1.It's a sobering fact that the business of blogging about the writing of either Stan Lee or Brian Michael Bendis, and in particular Brian Michael Bendis, brings with it the likelihood of rude, cuss-heavy and offensive diatribes being dumped like the most deliberately disagreeable of stink bombs into the comment boxes here. To write about the style and content of both Mr Lee and Mr Bendis's scripts in the same piece is, I've come to understand, to exponentially increase the probability of such ill-reasoned and nasty-minded comments arriving.
In particular, it's come to the point where I'm quite resigned to receiving furious assaults upon the ability and the integrity of Mr Bendis whenever I discuss his work. What must it be like to be him, to be an honourable and generous craftsman who is so actively and apparently obsessionally loathed by such an vindictive minority of folks? I can't imagine what it must feel like, to be slandered not so much for the detail of the work so much as for the anger it unintentionally provokes in, to name just two representatives from this hopefully small community, Mr Angry-From-Ohio and Mr I-Mock-Autistic-People-from-Western-Australia, both of whose comments reached not the pages of this blog, but the delete dumper. For it just can't be Mr Bendis's work itself
that triggers such expressions of hatred in these fellows. For one thing, anyone who gets that angry about a writer's style is of course, and at the very best, sorely lacking in a sense of perspective. For another, these begging-to-be-deleted commenters are nearly always seemingly possessed of a mind strong on received (un) truths and weak on specific examples and analysis. In essence, they're angry at Mr Bendis because he didn't work harder at not making them so angry. Take, for example, the following statement extracted from a since-deleted, never-published comment left here recently, which has been severely edited for swear words, libellous statements and, I kid you not, a vile expression of anti-autistic sentiment;
"Stan Lee, widely derided .... (by the people who buy Mr Bendis's work) ... as someone who writes corny dialogue still somehow managed to make everyone sound different."
Edited for its various markers of fury and insensitivity, it's a sentence which hardly seems to touch upon a subject worth becoming apoplectic about. Feeling passionate about storytelling is a business that I obvious share, but I'd really rather avoid anger when I think about such matters, and I'd especially prefer to sidestep such extremes of emotion when they've been inspired by what seems to me to be a misreading of how comic-books from both Mr Lee's golden era and the present day are concerned. For the above statement works from a series of questionable premises. Firstly, the writer obviously feels that all of those who buy comics written by Mr Bendis loathe in turn the books written by Mr Lee, which would seem to be at best a considerable over-generalisation. Secondly, our commenter buys into an admittedly generally-held presumption that Mr Lee's characterisation was always far more distinct and effective than that of Mr Bendis. And yet, as is common in such cases of testosterone being triggered before grey matter is fully engaged, the evidence that supposedly supports such a belief actually produces a considerably more nuanced picture of both creator's achievements, if only a little time and thought is given to a careful reading of the various comic books involved.
2.
There tends to be a lot less swearing in the unfavourable and unpublishable comments which arrive when Mr Lee's work is discussed. On the whole, he's far more likely to be dismissed in a spirit of contempt rather than loathing, to be seen as a relic of the past, as a snake-oil salesman who cluttered up the pages he added dialogue to with a lack of restraint and a pronounced insensitivity to the virtues of the artists he was working with. If Brian Michael Bendis is apparently a rapacious hack bent on annoying the heck out of innocent fanboys - they seem to be pretty much all fanboys - then Mr Lee seems for some to be nothing more than a mediocre talent harnessed to the soul of an unprincipled self-publicist.
And the assumption being made by these rather volatile folks is that a respect for the work of any one of these creators must bring with it a loathing for that of the other,, as if Mr Lee and Mr Bendis were polar opposites, and their stories so utterly different from each other that they represent not just "good" and "bad" storytelling, but good and bad themselves. The preferred creator represents the way that things should be done, and the other is nothing more than the comic book commenter's version of the despised apostate.
After all, if that's not so, whyever would these irate folks allow themselves to feel so very strongly about what is, after all, merely a matter of partially different styles of superhero comic books?
3.
If I had to choose between the superhero work of Mr Lee and Mr Bendis, I'd suppose I'd opt for the achievements of the former, just I'd plump for the non-superhero work of the latter if compelled to do so. (But I'd have to be able to cheekily, and indeed dishonestly, claim "Powers" as a comment on superheroes rather than a superhero book itself, because I'm not giving that comic up.) But, short of the world being conquered by an army of psychotic comic-book obsessives, which, thankfully, is a tad unlikely a prospect, I don't have to choose between the one and the other. In fact, and in a fashion that might both scandalise, depress and annoy a small number of folks out there in interblogospherenet land, I rather think that I might continue to enjoy and admire both men's work, while simply ignoring all of that meaningless keyboard-rattling that demands I loathe one and adore the other.
