It looks like I'm winding up having a Tuesday - Friday posting pattern, and although captial-L Life is just as busy as ever, I'd like to try to keep it up. (Keeping in mind I do live overseas so there may be some time differences!)
One thing that has been getting a lot of controversy is Brian Micahel Bendis' Dark Avengers #13, art by Deodato and Beredo. I thought I would just take a moment to point out that, regardless of your personal opinion of this issue in particular or of the series/author in general, that Bendis is overall ... a poet.
By that I mean that Bendis is a craftsman of words. We can tell what is poetry and what isn't by the author's careful selection of words. No word is frivolous. As Mark Twain put it, "the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."
I picture Bendis at his desk, leaning back in his office chair, perhaps tossing a ball up in the air to help the thoughts flow. He is talking out his big ideas, discussing their implications, hitting a few "oh, and isn't it cool that such and such!" moments along the way. He parks on one of those moments, breaks it down, and considers how a characters might genuinely react. That dialogue is parsed, tripped over, tested, spoken and then preserved in type. I can see many "Ah! If I leave out this word, or put this word like this..." He's after the feeling and impression and implications that such poetic decisions leave in their wake as they pass by the readers' eyes.
Of course, whether or not you think he is a GOOD or a BAD poet . . .
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