Blogging Bendis

Blogging Bendis 2.0

A little over a year ago I attempted to launch a blog called “Blogging Bendis” on my previous TypePad hosted account.  Life, which included a wedding, a honeymoon and two transfers at work, got in the way of my blogging as regularly as I would have liked, and when I changed blog hosts from TypePad to Squarespace, I lost most of the graphical content of the blog.

In retrospect the blog was too focused on graphics, and one reason I was not posting much was that the process I put any images that made it onto the blog through took too much time and had to be accomplished with imaging programs I only had at home. 

So now I’m going to try again.  A little bit different, but still the same idea.  And what is that idea?  Well let’s let my April 17th self explain it from the first post on the original Blogging Bendis.

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Blogging Bendis. The title is fairly self-explanatory, it’s a blog about Brian Michael Bendis the comic book writer (and sometimes artist).  That’s it.  Why a blog just about Bendis?  Well I’m glad you asked.

I started a comic book blog a few years ago, and it lasted about ten days until I just stopped updating it.  The trouble was for a single person it’s hard to write about the world of comics and provide any sort of coherent story.  There’s just so much happening that only multi-author blogs or news sites like Newsarama [nsr] are really capable of covering things.  Eventually I realized that at best I’d be simply regurgitating the press releases from Marvel and DC and since I had no industry contacts even that was going to be hard.  So like when I come across anything hard, I gave up.

But damn do I love me some comic books, and not having a forum to write about them got me down.  I don’t have the time during the day to go become a Newsarama forum troll, or keep up with Bendis’ own boards [jxw] so I was lost.  Or I was until I listened to the recent talk given by John Gruber and Merlin Mann at South by Southwest this year [rc].  Talking about being a better blogger they suggested that the best way to go about it is to blog about a very specific niche that you’re passionate about.  As Mann puts it:

Like, you’ve got something that you care a lot about, and you’re obsessed about — it’s almost like an intellectual fetish. And then you’ve got something that’s your angle on that. And to me, the more you zero in on both of those things — get crazy specific about the thing… Don’t just, don’t have a blog about Star Wars; have a blog about Jawas. Or, like, this one Jawa that’s just in the scene for a minute. Like, it’s gonna be so much easier for you to dominate, first of all; you’re gonna become the go-to guy for that one Jawa, right?

 I was being too general with just writing about comics, and I needed to find my niche.  I needed to find a section of comics that I was just ridiculously passionate about.  I quickly decided on Bendis.

 I came to comics in the 1990s, and I left them a few years later.  I had the odd Transformers comics growing up.  When I was younger I was in the University of Alberta Hospital for six months after open heart surgery, and my parents would buy me comics from the gift shop in the lobby, and I had half a years run on whatever titles they haphazardly stocked there.  But it wasn’t until years later when I got into the X-Men that I really got into comics.

Jim Lee was my favorite artist, and that was pretty much as much as I knew about the books.  Lee could draw a comic that looked beautiful, exciting, sexy and all of the the sorts of things a young teenager wanted from comics.  It did not matter who was writing them, as long as Lee was drawing them.  I got big into the X-Men, read a number of titles and stayed around for a few foil covers and crossovers.  Then Lee went to Image to create Wildcats and while I read a few issues of that it never clicked with me.

Eventually I got bored, got into high school and left comics behind.  It wasn’t until my second year at university that I started to get back into them.  Spured on by a few friends, one of which was a huge fan of Batman, I began visiting comic book stores again.  Wanting to get back into comics I picked up a few earlier issues of Ultimate Spider-Man (USM) which was coming out around the same time as the first movie. 

 Mark Bagely might not have been Jim Lee, but the art was still enjoyable and for the first time I began to notice the writing.  It was just, well it was just well written.  Clever.  Peter Parker and his friends talked like real people, and not like comic book characters.  Comic book things might happen to them, but the characters dealt with them in a fairly realistic manner.  After a few months of USM I began picking up trades of various things, and noticing that the writer of USM was also writing a book called Alias I picked that up half thinking that it had something to do with the television show of the same name (it didn’t).

I’m not sure which trade I picked up at that point but it included the scene where a teenage Jessica Jones seemingly masturbates to a picture of Johnny Storm on her wall.  I had seen enough of Preacher to know that twisted comics were hardly new, but there was swearing and this comic had Spider-Man.  This was a damn Marvel comic, in universe with the word ‘fuck’ and Spider-Man was in it.  Things had certainly changed, and comics were most obviously not what I remembered.

I guess this makes it sound like I’d gotten out of comics because there was not enough female masturbation, which isn’t the case.  USM is the sort of book that you could give to anyone ten years old and up and not worry about them picking up anything worse than what you’d see on prime time television.  But both books reflect a sense of realism, and a story telling craft that I admired immediately.  So Bendis got  me back into comics, and while I read a lot more comics than just the ones he writes, he’s still my favorite comic writer. 

Bendis is my Jawa.