Hi, there, I’m David Harth, and this is a new article series for our humble little website. In it, your esteemed reviewers will pick books that are near and dear to us or merely books we kind of want to savage and present to you, our rollicking readers, why we love or hate them. If we’re being honest, there are plenty of places you can go to get content like this, but personally, as someone who grew up with Wizard magazine, I’ve always found a lot of this kind of scrutiny to be lacking. Sure, they present the books and talk about them, but a lot of the time their critical analysis boils down to, “Well, we think this book sucks,” or conversely, “We think this is awesome.” That’s not precisely critical, and I think all of us here at You Don’t Read Comics can do better.
Also, I’m personally sort of jealous of their YouTube money, so $%^# them (I don’t know if we can curse here, so I’m just going to go the tried and true comic method of using a bunch of symbols. I’m sure you can get the gist of them through context clues, much like you have for years with Marvel and DC books).
This concept is sort of my brainchild, so I’m taking on a curator role. Due to circumstances in my personal life, I suddenly have tons of free time. Therefore I’ll probably be banging out a bunch of these out in the coming months, and you’ll get used to my individual viewpoints, but my comic-loving colleagues will also be coming on to present their own takes on books they love and/or hate. We hope you enjoy this little space and that it inspires to pick up some of the great and not so great comics we talk about and decide for yourselves.
Now that the housekeeping is out of the way, let’s dive in, shall we?
The Bendis Superman Run
So, if you keep up with the website, you might know that I’m the Superman guy. I review Superman and Action Comics. I also wrote an article a year ago about why we should all give Bendis a chance on these books before dismissing them (here’s a link- https://www.youdontreadcomics.com/articles/2018/4/17/bendis-is-coming-an-exclamation-or-a-warning). I think that in comic circles, a lot of people felt Bendis would be a weird fit for Superman, especially after the stellar Rebirth runs these books had. Bendis’ style is rather dialogue-heavy, eschewing a lot of the action that a Superman book should have. He’s also not known for his ability to capture individual voices and his ignoring of continuity that doesn’t fit the story he’s telling. These are somewhat problematic on their own and worked to sour a lot of readers right out of the gate when the announcement was made.
So, we’re about a year removed from Bendis taking over the books. How have these comics held up? Are they really worth reading still? If you’ve been reading my reviews, you may have gotten an inkling of my opinion on this, but I’m going to present my arguments here in a more extensive and hopefully more coherent context.
Yes, I’ll try and stop and doing the alliteration thing. This isn’t Stan’s Soapbox, and I’m not Stan. You know that because I would have given Kirby and Ditko way more credit and went to bat for them, unlike he did.
Too soon?
Okay, on to the meat and potatoes.
Superman
So, if you’ve read my reviews of Superman, you’ll see that I generally enjoy the book. One of the things that scared me the most about Bendis and Superman was his handling of Superman’s voice. If we’re being honest, over the years, Bendis has only written a handful of characters where he actually captured their individual voice. Here’s a short list of ones I think he got right: Spider-Man, Wolverine, Luke Cage, Daredevil, Captain America, Jessica Jones (although since he created her, that’s sort of a cheat). Then there's Norman Osborn, the Sentry, Ares, Bullseye, and Iron Man (or he at least matched what was being done with Ol’ Shellhead in other books. Iron Man hasn’t had a consistent voice until recently, and that was mostly just the writers aping RDJ). That may seem like a lot, but we’re talking about a writer who has written most of the Marvel Universe at some point or another. Pretty much every other character he writes is basically a version of Spider-Man: a quippy smart aleck or he makes most of his female characters into Jessica Jones lite.
This is a big problem. It really blends in with Bendis' consistent ignoring continuity. One of the greatest strengths of this little medium we love can be its consistency. Writers work hard to keep the characters recognizable in a lot of ways while still giving them growth and their individual voices are a big part of that. Ignoring that because you think that smart-alecky quips are awesome is extremely disrespectful both to what came before and the characters themselves. It’s bad enough to do it to the vast majority of the Marvel Universe, but to do it to the originator of our fine medium? The first superhero?
Yeah, that would have been sacrilege.
