Dark Reign

[Velorath]

Marvel/Bendis' next event after Secret Invasion:

Brian Bendis was the special, surprise guest during Marvel Comics' presentation at Diamond Comics Distributors' retailer summit in Las Vegas Nevada Monday evening. After thanking retailers for the success of this summer's Secret Invasion, Bendis announced the Marvel event that follows that storyline will be called Dark Reign, which will focus on the "after effects" of Secret Invasion, and will include several Marvel Universe titles that will feature "Dark Reign" trade dress.

More specifically Bendis went on to say the post-Invasion Marvel Universe will feature a complete change in his Avengers family of titles, including Bendis leaving Mighty Avengers with issue #20 and the launch of a new title Dark Avengers, with art by Mike Deodato.

The fan-favorite but sometimes controversial creator told the retailer audience that if they thought Internet readers have been mad at him before that they should watch out for the post-Invasion fallout as he expects "loads of sh*t" to head his way.

Dark Avengers... 

[HaemishM]

Oh for fuck's sake.... Dark Avengers? REALLY? THIS IS THE BEST YOU CAN DO?

Clownshoes.

[Khaldun]

Dark...Avengers...

Right, this is like the new "Stabby X-Men" title? Avengers who do things that the other heroes won't do, blah de blah de fuckity fuck blah.

[HaemishM]

X-Force... the Stabby X-Men. I like that title. It completely encapsulates the differences between it and the main X-Men title while also boldly highlighting how fucking retarded the concept is in the first place.

[Velorath]

On the possibly positive side of things, it's also been announced that Millar is returning to the Ultimates (more or less) next year.

[Khaldun]

He talks in that interview about one big issue, which is: what's the difference between the "regular" and "Ultimate" Marvel universe now? It's like you had a regular burrito and a spicy-as-hell burrito, but now they're both spicy-as-hell. There's a limit to how much you can make the formerly spicy one even spicier before it gets inedible or ridiculous. I mean, what's left to do?

[Velorath]

He talks in that interview about one big issue, which is: what's the difference between the "regular" and "Ultimate" Marvel universe now?

Before Loeb took over for Millar on the Ultimates, Bendis flushed Ultimate Spider-man down the toilet with Venom/Carnage/Clone Saga shit, UXM meandered off into mediocrity, and various bland minis and crossovers came and went, my answer to that question would have been quality.  That and the fact that the Ultimate U can make major changes without takin a big ol' shit on continuity (although to be fair, the regular MU could do that as well if more writers just took the effort).

[Sir T]

You know talking about Spiderman is interesting, as the whole point of the "Maximun Carnage" storyline was that these whole anti-heroes were anything but and sometimes you needed heroes to embrace the light even when it bloody hurt doing it. Thats one of the reasons it remains one of my favorites.

That said complete reset of the comic storylines would be a serious blessing. Shut the whole thing down and restart it and possibly change the whole character of every hero they have. Like Spiderman should have ended when Aunt May told Parker that she had known he was spiderman all along and had been playing along for the laugh. That said they experimented with changing things with the whole "future spiderman" crap, less than successfully. Going the whole "ultimate darkness. so dark you cant even see what going on in the panels" is boring as hell at this point, but how eften han you have then smack around Apocalypse before that gets old too?

[Velorath]

Based mostly on the recently revealed covers, people are speculating that the Dark Avengers are Ares, Marvel Boy (Noh-Varr), Wolverine's son Daken, and then Bullseye in Hawkeye's costume, Moonstone as Ms. Marvel, and Venom as Spider-man, with various guesses as to who is in the "Iron Patriot" armor.

[HaemishM]

That sounds Ultimatarded.

[Velorath]

I'm not opposed to Dark Avengers as a concept, if in fact the speculation on who the members are is true.  It's pretty much a retread of the Thunderbolts (the actual Thunderbolts title seems to be getting a change in mission statements).  Team of (former and current) villains act as a replacement for the Avengers, only this time they will actually officially be the Avengers.  I think the title of the book sucks (don't think the team will actually be referred to as the Dark Avengers though), and I think Osborn's rise to power is pretty flimsy (there's been some debate amongst the comics nerds as to whether or not the public actually knows he is the Green Goblin).  I think any team book written by Bendis is going to have pacing and dialogue issues.  I think Daken is a stupid character and the Iron Patriot is a stupid concept.  I've been a big fan of the Thunderbolts since the start of the original series though, so I'm at least willing to give this a chance.

