I put it up because I love the pacing of the page. The six-panel pause joke is a move I really like. I think it looks great as a static page, calling attention (but not overly) to the form at the same time it makes use of it, and I think it's effective for timing out this kind of joke. Jeff Smith's early Bone issues are the master class for this move, by the way.
Of course I couldn't communicate that in 140 characters, so what I said was that people who hate Brian Michael Bendis will hate this page. Because it is "A Thing That Brian Michael Bendis Does". It happens to be A Thing Brian Michael Bendis Does Well, but for people who determined a long time ago that they don't like Bendis as a writer, it's a tic, a waste of a page, 1/20th of a four-dollar comic burned on a joke.
Bendis, for those of you who don't know but are reading this anyway, is probably the biggest writer at Marvel Comics right now. He pretty much moves from one high-profile project to the next. He wrote a long run of Avengers, then a few years of X-Men, and now Iron Man, who Marvel is working hard to establish as their flagship character (suck it, Spider-Man)*.
He's also a writer with a particular style. He comes out of crime comics (Goldfish and Torso are particularly good) and writes snappy dialogue, which has a very different effect when you read it on a page rather than hear it. I mean, imagine reading an Aaron Sorkin script. Don't imagine it for long, just for a second. Dense verbiage, is what I'm saying.
And I dig it (surprise!). There are things I don't love about Bendis, but those things relate to his weaknesses (not great at closure is the big) rather than his strengths or just the Things That He Does. But there exists a crew of fans who just hate on Bendis for the way he writes. Which is fine and is a problem with a simple solution.There are a lot of writers I don't like: I don't read them. But because Bendis happens to be writing characters that people love, people who hate his writing read his books anyway, then hate on him for Bendis-ing them up. He's writing the X-Men as if he's...writing them! That's not the X-Men!
Here we get to something that is not particular to comics: the weird phenomenon of people consuming stuff made by creators with a discernible style that they hate and then complaining about that style. I'm going to posit that the most prominent and vehement of these in nerd culture right now is the bloc of Doctor Who fans who can't stand Stephen Moffat. Every week when a new episode of Who airs, they light up message boards and comment streams complaining that Moffat has done another Moffat-y thing and should be immediately shit-canned for Moffat-ing up Doctor Who.
Moffat-y things include: sexual tension between the Doctor and his companion, everything with River Song, jokes, ret-conning classic Who, mentioning classic Who, incorporating classic Who, disrespecting classic Who, using time travel as a plot device (in a show about a time traveller).
And brace yourself, but the big one is coming. There was plenty of howling when J.J. Abrams took on Star Trek, but I can already hear the wailing butt-hurt when he Abrams-up Star Wars by doing Stuff That J.J. Abrams Does. Mystery Box! Lens flare! You're ruining it!
But this "ruining it" is substantively different from the way the prequels "ruined it". Because those films are examples of a creator's weaknesses on display. George Lucas writes shitty dialogue. He always has. In some of his stuff, this weakness is overcome by other strengths, but it's a weakness that's always there (I'm just going to say the word "sand" and let the cringing ensue). Moffat and Bendis don't write bad dialogue, they just write dialogue in a style that might not be to some people's tastes. J.J. Abrams plotting is quite good, it just leans on certain tropes and tricks (mystery box!) that might not be your jam.
Even within his strengths, Lucas has quirks that have become part of the language of Star Wars (swipe cut. All the time. So many swipe cuts) and no one, except apparently me, gripes about them. In fact, we sort of love them. Ditto for Chris Claremont's myriad verbal tics on classic era X-Men ("the focused totality of my psychic powers!", for example). And on Who, you don't have to look further back than the Russell Davies era to see habits of a particular creator incorporated into the vocabulary of the show. But since Davies has his own set of haters, head on back to the Tom Baker/Philip Hinchcliffe era, which is (rightfully) almost universally beloved. Hinchcliffe has easily as many narrative go-to's as Moffat or Davies. Return of the suppressed is a big one, as is the genre mash-up. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find an episode of the Hinchcliffe era that doesn't include one or the other of these tropes. But over time, they've become essential bits of Doctor Who vocabulary. They've been written into the DNA of the show, even though they started out as one guy's little quirk.
Does this mean lens flare is the new swipe cut? Does it mean the next X-Men writer (or set of writers) is honor-bound to include page-long jokes, or whole issues of snappy interpersonal dialogue? Does the next Who showrunner have to incorporate River Song?
Nope. Not a bit. But now these are tools in the narrative toolbox. These things get handed off and a whole new quirky, idiosyncratic creator is allowed to play with the toys, to clash symbols together however they see fit. And you can love it or hate it or leave it alone. What you can't do (with any kind of hope, or validity, or whatever) is whinge that THIS ISN'T WHAT IRON MAN IS LIKE!! Or THAT'S NOT DOCTOR WHO!! Or YOU'RE NOT DOING STAR WARS RIGHT!!
Because that's exactly what these things are like. They are idea sets that change, that evolve, that are sturdy enough to be passed from hand-to-hand, through tonal shifts and new plots. Their status quo is a state of change, because story can't exist without change**.
So buy your Star Wars ticket and suck it up. Or don't, and quit your whining. Or buy your ticket and then whine about it, because probably they will fire J.J. Abrams if six people don't like a light saber with a handle guard or whatever.
*I don't mention Bendis's Daredevil run here because DD was not a top tier character when Bendis took on the title. But Bendis's Daredevil is maybe his most successful front-to-back run on a book, if you ask me.
**Yes, the nature of that change includes a return to start, a putting back in the box. I am open to the accusation that there is no actual change, particularly in superhero comics.
