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That's an interesting last point. I think it may have a great deal to say about serial writing in general rather than Bendis in particular. Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle both wrote exceptional stories much of the time, but also turned in turkeys, and sometimes contradictions within stories. The business of writing regularly to a deadline produces this kind of thing, and editors ultimately are responsible for getting something on the shelves as well as for getting the perfect version on the shelves. Similarly with soaps - there are episodes, even episodes by good writers, which are utterly appalling - because anyone can have an off day. Now, if you want to talk about occasional off issues, my personal favourite is GM himself, whose remarkable reach can really exceed his grasp from time to time - which is as it should be.
Bendis's most notorious piece of writing is the 'Dawn of Time' episode of Powers. For anyone who hasn't read it, it has no dialogue and features naked ape sex with, um, full illustrations. I think it's daft - but not because it's got naked ape sex. It's daft because, now that I've seen the scripts, I know that I had no fucking idea what was going on. But it was a brave thing to do. For some people, it was revelatory. In that respect, perhaps, it compares with the silent Buffy episode 'Hush', which supposedly was written to make the point that Buffy was not all fancy dialogue, and which is to me one of the most interesting (and certainly the creepiest) episode of the show.
To answer the original question, I think that in both TV and comics we frequently live with a tragically low standard of writing; I think in TV and film in the UK particularly, we've stopped taking chances at the same time as refusing to do what we do well. Typically, because I'm a writer, I tend to blame reality TV for much of that and Hugh Grant for the rest, but in fact I think there's much more to it than that. But I can't understand, at root, how it is that we let the stars of the UK comic scene end up writing for comics when they could have been creating their own series to replace Dr. Who, B7, and Quatermass - not that comics is a lesser medium, just that TV should have been chasing these guys down and begging for them instead of giving them a hard time. I can't believe that Mike Marshall Smith had such a lousy time with script writing that he swore off. Do we accept a lower standard of writing from comics than from TV? I don't think so. Do we accept a lower standard of writing than we should in both media? Absolutely. |
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