Iron Man is apparently the only person with the registered heroes list, and Osborn wants it.  This is Marvel's attempt now to undo the character assassination they committed on Stark.  He'll obviously realize that the anti-reg heroes where right all along in that there was no realistic way to ensure this info never fell into the wrong hands, and will now work to regain everyone's trust after losing everything.  This is a story that should have never been needed.  Also, the ongoing drama between Thor and Iron Man needs to stop.  It only reminds us of fucking Thor clones, and I don't want to be reminded of Thor clones.  Blame it all on Skrull Pym and be done with it.

Dan Slott takes over on Mighty Avengers.  Pym, Jocasta, Scarlet Witch, USAgent, Hercules, Vision (Young Avengers version), Cassie Lang, Iron Man and the Hulk.  I like Slott, and I like the cast for the most part.  Slott did a pretty good job on the Initiative series, and it doesn't look like he'll be tied up dealing with the New/Dark Avengers stuff.

Secret Warriors... no thanks.  I've been listening to the new House to Astonish podcast recently (have always been a fan of the x axis reviews, and now hearing Paul O'Brien and some other Scottish guy talking about comics is pretty entertaining) and I think they were pretty dead on when talking about how Marvel mismanaged this one.  Secret Invasion was supposed to really introduce this team and give it a big push.  Instead they got an issue of New Avengers and a couple of panels in SI.

War Machine solo book?  Yawn.

Thunderbolts now written by Andy Diggle (best known for writing The Losers).  New cast.  Osborn's black ops team.  I'll check it out based on Diggle's past work.

[HaemishM]

Dan Slott takes over on Mighty Avengers.  Pym, Jocasta, Scarlet Witch, USAgent, Hercules, Vision (Young Avengers version), Cassie Lang, Iron Man and the Hulk.  I like Slott, and I like the cast for the most part.  Slott did a pretty good job on the Initiative series, and it doesn't look like he'll be tied up dealing with the New/Dark Avengers stuff.

Bolded part just makes me go "Lolwut?" Didn't we just spend like asstons of paper taking both Scarlet With and the Hulk out of the hero category and off the stage mostly permanently, and now they are both back on the main Avengers team? What... the... fuck? I don't mind Slott as a writer, but that cast sounds like continuity-stretching silliness.

Secret Warriors... no thanks.  I've been listening to the new House to Astonish podcast recently (have always been a fan of the x axis reviews, and now hearing Paul O'Brien and some other Scottish guy talking about comics is pretty entertaining) and I think they were pretty dead on when talking about how Marvel mismanaged this one.  Secret Invasion was supposed to really introduce this team and give it a big push.  Instead they got an issue of New Avengers and a couple of panels in SI.

I don't even know who the characters are, and I read both the New Avengers stuff and the SI. They weren't even third bannana characters.

[Velorath]

Dan Slott takes over on Mighty Avengers.  Pym, Jocasta, Scarlet Witch, USAgent, Hercules, Vision (Young Avengers version), Cassie Lang, Iron Man and the Hulk.  I like Slott, and I like the cast for the most part.  Slott did a pretty good job on the Initiative series, and it doesn't look like he'll be tied up dealing with the New/Dark Avengers stuff.

Bolded part just makes me go "Lolwut?" Didn't we just spend like asstons of paper taking both Scarlet With and the Hulk out of the hero category and off the stage mostly permanently, and now they are both back on the main Avengers team? What... the... fuck? I don't mind Slott as a writer, but that cast sounds like continuity-stretching silliness.

Well, they're in the book and on the covers.  In what capacity they're on the team, Slott hasn't said yet.  The team will be based outside the U.S. though in order to work around the registration act.

[Velorath]

I'm not going to pretend at this point that I haven't formed a bias against Bendis.  From the New Avengers threads, to Secret Invasion, to this, I think my issues with Bendis' writing are well documented.  I say this, because I know that when I make the complaints I'm about to make in regards to the Secret Invasion - Dark Reign one-shot, one might be tempted to say "well, he just likes talking shit about Bendis, but it can't really be as bad as he says."

