Bendis for Beginners, by Andrew Wheeler.
"Around 1982, I guess, or somewhere around there... I had pretty much decided I had found my calling. I knew as sure as I knew anything that I was going to be a comic artist. A great comic artist. A legend comic artist. I was going to be George Perez."
- Brian Michael Bendis, My Blue Heaven.
Seven days ago I had never read anything by Brian Michael Bendis. Today, I am writing an introduction to his works. As you might expect, the intervening seven days have been a real education.
My editor had been raving at me to go out and read some Bendis. Since he is prone to sulking when he doesn't get his own way, I demurred and headed out to the shops. The names of the books I was looking for did not fill me with confidence. JINX and GOLDFISH sounded like happy, chirpy, comedy book about wide eyed anthropomorphic animals getting up to all sorts of mischief, to say nothing of SAM & TWITCH, who could so easily be two fluffy, lovable bunny rabbits.
It sounded dangerously saccharine for an old noir fan like me, and I worried that my editor had sent me on a suicide mission where I would be driven to the brink of sanity and forced to take the coward's way out. Perhaps if I had known the titles of Mr. Bendis' other works, such as TORSO, FIRE and TRUE CRIME CONFESSIONS, I would have had a little more hope. In any event, I went into my comic shop and asked the guy at the counter if he had anything by Bendis that I could read without buying all the back-issues.
He gave me a book called POP CULTURE HOO-HAH, a JINX special. I would later learn the reason this needed no back-issues was because this had nothing to do with the ongoing JINX series at all. In fact, it wasn't even typical of Bendis' work. This book was a compilation of Bendis cartoons from the CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER magazine. They weren't hard bitten pulp, but they weren't fluffy talking animals either. It was a compromise.
The cartoons varied from autobiographical stories to anecdotes to satires, mostly told in a cartoon form. The last category includes pieces such as "What I Learned From The Summer Movies", and "If Elvis Had Lived". Anecdotes about bad dates and JFK's tailor were more intricately drawn, in a fairly documentary style. The rest of the book tended towards the cartoon style, but it was in pieces such as the closing Christmas miracle story and the brilliantly paced "The Real Thing" that Bendis' talents started to shine through for me.
In his text-driven coming of age narrative "My Blue Heaven", quoted at the start of this article, Bendis explains how, at the age of 17, he tried to draw a frame by frame adaptation of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. After 40 pages, he still hadn't made it past the opening credits. It was an abortive notion, but one which Bendis claims set him on the path towards learning the basic tools of graphic narrative, especially pacing and building a story. "My Blue Heaven" also illustrates another of Bendis' skills. He describes the story as a "pretty close to true tale". As I was soon to learn, "close to true" is very nearly a Bendis trademark.
Another JINX special bearing no relationship to JINX is BURIED TREASURES, which contains more cartoons from the PLAIN DEALER, plus a series of collaborations with talented writers such as Warren Ellis, James D Hudnall and Mark Ricketts. Bendis clearly saw this as a great opportunity to play with visual storytelling methods, and it highlights his enthusiasm for finding new ways of breaking basic page structure without sacrificing readability. This is especially apparent in Warren Ellis' "Better Living Through Chemistry", in which a simple nine frame page is approached in a variety of imaginative ways, and in Mark Ricketts' "Nowheresville", which consists entirely of a Bendis favourite trick; using photographs to tell the story. Brian Michael Bendis is quite rightly unrepentant in his use of life models for his work. Again, it allows him to flirt with realism, without quite having to commit.
Next on the list on my Bendis reader was GOLDFISH, in which no goldfish were present, anthropomorphic or otherwise. In fact, GOLDFISH is much more typical of both Bendis and JINX than POP CULTURE HOO-HAH. GOLDFISH is the story of a grifter drifting back to home to take back the child he left behind when he rode out of town. It is a gangster story. It is noir. Perhaps not as widely acclaimed as JINX, it is none the less a very accomplished piece of storytelling which reads like an urban fable, complete with one of the most gleefully melodramatic villainesses in comicdom. (Lauren Bacall. Not the one you're thinking of.)
The spine of the book reads "Crime Fiction" - a sign that either the publisher or the creator, or both, wanted the book to be considered alongside others of its genre, not its medium. Like most strong noir protagonists, Dave Gold is definitely heroic, somewhere beneath his veneer of sidewalk grime, and has a very fixed sense of what is acceptable, and what goes too far (as opposed to abstract notions of "right" and "wrong"). Still, he's not pure hearted and square jawed. He's not your average comic book hero.
Nor is he your average human. The spine does not lie. This is crime fiction, and as with all crime fiction, the complex, amoral lives of the underworld classes it represents is not a life you would likely recognise, even if you were a crook. This is the magic reality of noir, where the human condition is fixed in tragedy, and the asphalt shadows are poured on thick. Not "true crime stories", and certainly not "crime fact", but something with all the right echoes and a little more jazz.
SAM & TWITCH takes things a step further. In a brave move for both McFarlane Productions and Bendis himself, SAM & TWITCH is a detective story series for a major "super-hero" imprint. The two detectives share their world with SPAWN, the book from which they originate, but this is not a SPAWN series. In his introductory "Crime Reports" column, Bendis suggests that "some of you... may have just read your first comic that didn't have a super hero or some sort of fantastical element in it". It is a noble ambition, to want to introduce readers trapped in the fantasy genre to other types of story, but to be honest, SAM & TWITCH is also fantastical, in its own unique way. The first story arc hints at things which are just the other side of science-fiction insanity. It's not FORBIDDEN PLANET, no, but it isn't entirely Chandleresque either.
Brian Michael Bendis prides himself on his research method of going out to interview the people who do the jobs of the characters he intends to write about. In other words, he has life models for his writing, as well as his art. Yet in both words and visuals, Bendis refuses to be a slave to the source material, because the real world is not the one he wants to write about. His world is like this one, only better paced, more exciting, glamourous and grim. His world is only close to true.
When he was a boy, Brian Michael Bendis wanted to be George Perez, one of the foremost artists in super-hero comics. Thankfully, when it comes to being George Perez, George Perez is still doing an excellent job. Brian Michael Bendis will have to remain himself, and continue to explore that world of his own. The next generation of comic book pros? They probably want to be Brian Michael Bendis.
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