As others have said on here, I don't even know why people bother with non-creator-owned Bendis these days. He definitely had his day (Ultimate Spider-Man was a seminal book, and he and Alex Maleev put together arguably the greatest Daredevil run ever), but he's barely done anything worth a shyt for Marvel or DC since 2004. You had to know that him on every DC book was going to suck.
On another note, old shyt I've been reading these days:
-Did a mini-Warren Ellis dive inspired by
@Mr. Negative's Avatar Press question, and yeah: a lot of his Avatar Press stuff still holds up. No Hero is aimless and should be half the length (but with an admirable focus on themes related to drug abuse, the distinction between perception vs reality, and a desire for general personal worth), but damned if Black Summer and Supergod aren't still amazing. Supergod especially still retained its ability to freak me out a decade after its publication, and I don't scare easily at all. Also, Nextwave is still amazingly hilarious stuff; The Authority if The Authority lacked all manner of sense or sanity.
-Wanted to see if my claim about Joe Casey on Uncanny X-Men held any merit, so I revisited his run. For the most part, fukk no...the first seven issues of this run are seven of the worst issues of an X-Men comic I can remember.
Insanely generic garbage marred by derivative, bog-standard plotting and terrible art. Like, it makes me wonder why people shyt on Claremont so hard when he came back to the title in 2000 and 2004, because between the middle of Lobdell's run and Brubaker's run, there's over a decade of either irrelevant or unreadable stories in Uncanny X-Men. At least late-period Claremont made it to mediocre.
. The X-Corps stuff is decent until the mess of a climax, and the final 2 issues of the run (along with the annual) serves as a nice little twist on the usual superhero problem solving (if you have a business related problem, don't punch it. Have your incredibly rich teammate manipulate them and their business partners and buy them out instead). If he would have done something in the vein of the Vanisher story for his entire run, I'd have been more into what Casey was doing here.
It's strange though, because Casey's actually a great writer when you put him on more fringe or creator-owned stuff. His Wildcats run, particularly Wildcats 3.0, was one of my favorite runs of the 2000s (superheroes attempting to change the world through corporate marketing and selling perpetual energy batteries was amazing stuff), Automatic Kafka was such a demented and bizarre (sometimes blatantly metafictional) take on superheroes and American cultural sensibility that I'm still shocked DC published it 17 years after the fact, Codeflesh is one of the most subtly compelling ruminations on addiction and obsession I've read in comics (and contains one of the best single issues of the 2000s, in my opinion), Godland is fantastic Kirby tribute/pastiche, his Mr. Majestic is the second best classical Superman comic to never be published as a Superman comic (first is probably Alan Moore's Supreme), and then he wrote a compelling Superman comic in which Superman doesn't throw a single punch for 12 issues.
He's probably more well-known for his Man of Action animation stuff these days (Ben 10, Big Hero 6, the most recent Avengers and Spider-Man animated series), but dude could write the shyt out of a comic book (even if he wasn't necessarily the greatest writer of
superhero comics...more of a mainstream subversive than anything). He just happened to not write a very good X-Men comic.
Why are you making me defend this dude!?
It's amazing to me how slept on Wildcats 3.0 is/was. I could've read that book forever.