I'd like for nothing more than for that to be the truth.  Honestly, if Bendis was just on Jeph Loeb's level of overrated writer who just churns out poorly written shit in recent years, there wouldn't be a problem.  I'd get a few jabs in and move along.  Instead, somehow his work on Ultimate Spider-man convinced everyone at Marvel the Bendis was better than he actually was, and we're still dealing with the results of that today.  Not happy with just fucking off doing some easily forgettable stories like Loeb, Bendis won't be happy until he's wiped his ass with every character in the Marvel Universe.

In this issue (and this is that part that has me going off on this rant), the targets of his ass-wiping are Normal Osborn, Dr. Doom, Namor (someone needs to make sure Alex Maleev never draws him again), Loki, and Emma Frost (I don't really give a fuck about The Hood).  If ever there was an assemblage of characters that don't fit with Bendis' attempts at "realistic" dialogue, it would be this one.  Namor doesn't get easily embarrassed and stutter.  Osborn gets to become Bendis' mouthpiece for the issue, explaining at length, everything that Bendis explained (also at length) in interviews.  Loki gets the least amount of dialogue, probably because he/she is quietly thinking about the time he had the exact same plan Osborn's got way back in Acts of Vengeance.  He can't get Emma's voice right to save his life.  I'm curious as to whether or not BMB has ever actually read a story with Dr. Doom in it.  It's no secret that Bendis patterns his dialogue after the speech patterns of people he knows.  I'm pretty sure he doesn't know any undersea rulers though, nor any Eastern European dictators though, so he might want to start looking for inspiration elsewhere.

Now one might wonder why I'm spending so much time nitpicking the dialogue here.  "What about the story?" one might ask.  The story is that readers dropped $3.99 (a price point that many Marvel books are about to be raised to) for 32 pages of talking, and a few pages of previews (advertisments) of Secret Warriors, Agents of Atlas, and War Machine.  This issue is an absolute rip-off, and Marvel should be ashamed for charging money for this.

[HaemishM]

Have there been many Bendis comics lately that WEREN'T 32 pages of dialogue? I swear he's turned super-hero comics like the Avengers into meta stories about everything but being super-heroes.

EDIT: Just read it. Holy fuck, that is PUTRID. Capital P, Capital U, Capital TRID. I like Alex Maleev as an artist, but you are right. It's like Namor has been replaced by some schnook from accounting with a three day stubble on his chin. Emma Frost STILL has no good reason to be there. AT ALL. And the whole "we're bringing Kitty back" thing is lame, since the character just "died" a few months ago and Emma has shown no signs of real remorse about it. The dialog is just so totally wrong for 99% of the characters in there. The worst was the dialog by Swordsman. Does Bendis even know who Swordsman IS? German aristocrats with dead twin sisters do not talk like common New York jagoffs. And gee, I wonder who it is that Norman showed all the people in the room that made them shit themselves... could it be the fucking SENTRY? Worst mystery ever.

As for mystery... why? Why do you feel the need to have a mystery reveal in EVERY FUCKING STORY? He's become like Shamalamadingdong and his twists. After a while, we just want a good story told. It doesn't even make sense what he offered them, especially the Hood. He's somehow going to make it so common street crime super villians get to walk on ALL their crimes AFTER they've registered? Seriously? That's the master plan?

Total shit.

[Khaldun]

I really enjoyed Bendis' work on Powers, Ultimate Spider-Man and Alias. Alias in particular was a showcase for what he could do, which is write against and within the normal story-telling rhythms of a convoluted comic-book mythology. Which is why he is a goddamn catastrophe as the lead writer for that entire mythology. For the moment, I'm done with Marvel's regular titles, because they're all vanishing down the event horizon of Bendis-Millar shit-making. Unfortunately, I'm not much more enamored of DC's output at the moment, either. My pull list is getting very small.

[Velorath]

So the Dark Avengers were pretty much who everybody on the message boards predicted.  For all intents and purposes this is pretty much just a second Thunderbolts book.