On this count, Bendis is not only pretty blameless, but he actually does a great job presenting Superman. Superman is his big superhero book, so readers mostly get Superman, and not Clark Kent, as the star and Bendis has captured the way Big Blue speaks and acts very well. For the most part. I’m not exactly a fan of Superman leaving to go smash things when he gets frustrated, but I can understand why Bendis has him do it. Other than that, his portrayal of Superman as a character is pretty much spot on, and it even shows that Bendis has some love and respect for the character. Superman isn’t a humorless titan, so Bendis’ jokes actually land in a way that, for me at least, they rarely did in his Marvel books. Reading his Superman mostly feels like the same Superman I’ve been reading for most of my life. His portrayal is authentic, but it doesn’t really take too many chances with who he is. Other than his little tantrums humanizing the character, Bendis is presenting a straight up classic Superman.
This being his big superhero book, we have to look at one of Bendis’ main deficiencies as a writer- his handling of action scenes. I can only speak for myself, but Bendis is a writer who has never met a 22-page comic he can’t fill with twenty pages of dialogue and one two page action scene that is ultimately disappointing. Even when his action scenes get more page real estate, they aren’t exactly great. They mostly feel like things that are happening in the background of the dialogue. This has been a big problem for me, and a lot of other fans, especially in his event books. I know people love t, but I was reading it as it came out and it was boring. So very $%^&ing boring, and it’s one of my least favorite events ever. I’ll re-read it sometimes to make sure I still hate, and I always do. And his Avengers books, where he was known for teasing a fight on the last page of an issue and then starting the next issue after the fight, giving readers the heroes some lackluster flashbacks. This style of action writing would not work for a Superman book. Superman isn’t all about fighting everyone, but when he does, it has to be the type of fight a reader feels. All-Star Superman isn’t filled with titanic tussles (sorry), but it’s not telling that kind of story, and it doesn’t need them. It helps that the few fights in the book are clever and well choreographed and, of course, that Grant Morrison is writing it. Bendis will never be Grant Morrison (one day, I’ll let you readers in on my theory about Bendis and his jealousy of Morrison; it’s quite convincing, to me at least).
Right off the bat, Bendis did some big stuff in this book, throwing Earth into the Phantom Zone. This is sort of a classic Silver Age kind of idea, and it works very well in the book. Of course, it mostly seems to serve as a way for Bendis to build his OC villain, Rogol Zaar, and because of that, it feels a little… soon, honestly. Readers had just gotten six issues of the villain in Man Of Steel (which I will not be talking about in any depth here; however, I thought it was mostly a pretty great series, here are all the links- (https://www.youdontreadcomics.com/comics/2018/5/29/man-of-steel-1?rq=Man%20of%20Steel, https://www.youdontreadcomics.com/comics/2018/6/6/man-of-steel-2?rq=Man%20of%20Steel ,https://www.youdontreadcomics.com/comics/2018/6/12/man-of-steel-3?rq=Man%20of%20Steel,https://www.youdontreadcomics.com/comics/2018/6/20/man-of-steel-4?rq=Man%20of%20Steel,https://www.youdontreadcomics.com/comics/2018/6/26/the-man-of-steel-5?rq=Man%20of%20Steel, https://www.youdontreadcomics.com/comics/2018/7/3/the-man-of-steel-6?rq=Man%20of%20Steel) and the jury was definitely still out on him. Personally, I like him but I feel like Bendis was trying to hype him a little too much and this shows by having him be the main villain of the first story arc. That said, the first six issues proved to be a great mix of action and plot. The fight scenes weren’t particularly long, even when they could be, but they were exciting and well choreographed, something he has struggled with in the past. A lot of this comes down to the art team of Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Oclair Albert, and Alex Williams. Together, they made each fight feel epic no matter what the page real estate was and they always looked great. Reis’ work sometimes lacked the detail he was known for on books like Green Lantern and Blackest Night, granted, depending on the inker, but his pencils are quite dynamic, and he does sci-fi battles like no one’s business (until later in this series, but stay tuned for that). Plus, his Rogol Zaar is big and intimidating, which is perfect for a character that needs more work.
I loved the solution to the Phantom Zone problem. As I said earlier, the Phantom Zone thing had a very Silver Age feel to it, and the resolution played that up. It borrowed a little bit from Darwyn Cooke’s seminal New Frontier, although it lacked the explosive outcome, it worked perfectly for me. I loved Rogol Zaar getting an army, making him even more dangerous. The first story arc was great, and I would recommend it to anyone, honestly.