Now, I'm assuming that you too aren't cursed by the obligation and attendant responsibilities of being forever right, and that you're not weighed down by the need to establish and police the hierarchy of acceptable and unacceptable comic books and comic book creators. More so, I'm working according to the belief that you're also not bent double with the weight of righteous
rabidity that comes to those who are blessed to be forever right and yet eternally doomed to be ignored by a world that just couldn't give a toss. For I'm sure that you too can't see the point of convincing yourself that any creator is either 100% brilliant or unconditionally inept, and that you are as fascinated as I am in the skills that all and any creators apply to generate the effects they do, and do not, achieve.
Surely the point is not to wholly embrace one creator while damning the other, but to enjoy both, and, if we have a mind to, to think a little of what we might learn from the work of, for example, both Mr Lee and Mr Bendis.
That's not exactly rocket science as a premise, is it? Making sense of how creator's earn, through their craft and efforts, the success that they do is undoubtedly a difficult process in itself, to say the least, but wanting to make such an effort surely isn't anything of a challenge at all. It may not be a process that adds in anything other than the very slightest way to the sum of human happiness, but as options go, it has to better than all that endless hatred.
4.
I.
Is it really true, as is so often argued, that Stan Lee's characters were always absolutely distinct from each other while those of Brian Michael Bendis are often indistinct and at times even interchangeable? Can it really be said that the work of these two creators is as diametrically opposed as so much interblogosphereanet chit-chat would have us believe, and is the matter of establishing easily-distinguishable characters solely a matter of a writer's words on the page anyway?
For example, to take the dialogue of the first issue of "The Avengers", which we've been discussing for a good while now on this blog, can we say with absolute confidence, and without a glance at a handy copy of Essential Avengers number 1, which characters are made by Mr Lee to say the following?
a: "There is ONE who can save her!"
b: "Don't just sit there, fella! Start sending! Use the FF's special wavelength! Tell 'em to contact me pronto, before any innocent jokers get hurt real bad!"
c: "I thought I saw ... it is! It's the Hulk! No need for me to disturb the others!"
d: "And now that he has fled back to the Stygian depths from whence he came, it is time for you to taste the awesome vengeance of Thor!"
II.
d: "And now that he has fled back to the Stygian depths from whence he came, it is time for you to taste the awesome vengeance of Thor!"
That last quote is obviously the easiest of them all to attribute, given that Mr Lee has the speaker name himself in his best, and indeed perhaps worst, pseudo-Shakespearean fashion. And it might be imagined that Thor is one of the characters who Mr Lee always presented in an immediately recognisable fashion, and especially where his speech patterns were concerned. And yet, the far more prosaic and far less tortuous example of (C) contains the Thunder God's words too, and there's nothing to differentiate the contents of that speech bubble from anything that's said by, for example, Hank Pym or Tony Stark in the tale;
c: "I thought I saw ... it is! It's the Hulk! No need for me to disturb the others!"
Indeed, Mr Lee is obviously still coming to grips with how he wants Thor to express himself in "The Coming Of The Avengers". At times, he has the Thunder God speak just as any other middle-class American might, such as when he introduces himself to the Teen Brigade with a terse but everyday "Why so surprised? Didn't you send for me?". At others, and particularly when he's interacting with his fellow gods, Thor tends to suddenly begin to express himself in a more recognisably cod-formal fashion.
Now, I don't raise this point to slander Mr Lee's work. At the time he was writing the first issue of the Avengers, he was quite literally helping to create with his collaborators a new sub-genre of the superhero comic. But even as the years passed and Mr Lee became more and more familiar with his own entertainingly two-dimensional take on the personality of superheroes, he was always playing with a limited number of types and he was always reliant upon his artistic partners to help him keep his characters seeming as distinct from one another as possible. And the less outstanding the artist, and the less that the paternalistic style that we've been discussing recently was used, the more that Mr Lee's character work would seem less distinctive and more shallow. Indeed, as time passed, it was almost as if adding excesses of angst to different characters was Mr Lee's solution to the problem of keeping his cast interesting and distinct, which then meant that superheroes often seemed to differ one from the other only in the causes of their angst rather than in any unique personality traits.
Mr Lee was facing, and remarkably often overcoming, a problem that everyone who's ever worked in the sub-genre of the post-Fifties superhero has faced, namely, how to make all these costumes and the folks who are wearing them recognisably individual and interesting on the printed page? For it is a challenging if not impossible business to constantly make every figure on a page sound and act in a way that's quite different from everyone else around them, and that's a fact that we can see illustrated in "The Coming Of The Avengers" when we consider quote (b) from above;
b: "Don't just sit there, fella! Start sending! Use the FF's special wavelength! Tell 'em to contact me pronto, before any innocent jokers get hurt real bad!"
