Comics was re-emerging from declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy, fighting a then-dying marketplace. When creative partners Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti were tapped by Marvel to produce a line of four titles under the imprint of “Marvel Knights”, the pair staged a coup by drafting cult film maker Kevin Smith to write the first several issues of the failing comic book Daredevil.

    The second arc was written by Bendis’ old friend and collaborator, cartoonist David Mack, who did Bendis a favor that resulted in Brian’s new residency at the House of Ideas.

    “My friend David Mack was doing Daredevil, and I went ‘Show Joe my stuff, Dave!’ Brian says. “He did, and then Joe called me and asked me what I wanted to do, and I wanted to do Nick Fury. I wanted to do Dr. Strange. I pitched what everyone pitches. Nick Fury almost happened with Bill Sienkewicz, and that fell apart, so I thought ‘Oh, man, back at the end of the line again. Here I go.’

    “Joe called me up again and said ‘You know what we need, if you want to do this, is we need Daredevil. Kevin’s late, and I’m late, and the book’s our flagship Marvel Knights title and is off the rails schedule-wise. If you come back in for an arc, it would help us get back on track. Is that something you want to do? In fact, why don’t you and David Mack do it together?’

    “I wrote back, thinking it was going to be cancelled again, and did two issues in a weekend. I wrote my little ass off and it was the story ‘Wake Up ’.”


    “Wake Up” follows newspaper reporter Ben Urich, as he gets drawn into the life of a former super-villain’s troubled young son. The story deals more with child abuse than the struggles of costumed heroes and villains, viewed through the everyman lens of Urich. After finishing “Wake Up,” Bendis got handed a defining assignment by Quesada, one that led to a record-breaking run by any creative team on a comic book..

"I was a big fan of guys who had lengthy runs: I like Gil Kane as the Green Lantern guy; he did a million things after, but two of the first five words in his obituary were ‘Green Lantern’. I know that when I die, Spider-Man will be somewhere in the first sentence, and that’s fine by me."


    “I handed [‘Wake Up’] in and then Joe calls me up and goes ‘Hey, do you like Spider-Man?’,” Brian continues.

    “I go ‘I love Spider-Man.’

    “‘How much of a nerd are you?’

    “‘I’m on it. I’m a Marvel kid.’

    “He goes ‘Do you know who Bill Jemas is?’

    “‘No.’

    “‘Bill Jemas is the new Publisher, and he’s starting this thing called Ground Zero comics. If you want to start Spider-Man over from scratch, is that something that would interest you?’

    “I go ‘Yeah.’

    “Then Joe goes ‘You’ll get a call from him, and if you don’t want to do it, that’s okay, we’ll find someone else.’ Of course I wanted it; another writer had had it before me, and he had made the mistake I would’ve made, which is slavishly adapt Amazing Fantasy #15.”

    Marvel’s pride has always been a solid continuity since the 1960s, unlike rival DC Comics, who has constantly restarted their superhero series anew. When Ground Zero Comics was first announced, the fan reaction was not entirely favorable, particularly since artist John Byrne had just unsuccessfully updated Spider-Man’s origin in 1998 with the Spider-Man: Chapter One. Taking the assignment placed a bullseye on Bendis’ bald pate.

    “With great power comes great responsibility’ is ultimately the story that you’re telling,” Bendis reflects. “It wasn’t broken, so you didn’t have to fix it. I went about telling the story how we would do stories today: Uncle Ben originally died on panel sixteen because Stan and Steve only had about eleven pages to tell the story. When you read it, it’s like a Cliff’s Notes of this other story. I said ‘I’ll write that other story, and not the Cliff’s Notes version.’

    “It’s not enough to say ‘Uncle Ben’s dead, let’s be sad’ Let’s make you feel it.

    “When the book started coming out, people thought Aunt May would die instead. They still think things need to be fixed, but it’s not even broken.”

    In the summer of 2000, the newly rechristened Ultimate line premiered with Ultimate Spider-Man #1, which wasn’t as bad as we all worried it would be. It was, surprisingly, a clever retelling of Spider-Man’s origin story, trading a radioactive spider for a genetically-engineered one and taking its time in telling the story.

    Bendis’ take on Peter Parker’s Uncle and Aunt were old hippies, with Ben sporting a ponytail and May plucky and active. Rather than a cub photographer, Peter Parker was now a web designer at the Daily Bugle. Even villains like the Green Goblin come out different than their classic counterparts, with the masked villain now a hulkish brute.