The next one, though, is where Bendis started to Bendis. A lot of people saw the covers to these books and thought we were going to get an Edge-lord Jon Kent, something no fan of the character (and it’s safe to say that just about everyone who read him in the Rebirth books or Super Sons is a fan of him) would ever wanted to see. Bendis doesn’t go through with that although the character has done some maturing. That said, Bendis really leans hard on his dialogue-heavy ways in this arc, keeping the action down as Jon and Lois describe their time with Jor-El.
Now, another misstep that is very much related to the Rogol Zaar one is Bendis bringing Lois and Jon back so soon. I’ll talk about that more in my Action Comics breakdown, but it definitely feels like he didn’t have a lot of faith in these plot points, just like he thought he had to keep hyping Zaar. Now, as a fan, I didn’t exactly like it either, but I was interested in seeing how long he would keep the Kent family apart and what he would do with it. I figured we’d get some more tantrums and brooding and such, followed by the characters’ return. I don’t think anyone would have predicted what we got, though, and that’s a good and bad thing. Good, because predictability is bad. Bad, because, well, so far the story hasn’t been great. Jor-El is crazy? Yeah, we got that, thanks. Add to that Bendis doing some patented continuity ignoring (how exactly did Jor-El come back after Dr. Manhattan took him out?), and this story felt like it died on the vine from the beginning. There’s just not a lot that is interesting about it.
He brings in the Crime Syndicate of America and Earth-3, which at first seemed like some more patented Bendis continuity ignoring, and barely does anything with them. Ultraman throws Jon in a volcano and then shows up periodically to berate him because… reasons? It’s a plot point that goes nowhere and does nothing. It takes up way too many pages, pages that could have been better used showing Jon dealing with Earth-3’s topsy turvy world after he escapes. Instead, readers get some quicky caption boxes telling them about his time there but not showing us nothing. In visual storytelling, telling and not showing is a grave sin and it’s one that Bendis commits way too often (I mean ever read any Bendis books ever? It’s basically his style at this point). The next issue, #10 and the last current issue, is a vast improvement. It’s not an action blockbuster, although the opening chase scene between Jon and Superwoman is exciting if a little short, but it does a great job of mixing interesting plot points with a foreshadowing of what comes next… which, sure, is more Rogol Zaar, but it’s rather exciting because his army is out of the Phantom Zone somehow and ready to run amok. Plus, he explains how the CSA and Earth-3 are around after the events of Darkseid War and Forever Evil, both of which are still canonical, without ignoring either story.
The art on the second arc is handled by the team from the first arc and Brandon Peterson, who draws (and inks and colors his own stuff; he’s so #$%^ing great) the flashback sequences and they are a treat. Peterson’s super slick and detailed pencils are lovely. As good as Reis has been at sci-fi, Peterson is even better, his ship designs and such feeling real and looking so good. Reis’ pages suffer from the same lack of detail in places that they did in the first arc, but he doesn’t have that much to draw, so it’s not as bad. Peterson has been in the business for a long time now, and his style has developed wonderfully. If this is what he’s capable of, DC should give him so much work, especially on sci-fi stuff (Unsolicited opinion, thank you very much).
I bet you think I’m going to give you my opinion on whether you should be reading this book now, eh? I mean, that’s what we’re building up to, a climax…
… but nope, gonna switch positions on you. Let’s talk about…
Action Comics
*sigh*
I’ll be honest with you- I felt like Action Comics would be a much better book when I read Bendis’ initial ideas for it. It was going to be the quiet Daily Planet centric book, something that was right up Bendis’ alley. I was excited to see what he would do with the newsroom and the characters. The first two issues, setting up the Invisible Mafia and the Red Cloud, were intriguing. A secret group of criminals who realized what they were dealing with in Metropolis and catered their criminality accordingly to make sure that Superman would never learn about them and succeeded? That’s some great stuff right there, and it felt like something Bendis could do such justice to, almost like a throwback to his Daredevil stuff.
He managed to screw up it, though.
First off, bringing back Lois and devoting so much time in the middle of the story arc to that kind of killed dead any momentum the idea had. The return of Lois didn’t really serve that story at all, and it took a great idea and hamstrung it. Secondly, you have the most egregious of character continuity ignoring- Lois saying that being a family, a Super family, didn’t work.
