Digitally Speaking...#4 "Avengers, Bad Medicine"

Avengers #12.1 (Marvel)
From 2011.  This was part of the kick-off to the "Age of Ultron" event that has nothing at all to do with the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron movie.  But it's also perfectly readable as a window into the decade-long Brian Michael Bendis era in the franchise, which ended a year ago.  The Avengers you know from the movies more or less came ready-made from a Brian Bendis comic.  Bendis is known as the godfather of decompressed storytelling, in that he can string any story out for many issues at a time.  The funny thing about this issue, however, is that it seems to be severely compressed, the exact opposite.  We go from the captured Spider-Woman to the Avengers arguing about how to handle the news (being delivered by a fairly complete nobody) to the Avengers finding Spider-Woman in a split second, right after we've heard her kidnappers hint at why they did it, to the revelation of Ultron's involvement.

There's a lot of trademark Bendis banter.  I mean, that's the playbook to every Bendis script, bantering between a large number of characters.  Especially in this issue, he might have benefited to streamline the players, so that the ones who actually contribute to the story better stand out rather than randomly comment here and there.  It makes the whole team seem poorly led and extremely inexperienced.  On the one hand, it makes things less intimidating to new readers.  And obviously, when adapted to the big screen very popular, but...it fails for anyone looking to have a more-than-decent comics reading experience.  Maybe when Bendis is writing a thousand different Avengers books (besides everything else he writes), it's easy to spit out the Bendis banter, but it's probably not great for his overall legacy, except to say that he's spent a huge amount of time writing Avengers (and Ultimate Spider-Man) adventures.

I'm always flip-flopping on Bendis.  This particular experience is no different.  A focused Bendis would be ideal, but a popular Bendis is an in-demand Bendis, and so I guess maybe that's not really an option.  Obviously the guy has talent, and can come up with enough stories to fill a thousand monthly adventures...It'd be nice to find out what's possible if he tried to do a more finite story, I guess is what I'm saying.

FCBD 2012 Bad Medicine (Oni)
The comic itself seems to be a gloss on the TV series Fringe (and hopefully the writers knew that, because nearly element is an exact duplicate, although in every sense less inspired), so why did I bother reading this?  Because of the art, from Christopher Mitten.  Mitten drew much of one of my all-time favorite comics, Wasteland, also published by Oni, in collaboration with writer Antony Johnston.  He became a little burned out and subsequently bowed out of the project, but is returning in time for the final ten issues, hopefully all of them to be released this year.  His artwork in Bad Medicine is similar to his Wasteland work although not as distinctive, perhaps because Bad Medicine itself is not all that distinctive.  The real bonus, the real treat for me, was the unexpected Wasteland backup tale from Mitten and Johnston, which nails perfectly everything to love about the series, the main characters Abi and Michael along their journey to I-Ree-Yass-I stumbling in classic Wasteland fashion into the middle of someone else's story (which is what half the series became in the city of Newbegin) even while providing more dazzling hints into the true nature of these deceptively complicated characters (their magic healing powers do not seem to be limited by decapitation, a throwaway joke aimed at Highlander fans).