Lifted out of context, it's remarkable that these words were given not to the likes of Nick Fury or Captain America, but to Rick Jones. (Only the sentence-ending phrase "hurt real bad" seems to evoke anything of Jones's character and background. Elsewhere, these words are closer to those that we might expect to come from a fearsomely determined sergeant taking control of an imperiled redoubt on a battlefield.) Of course, neither Rogers or Fury could have appeared in the first issue of The Avengers, but Jones is shown here assuming the language that Lee typically gives to adult authority figures from the working classes. It's a discontinuity between who Jones is and how he's portrayed that
should be immediately obvious to anyone who reads the story, but it doesn't jar as it should, and we'll discuss why that might be so in a moment. But no-one could identify Jones as a sub-James Dean youthful rebel from how he's shown speaking in that quote. But then, Lee was always good at representing a narrow range of white middle-class types, but anything beyond those, and a sprinkling of salt-of-the-earth foot-soldiers like Fury or Ben Grimm, often proved problematical and, in retrospect, on occasion disappointing. He certainly never possessed a wide range of voices for his younger characters or his various interchangeable superheroic women, and of course his representations of minorities, though laudable in the context of the time, was never a highly informed business.
Yet noting that this was so doesn't make Mr Lee any less successful or important a writer. It certainly doesn't diminish the value of his radical achievements. He did introduce a measure of character and distinctiveness to the American superhero tradition which was utterly unique. His work is engrossing and enthralling and often laugh-out-loud funny. But to push forward Stan Lee's work on character as an ideal, as a model which can be used to right supposed wrongs in contemporary superhero comic books, is to vastly over-simplify our understanding of his achievements, as well as those of his co-creators.
III.
a: "There is ONE who can save her!"
Finally, I'm working on the assumption that at least one or two folks reading this will have thought that the above quote was probably associated with Thor too, and that I'm the kind of blogger who'd fix his quick-quiz by having three out of four quotes all coming from the same character. And, of all of the lead and supporting cast present in the Avenger's first appearance, it would surely be a good bet to think that such a line might most likely be expressed by the bloke with the wings on his shiny, pointy helmet. Yet, it's actually Iron Man who's speaking with such vainglorious self-assurance. And of all the characters in "The Coming Of The Avengers", Mr Lee has the most problem finding a distinct voice for Tony Stark. Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne are cleverly given the roles of jousting lovers from a screwball comedy, giving their
relationship a definite context and the characters a mutually defining voice which they've most-often lacked ever since. It's a truth that can be hard to immediately see from the context of 2011, because the sexism of Pym and the powerlessness of van Dyne alienates the modern reader, who can lack the cultural experience to hear the playfulness and repressed-but-fierce desire carried by the pre-sex wars banter of Ant-Man and the Wasp. Indeed, it's hard today to hear anything in their sniping beyond the faintest echoes of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, and what's left seems to be a bullying and self-obsessed man and a pixie-headed, womb-and wedding-ring obsessed girl. It takes an effort of considerable will to recognise Pym as a Cary Grant type trying to hide the depth of his emotion, though van Dyne is perhaps more recognisable as a woman so fiercely committed to a taciturn partner that she has to constantly express her feelings in the form of caricature or be overwhelmed by them. Audrey Hepburn could have played that part to a tee.
But if Pym and van Dyne together had an identity that allowed Lee to bring the characters to life and mark them out as a couple with a specific relationship, Pym as a character outside of that coupling was a problem to Mr Lee, just as Tony Stark was. In common with most Marvel characters of the period, both men are WASP scientists, middle class, educated, privileged and able. They are, when presented together away from the settings of their own strips, remarkably similar. Yet, whether by chance or design, they're given separate roles if not speech patterns in the narrative, and it's what they do combined with how they look that distinguishes them from each other rather than their often inter-changeable dialogue. Ant-Man, for example, is presented as the field-leader, constantly improvising and leading the implementation of strategy, while Iron Man comes as close as he'll ever be to functioning solely as the Avenger's unquestioning heavy artillery, occasionally expressing as he does empathy with the Hulk's predicament as a hunted outcast.