That’s the exact moment that the book got me mad.
See, I had just got done reading nearly two years of Superman stories showing that not only did it work, but it was the most entertaining Superman had been in years. Both in the real world and in-universe, Superman is the father of modern superheroes. He was the Alpha, giving birth to all who came after him. In the DCU, he was the guy all of the heroes came to for advice on how to be a hero and when they needed a leader, he was the guy. Readers were used to that, but Tomasi, Gleason, and Jurgens showed us Superman as an actual father with a family we never even knew we wanted and, I think I’m entirely justified in speaking for everyone on this one, we loved it. #$%ing loved it. They proved Marvel wrong with their whole “No one wants to read about superheroes with families” guff that destroyed Peter Parker and Mary Jane’s marriage, something most fans reading comics at the time had grown up with and did it masterfully. They showed us that with the right writers on board, the superhero family could work perfectly. For myself, I wasn’t super into Superman when Rebirth started. Beyond Grant Morrison’s Action Comics run, the New 52 Superman did nothing for me and, besides, Morrison’ pretty much rendered every other Superman story invalid. I still liked the character, but I had already read the ultimate Superman story. I couldn’t see what they could do to make me really love the character again.
Rebirth changed all that, presenting readers with a new vision of Clark and Lois and gave us Jon. This was indeed a Superfamily. They worked together, supported each other, taught each other, and, most importantly, loved each other and what they did. This added so much to both Clark and Lois as people, rounding them out in ways that I never expected to see and I feel like it had that effect for a lot of other readers as well. This changed who they were and for Bendis to throw that away with Lois was… dude, it was #$%^ing infuriating. You can tell he didn’t actually read any of the Rebirth stuff or if he did, he merely skimmed through it. It made no sense form a character standpoint, it just served to reboot her into who she used to be. Now, Lois is and always will be a great character but taking away a new dimension of her, something that made her more real is idiotic at best and disrespectful at worst. Both to her as a character and to the creators who worked for two years to make her into something new.
From there, Bendis focused a lot on his OC characters, neither of whom are very interesting or worthwhile. The Red Cloud reveal was underwhelming because of that. Again, if he would have held off on bringing back Lois, he maybe could have done work with those OCs and the Invisible Mafia, making them into something that readers could really enjoy, but he shot himself in the foot, and the book has suffered dramatically because of it. This is easily the most classically Bendis of all of his books- it’s wordy in the worst possible way. The action scenes are short and uninspired (which is a shame because the artists he’s working with on this book are all great artists who know their way around action panels like no one’s business), his OCs dominate the book in a bad way, and it just feels like nothing happens at all. Lois is sort of Jessica Jones lite half the time, but his Clark is pretty great, so there’s that. He doesn’t really ignore anyone’s continuity, but he does throw in DC characters for reasons that are kind of mystifying, and it feels like he’s doing it to show he’s read DC books, although it looks like he’s going to be using Adam Strange and the Question for his Leviathan story.
The new arc is all set up for that upcoming event, and it’s pretty lackluster so far. Now, yes, this is just a teaser for an event, but for my money, it’s not really doing anything to hype me up for the upcoming. The threat of Leviathan is still very nebulous and, at this point, I’d much rather have more of the Invisible Mafia. Action Comics #1009 (here’s a link to my review- https://www.youdontreadcomics.com/comics/2019/3/27/action-comics-1009) is the best this book has been in a long time, but it wasn’t great. It works very well, has a pleasant little surprise ending, and Amanda Waller is always entertaining. It has a lot going for it, and maybe the upcoming issue will keep that up, but Action Comics has been so uneven everywhere but in the art that it’s hard to hold out hope for that.
The art is the only highlight of the book, as DC has assembled an exceptional cadre of artists for the book. However, guys like Patrick Gleason, Yanick Paquette, Ryan Sook, and Steve Epting deserve way better than what Bendis has put out in this book. They aren’t given much action or many satisfying set pieces to work with, not like the art teams over at Superman, but each of them found a way to shine, with their eyes for detail, excellent character work, and all around appealing art. Ryan Sook should get to draw so much more Superman off the strength of the few issues he did. Of all of them, I would say he was my favorite artist to work on the book. His clean, detailed pencils worked very well with Bendis’ style, and in the few action sequences he drew, he proved that he could draw a dynamic and powerful looking Superman. Epting has probably been the weakest of the artists on the book, but as a fan of his, I still enjoy most of what he’s done in it.