[Velorath]

Second issue of Dark Avengers is out and I'm finding myself surprised at reading a Bendis Avengers book and not hating it.  Sure, as I mentioned before it really is a continuation of Thunderbolts, complete with Ellis' Thunderbolts collaborator Mike Deodato on art, but all the same I wasn't expecting to like it much.  I'm sure it's largely due to the art (Deodato does a really good Osborn), but this does feel like a solid continuation of what Ellis did with the team.  It also helps that Bendis can't really fuck up anybody's characterization here since most of them are either mostly blank slates (Daken, Marvel Boy), or on behavior altering medication (Sentry, Bullseye, Osborn, Venom).  Moonstone and Ares are fairly easy to get right.

[HaemishM]

Yeah, I don't hate it, but I don't much like it either. Still too much Bendialogue for my tastes. And what is it about Deodato's artwork? All his Marvel stuff has just been muddy as hell.

[Khaldun]

The Bendis parts of this whole thing are really fucking bad.

But.

I have to say that as a premise, it's pretty interesting once the non-hacks like Parker, Fraction and Hickman work with it. There's some Marvel books that have been a hoot lately with Dark-Reign-connected stories.

[Khaldun]

Necroing this a bit.

I hate to say it, but...Dark Reign has actually been pretty interesting on the whole, and in some ways, makes Civil War work better in retrospect. Secret Invasion not so much: that still sucks.

Don't get me wrong, Civil War still had some horribly annoying and bad storytelling in it, most of it the fault of Mark Millar.

But if Dark Reign is essentially the consequence of Tony Stark & Reed Richards' hubris, well, both Stark and Richards are in different ways learning the hard way what a mistake they made, with some satisfying character development for both.

I think this is the first time I can remember a big crossover event feeling like it was actually changing the fundamental character of a comic-book universe over the long haul, and in some ways, the Marvel Universe is now a more interesting place. That's even given the fact that I think Osborne and Company are eventually going to get their asses kicked, hopefully in a satisfying way.

Bendis' weaknesses as a writer have been pretty brutally exposed at times during the Civil War/Secret Invasion/Dark Reign books that he's worked on. But there's also been some good moments out of him. It's kind of interesting to see the bad guys sitting around talking about the heroes that they've known over the years, like the discussion in recent Dark Avengers between Mac Gargan and Bullseye about whether Spider-Man is actually funny or not.

More importantly, though, Quesada really seems to be putting quality writers on the books now--Hickman on FF and Secret Warriors, Pak and Lente on Hercules, Parker on Agents of Atlas, Brubaker on Captain America, among others. And most of those guys are doing good work with the basic premise of Dark Reign while not getting bogged down in it. Compared to most crossover events, this is like improvisational jazz on a common theme rather than a storytelling straightjacket that interrupts what the creative team is trying to do.

[NowhereMan]

Yeah, it feels much more like they've decided to shake up the MU and just given people a run down of how the world works now and left them to write up their stories in this new universe rather than the last two that seemed much more like writers had been given stories to tell and were just left to fill out the gaps the editors left. Primarily it's actually been enjoyable watching Osborne acting like a complete psycho super-villain. I can't decide yet if he's accepted this isn't going to really last and he's going to fuck with everyone while he can or if he's just being a psycho.

[LK]

So I heard they rebooted Tony Stark to a pre-Civil War version.

Awesome.

[Khaldun]

Reboot isn't quite the right word. They sidebooted him to the Robert Downey Jr. version, more or less, only leaving him aware that he's been a douchebag in the past. Which the Downey version is arguably quite aware of. More aware of in IM2. It's a bit boring--basically realigning the storytelling to conform to the movie, rather than understanding the movies to be drawing from the source material. But maybe in Iron Man's case, that's ok, considering that the core source material is basically just "generic Commie-fighter playboy with a physical handicap".

[NowhereMan]

Technically his mind has been rebooted to pre-Civil-War/Registration era. He's effectively not apologising for what he did while also saying he wished it had worked out differently. It's kind of a weird compromise to make for the character but we'll see how all the heroic era stuff is going to go, stuff like Steve Rogers not being Captain America might prove to be interesting.

[Khaldun]

I didn't think the capper to Dark Reign (Siege) was much to write home about, but

a) it and everything else Marvel's doing is a fuckton better than what DC is putting out now, and I say that as someone who prefers DC's stable of characters
b) the "Heroic Age" books are so far pretty durn good. Brubaker's first issue of Secret Avengers was excellent old-school comics.