And so, for all of the cleverness and achievement that can recognised in Mr Lee's script for The Avengers # 1, it doesn't mark in itself a Utopian period of crystal-clear and utterly-distinct character work, and nor does much of the work which follows. In particular, Stan Lee's script relies heavily on Mr Kirby's art to give, for example, Ant-Man a sense of being an individual quite distinct from any other white male, except for Rick Jones, in the story, because judged by Lee's words alone, Pym away from van Dyne is no individual at all. And it also helped the business of character differentiation that Marvel had so few superhero properties on its books in 1963, since the chances for confusing one with the other were far more limited than they are today. Certainly Mr Lee and Mr Kirby were in the helpful situation of having created for themselves a set of superheroes with quite distinct physical appearances; the Hulk was a great green brute, Iron Man a shiny gold-painted tin can, Thor a polite and rather cute viking, and Ant-Man and The Wasp really, really small. (As we'll discuss in the next piece to go up on this blog, Mr Bendis has had no such favourable a situation to work from.)
But if the working assumption is that Stan Lee's scripting, and particularly his dialogue, could alone produce characters which were quite distinct in themselves and easily distinguishable from each other, then I'd suggest that there's a lack of hard evidence supporting the point, and a mass of examples to contradict the case. Mr Lee's work was highly innovative, competent and great fun too, being quite revolutionary in the context of its time. But it's not the Holy Grail of storytelling clarity that it's often presented as being when modern-era writers are being criticised for their presumed sins, as if it's solely the idiot presumption of stepping away from the hallowed Marvel tradition that has caused whatever problems are apparently at hand, as if the solution for every challenge facing today's superhero books is simply a matter of doing it as Stan used to.
5.
Now, only a fool would note problems with Mr Lee's approach to characterisation and assume that his work is therefore poor because it's not perfect. Speaking personally, I'm terribly susceptible to his work's charms, and my fondness for his scripts isn't affected in the slightest by the knowledge that he was as fallible as he was entertaining. Stan Lee was a fine writer of paternalistic superhero comic books, and in the end, that's all that counts to me.
Yet, I am interested in more than just the degree to which Lee's dialogue was or was not absolutely particular to specific characters. I'm also fascinated by what it is about Stan Lee's work, and particularly that of this period, that convinces so many his readers, now as then, that he is providing them with quite individual and distinct superheroes despite all of the obvious qualifying evidence. After all, part of the skill of any conjurer is how he convinces his audience that his version of events is the valid one. And that's something which all of these recent pieces about Stan Lee and Jack kirby's Avengers on this blog have ultimately been concerned with, namely, why do those old Avengers tales seem to speaking to us with an authority that later takes on the property can seem to lack? I hesitate to repeat in any depth the arguments I've been trying to make on this matter in the past few weeks, but it is worth saying that I'm
convinced that it's the paternalistic method combined with the unique mixture of long-mastered craft and radical innovation carried by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, in particular, which makes the comics of that period seem so definitive. And just as unbelievably fundamental flaws in plotting and story-construction can be skillfully obscured and rendered irrelevant by Stan and Jack's vigorous and inventive brand of paternalism, so too can inconsistencies and indeed fundamental weaknesses of character be hidden, until the reader thinks that they're reading perfectly sensible stories with highly consistent three-dimensional characters, despite the fact that, of course, they're just not.
And if the fact is that Mr Lee's work can often appear to be more coherent than some of the constituent parts of it might suggest, then perhaps Brian Michael Bendis's characterisations might actually be far more able in his Avengers stories than they're often held to be, especially when compared to Mr Lee's work. So often criticised for producing reams of indistinguishable dialogue, and regularly compared disparagingly with the comicbook storytellers of earlier eras, is it possible that Mr Bendis can be shown to be writing work that to a greater or lesser degree contradicts the views that a significant minority hold about his work?
Is his dialogue, for example, really inferior at all to that of many of his predecessors, including the most celebrated of them all, or is there, perhaps, something about the form that his storytelling takes which leaves some of his audience feeling alienated and dissatisfied despite the evidence of the work before their very eyes?
NB.
Well, I don't know the answers to those questions yet. I had believed that I might be closer to a coherent argument than I now know, but it's obvious to me now that I've not finished researching this piece yet! I thought it might be worth mentioning the fact of my own ignorance, and the fact too that these pieces aren't written to declare to the world what it ought to be thinking, so much as to help me make sense of topics that I'm not clear on and of which I'd like to understand more. And so, that last paragraph in particular isn't meant to be read as ending on a rhetorical question or two, so much as a real live debate where I'm concerned. I've not made my mind up about the matter, that's all, and it's what I'm going to try to think about over some of the next few days.
But I'm not one of the constantly right, and, of course, I'm not here to tell you what's right and what's wrong. Heavens preserve you and me both. In fact, I'll probably have changed my mind by the time we next meet, and if you've any evidence or opinion that isn't vented through the spleen and which might help me think in a clearer fashion, I really would appreciate, as I always do, your comments.
Or, to no doubt unfairly appropriate Mr Beckett from "Worstward Ho"; "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
As always, splendid days are wished to all, and the appropriate measure of sticking together is wished for everyone too.
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