    “It was going to be called Ground Zero comics, which would have been the worst marketing ever in the history for the planet,” Brian admits, citing the Ground Zero name for the remains of the World Trade Center a year later. “You know what? It was weird when it first got announced, people were jumping out of line. Immediately, my enemy was ambivalence and indifference, which is fine, because I used to wear it like a warm blanket. I was filling up a nice Internet thing with the board, and then I went ‘Hey, I’m doing Spider-Man!’ People went ‘Fuck you!’ because Chapter One and other things that had been tried, left a bad taste in their mouth.”

    Marvel’s Publisher Bill Jemas became more known for his grand-standing and outrageous behavior to the fan press, something that Bendis feels helped bring notice to the struggling Marvel.

    “Some times when Bill Jemas would talk to the press, he’d say something and then leave, and I would be left there going ‘What did he say?’ One of the funniest things he ever said was when I was doing an Elektra book at Marvel Knights, and it was a dark spy thriller. He said ‘This is going to be the book for you fanboys when you’re alone on a Friday night, just to take care of you.’

    “He was a ballbuster and he was funny, and a lot of that’s what we needed at the time, because Marvel was digging themselves out of a big deep hole. You need a guy out there stirring shit up and taking shots at everybody. Sometimes he went over the top, which is not how I would do things, but I would laugh at it. Him and Joe put on quite a show, and it’s absolutely what we needed. It was undeniable.”


    Ultimate Spider-Man also established Bendis and artist Mark Bagley as a long-running creative team, clocking in at a full 111 issues together, eclipsing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s legendary 102 issue  run on Fantastic Four in the 1960s. The Ultimate comics line was an unexpected success, and continues to run today. The Ultimate line also started recap pages at the beginning of each issue, which brought new readers up to speed, something that changed how writers tackled each issue.

    “We did everything we were supposed to do originally and got everyone off their ass,” Brian notes. “Most of these weren’t my idea: the recap letters page, the way the Internet was being used for the audience, people across the board across Marvel Comics, to the point where you couldn’t tell that the Ultimate line isn’t that differently done from the main Marvel. There weren’t the recap pages before, that happened and then the writers could go ahead without having to worry about exposition. It absolutely changed the language of comics, without question. That’s Bill Jemas.”

“If you stay away from New York for too long, you wind up writing Woody Allen’s New York or Martin Scorcese’s New York, like some other fictionalization of a city, and you want to write your own (whatever version that it is), so you come back as often as you can…

    “I try to write the New York City New York and add elements to it. I don’t try to write anyone else’s. Stan Lee’s already done his New York, and Woody Allen’s already done Woody Allen’s New York; I’m just going to do a shittier version of it, and if no one wants it, at least it’s my thing.”


    While crafting Ultimate Spider-Man, Bendis was also becoming more firmly entrenched in Daredevil , a book that he was initially writing a story arc at a time.

    “When I first got these jobs, I was still freelance,” Brian explains. “You can plan all day long, but you’re only as good as your next issue. I was hired on Daredevil until Kevin Smith came back. I had been fired from Sam and Twitch, and Alex Maleev was still on it. He did a few, and then called me up and said ‘What are you doing now?’ and I could tell he was saying ‘Can I come over?’

    “I asked Joe ‘Are you a fan of Alex?’

    “Joe said ‘I’m a huge fan of Alex’s.’

    “‘Can we find something for him to do?’

    “‘Daredevil! Daredevil! I’d want to read that! You guys do Daredevil until Kevin comes back.’”

    Smith’s return to Daredevil never materialized, and Bendis found himself more fully taking on the reins of the title, now with the photo-realistic Maleev as regular artist. Bendis’ direction redefined Daredevil as a character, shattering the status quo.

    “Then it became clear that Kevin wasn’t coming back, and I came up with the Owl storyline. If you do that, you have to go the distance with it, and can’t just drop a bomb and leave. The point is to find an angle on the book and then enjoy it from every aspect of that angle, and then find what new stories you can get out of that idea.


    “I pitched it ‘He’s told every girl he’s ever made out with that he’s Daredevil. Kingpin knows he’s Daredevil. Out of all the superheroes in the world, he’s the one in the most danger of being outed, and has the most to lose. I know he’s been outed, but he’s not outed – out him. That’s what the book’s about. This Marvel Comic’s about the superhero who has been outed , and it can never go back. And guess what? He’s a