Bendis’s New Avengers Has Always Been Overrated

If you read Marvel in the 2000s, you definitely read comics by Brian Michael Bendis. Bendis started out at the now defunct Caliber Comics, but got his big break at Image, with books like Torso, Sam and Twitch, and Jinx getting the attention of Marvel. Bendis was given the reins of Ultimate Spider-Man and was suddenly one of the hottest writers in comics. Ultimate Spider-Man led to books like Daredevil, Elektra, and Alias, and those eventually brought him to Avengers, a book that had been put into a tailspin by writer Chuck Austen. “Avengers Disassembled: Chaos” was massively popular, and Bendis and artist David Finch were given the keys to the kingdom with New Avengers. New Avengers jumped over the X-Men books on the sales charts, becoming the bestselling Marvel book. It was the most important book in Marvel’s publishing line through the last half of the ’00s, the epicenter of the publisher’s major event comics, several of which that were written by Bendis.

Bendis was responsible for some of the best Avengers stories of the ’00s. That can never be taken away from him, nor can the sales success of the books. New Avengers was the first time in years that the Avengers were popular, and it broke the hold that the X-Men books held over the sales charts. However, I don’t think it deserves the unequivocal praise that it has been getting since it came out. Bendis’s New Avengers has always been overrated to an extent — Marvel in the ’00s is generally overrated — as there have always been problems with the book that mostly come from the way Bendis wrote it.

New Avengers Was Often Boring

New Avengers still has a lot going for it in re-reads. The art is fantastic for basically its entire run. Bendis worked with the best artists that Marvel had in the ’00s — the aforementioned Finch, Steve McNiven, Mike Deodato, Leinil Yu, Billy Tan, Olivier Coipel, Jimmy Cheung, Stuart Immonen, and many more. The book was always a feast for the eyes, which I definitely thinks helps with the perception of it. Bendis also did a great job with certain characters in the book. He made Spider-Woman, Iron Fist, Echo, and Luke Cage interesting for the first time in years, and his Spider-Man and Wolverine were always great (Bendis is honestly sort of an underrated Wolverine writer). These strengths definitely help the book, but the main problems with New Avengers are some of the defining problems with all of Bendis’s work at Marvel — the decentralized storytelling, the street-level feel of everything, and the lack of action.

Now, the decentralized storytelling thing wasn’t completely Bendis’s fault. It was becoming the standard across the comic industry at the time, as trade paperbacks became a bigger part of the publishing schedules of the major comic companies, but Bendis was especially bad at this. His stories often had a lot of filler; stories that would have been two or three issues in previous years were stretched to four to six issues, and the extra space would be taken up by Bendis’s patented talking heads. Bendis’s books were usually pretty funny, but there was also a problem with that — everyone made Spider-Man-esque quips constantly, hurting the individual voices of most of the characters. New Avengers often felt like a bunch of iterations of Spider-Man, with only a few characters having a unique voice (Luke Cage, Wolverine, Spider-Woman, and Cap). Any fan of the MCU’s humor should know that Bendis was the one who made it popular.

However, even that could have been forgiven if it wasn’t for the lack of action and the street-level feel of the book. The Avengers were often the home for the big action epics of Marvel; the Avengers were known across the universe as one of the most powerful forces out there. Bendis kept the Avengers on Earth, and barely used any of the major Avengers villains that fans loved so much. Ultron and Kang didn’t appear in the book at all (although he would bring them into later Avengers titles with mixed results). In fact, there honestly weren’t a lot of actual villains in the book until the Hood’s supervillain union, itself basically the Masters of Evil in everything but name, appeared. The Avengers fought the Void, the Hand, and other heroes more than they actually fought villains. Also, saying that they fought anyone is also a bit of a misnomer. Bendis never had a good grasp on writing action. Most issues would have no action at all, mostly taken up with drama and set-up. Bendis would tease fights at the end of issues, and then skip them entirely, having the Avengers talk about the fight they had in between issues in the opening of the next issue.

This honestly happened a few times over the book’s series, starting right in the book’s first story arc “Breakout”. When there was action, it would be a few pages that had no flow whatsoever. The Avengers were once Marvel’s wild action franchise, but that changed under Bendis. I often think that Bendis was trying to do a Claremont Uncanny X-Men-esque book, building character and making an Avengers soap opera, but Bendis didn’t have Claremont’s grasp on sci-fi or action storytelling. New Avengers was often issue after issue of characters talking, and that’s always been the biggest problems with Bendis’s writing in general (House of M was mindnumbingly boring, as was Secret Invasion). These problems — the decentralized storytelling, the talking heads, the street-level feel, and the bad action — make New Avengers into the most important overrated book of all time.

New Avengers Could be Fun but It’s Not as Amazing as Its Reputation

New Avengers was undeniably the most important Marvel comic of the ’00s. Even when there were other big Bendis written Avengers books like Mighty Avengers and Dark Avengers, New Avengers was the flagship. And this did work at times. New Avengers, from the end of Civil War to the end of Secret Invasion, is honestly very good, the book finally living up to its reputation (the Dark Reign New Avengers was good, but it wasn’t as great; Bendis was concentrating on Dark Avengers at the time). However, before that period and after the book was the sum of its problems.

In recent years, Bendis’s writing at Marvel has had a re-evaluation. With the hype of the era subtracted, a lot of his books haven’t aged well in the estimation of fans. New Avengers was a fine book most of the time — the drama and humor was entertaining, even when the book was in the middle of another issue of action-less Avengers story — but the book has always been somewhat overrated. It’s rarely actually bad (although I would argue that the first Ronin story, the post-House of M story, and the Civil War tie-in issues were mediocre at best, as were a lot of the stuff during Dark Reign), but it’s not this greatest of all-time team book. When it was good, it was pretty awesome, but it wasn’t always good, despite its reputation.

What do you think about Bendis’s New Avengers? Sound off in the comment below.

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