So, now, after much bloviating on my part, here’s my verdict on Bendis’ Superman run….
Much like a lot of Bendis’ other work for me, his Superman run has been remarkably uneven. I enjoy Superman way more than I do Action Comics, but in recent months, even that book has fallen in my estimation. The problem is that Bendis is gonna Bendis (I love the fact that I can say things like that and most of you will get it) no matter what. There’s no way around it, really. When Superman started, it felt like a Bendis book, sure, but a really good one, like Daredevil or Dark Avengers or his Heroic Age Avengers book. He had found a way to minimize his weaknesses and play to his artists, creating a story that was fun and exciting, with some cool ideas in it. Sure, maybe bringing back Rogol Zaar right away was a misstep, but it worked in the context of the story and the build of the character. The second story arc, however, kind of reverted to Bendisian (God, I love doing that so much) type, losing a lot of that action that gave the first arc momentum and kind of meandering, taking forever to get to the point that most readers already knew. The last issue (you know what, here’s my review; figured since I did that for Action #1009, I can do it here as well- https://www.youdontreadcomics.com/comics/2019/4/10/superman-10) is a vast improvement and finally gets the engine of the story running again… even though the impetus is Rogol Zaar still. Basically, if you aren’t sold on Rogol Zaar, Superman may not be for you.
I think that it works very well, though, and if you’re a fan of Superman and don’t want to stop reading his books, Superman is the book for you. Action Comics is all the worst aspects of his writing rolled into one package. It’s kind of dull and it feels like he abandoned a good idea (the Invisible Mafia) to spit in the face of Rebirth era fans in the first arc and the second arc is the build-up for an event that, let’s face it, probably won’t be very good. Time to be real- Bendis events are terrible, folks. All build up, lame action, and okay payoffs. Instead of finding a way to redeem the Invisible Mafia, he starts setting up an event that is probably going to suck. Probably. There’s always a chance we’ll get something useful, like Siege (which, I think, was so good because he only had four issues and couldn’t meander), or something that ends well but is ultimately disappointing, like Secret Invasion (great ending, but Jesus, it dropped the ball completely and was really dull for a long time).
You know, I would love to say that Bendis subverted his own weaknesses and is writing best of his career Superman stories. I would love to say that his books are a worthy follow up to the Rebirth ones. I would love to say that I buy and look forward to both books each month.
All of those things would be lies, though. Superman is mostly a good book, but it has its moments of Bendisian weaknesses, bringing it down. Action Comics has been chiefly terrible unless we’re talking about the art, which is excellent and the artists deserve better than Bendis’ boring scripts. If you read my article about him coming to DC (the first link in this article, in case you’ve forgotten), you’ll see that I was cautiously optimistic and I feel like what I’ve read has born that out. Some of his runs, I’ve enjoyed. Some of it I’ve hated. He’s found a way to to be both better than my worst expectation and worse than my best expectations. That’s what I say when I say his run has been remarkably uneven. I can’t call it bad, not really, because taken as a total, it’s not. It sometimes reaches the level of great (mostly in Superman and even though I didn’t talk about here, Man Of Steel was very, very good for the most part), but the problem is that it also reaches the levels of terrible and infuriating (bloody Action Comics). It’s become what I feel is classic Bendis, at least for me. His work has always varied so much in quality for me that on the average, I literally (used for emphasis because I don’t really need to use the word here, the same as 90% of the time that you’ve ever seen it or used it) hate most of what he’s done. And I do hate Action Comics, even if the last issue was excellent. Maybe not House Of M or New Avengers Vol. 1 (when I say that, I don’t mean Breakout, although that book is pretty bad in retrospect, but the entirety of the book up until it was rebooted for the Heroic Age initiative) levels of hate, but hate nonetheless. I like Superman, but I don’t buy it anymore.
My love for Superman makes me wish, these were better books... Too bad they aren’t. That’s just the truth of the matter. One is pretty good, the other is terrible. That’s that. Now, I still think you should give them a chance. I’ve actually met people who really like Action and maybe you will, too. I honestly hope this article makes you check them both out, even if it’s only to say how stupid I am for my opinions of them.
And that’s the point of it.
On that note, until next time, adieu, mon amour.
