Wednesday, 18 April 2012
On Avengers Versus X-Men #0: How Brian Michael Bendis Never Disappoints
When it comes to his Avengers scripts of recent years, Brian Michael Bendis never disappoints. His work is always terrible. It's that very lack of quality which has made me such a fanatical follower of his work on the various Avengers titles. Where else can the reader enjoy the certainty of such imperial levels of authorial indolence when it comes to characterisation and plotting, which other books can ever match the idle mix of wilful first-draft/last-draft sloppiness paired with a lordly contempt for common sense? Bendis's Avengers books are so utterly, inexcusably wretched that they're an absolute joy to experience. No matter how hard the reader works to imagine the depth of incompetence that'll mark the next issue, no-one can ever anticipate the endlessly dull-minded ways in which Bendis manages to cheat his readers while undermining what's left of his reputation with everyone beyond the Rump. Those who accuse him of writing only for the least discriminating of fan-zealots have quite missed the fact that his Avengers work now appeals to a highly-selective niche which only a tiny fraction of writers have ever conquered. As such, we few readers who actively seek out those rare comics which consistently disappoint even the very lowest of our expectations salute the man who sold himself to us as the David Mamet of comics, but who's since been outed by the evidence of his own work on the Avengers as the super-book's very own Michael Bay.
A prime example of exquisitely boneheaded Bendisness can be found in the recently-released, and reassuring awful, Avengers Vs X-Men #0, a comic which has at least helped to prove how Rob Liefeld's recent work for DC isn't actually the nadir of modern-era super-books at all In AvX #0, Bendis presents us with a scene in which the Scarlet Witch embarks on an ill-advised social visit to Avengers Mansion in the company of Ms Marvel and Spider-Woman. Wanda's reluctant to do any such thing, and understandably so, but Carol throws a sisterly arm around her and declares;
"Everyone's been worried about you. Just come back and say hello and get your hugs and let everyone know you're okay."
Of course, the trip to the Mansion goes particularly badly for the Scarlet Witch. Not only is she denied entry to Avengers HQ by her ex-husband The Vision, but she's also cruelly and publicly berated by him, and then effectively ordered off of the premises. A plot-furthering example of character-driven conflict, you might assume, but it's actually nothing more than the cheapest, the most stupid, of logic-less melodrama. For one thing, the audience has previously been given no reason to believe that the newly-reborn Vision feels any such way about his once-wife. (He expressed no such sentiments in his solo appearance just last month in Avengers 24.1, for example, though that was written by BMB too.) As such, the Vision's pronouncement of perpetual, irreversible exile upon Wanda erupts without the slightest foreshadowing, It's a common enough trick in Bendis's Avengers tales, to sidestep narrative logic in favour of great extravagant strokes of ham in order to capture the reader's attention. Here, Bendis decides that the Vision, the most kindly, the most sympathetic, the most purposefully human of Marvel's characters despite his android origins and appearance, shall suddenly become a vengeful, nasty bully. What can possibly be the reason for the Vision turning on the woman he once loved so in this particular fashion? It can't be the trauma of the temporary death which Wanda subjected him to, because Bendis has given us not the slightest evidence of anything but a certain degree of angst and frustration afflicting the synthezoid since his return to life. (He's been dead before, and utterly deconstructed in Byrne's regrettable West Coast Avengers run, so he's not even facing an entirely unfamiliar experience here.) Yes, we might expect that being transformed into a robot killing machine, after the way of superhero tales, might profoundly upset even an Avenger who's somewhat used to such things, but what Bendis is showing us in AvX #0 is a complete transformation in the Vision's personality, and there's been no sign of any such thing until this point.
That in itself might not have pushed AvX #0 all the way to the breaking point of its logic, but Bendis's story also relies, as we'll see, upon two other entirely unexplained, unforeshadowed and profoundly nonsensical conceits. Firstly, he expects us to believe that a number of the Avengers would be capable of holding Wanda personally responsible for the acts she committed in and after Avengers Disassembled, and, secondly, he expects us to accept that none of Earth's Mightiest Heroes will stand up for the Scarlet Witch while the Vision berates and then exiles her. In that, Bendis takes the Avengers and once again reduces them to either idiots, bigots or faithless friends, an act of careless revisionism which leaves the reader struggling to think well of any of the "heroes" on show.
For whatever the Avengers have decided was the cause of Wanda's first murderous and then reality-warping behaviour, the fact is that Wanda had obviously suffered a catastrophic breakdown of her ability to control her own actions. Whether it's seen to be the result of an unfortunate disorder or the consequence of the influence of Dr Doom, or even, according to She-Hulk, the paternal malignancy of Magneto, Wanda herself is blameless. She didn't decide on a whim to kill, she wasn't undergoing a brief moment of self-willed weakness. People don't just suddenly shrug, surrender to self-indulgence and decide to wipe out both their family and their closest friends, and you'd think that that would be a given for the smart, well-educated, supposedly compassionate members of the Avengers. That the Vision and his comrades suffered terribly because of the madness of how Wanda behaved is beyond doubt. Yet nobody who's at all rational, empathetic and well-informed would blame Wanda for the acts which she committed when she wasn't fully in control of her own mind. As such, she's every bit as much a victim as the rest of the Avengers are, and perhaps even more, since she has to bear the memories of what's been done as well as being constantly exposed to the ill-judgements and distrust of others.
It would have been an excellent moment, you might think, to emphasise the realities of psychological disorder and criminal responsibility in a pop-culture form, but of course, nothing of the sort occurs. For as Bendis showed in his treatment of the Sentry, he's little if any interest in the social ethics of psychological disorder, and here he's at his callous worst again. A strange business from beginning to end, of course, since if Wanda was in any way personally responsible for her own actions, then the Avengers would be both bound by honour and law to ensure that she's dealt with in a humane manner which also ensures that society's protected from her too. Yet she's seemingly free to run around half-naked firing off hex bolts and doing exactly as she wants, which surely indicates that the Avengers now consider her sane. Either the Avengers should be striving to constrain and help her, because she's mad and desperately needs their help, or they should be doing all they can to help her adapt again to everyday life, because she's sane and she desperately needs their help. Yet the Avengers choose to seem to consider her both sane and blameworthy, and to regard their obligations as being confined to ignoring her.
But where would the drama be in having the Avengers behave in a rational and kindly fashion, when Wanda can be treated so very cruelly, can be abandoned by her friends and left to fend so cod-tragically for herself? Where's the pathos, where the easiest of plotting short-cuts, to be found in having plots make sense and characterisation count for anything other than convenience?
Cheap, stupid drama with a considerable degree of ethical cold-heartedness directed against the blamelessly disordered: Bendis does not disappoint those hoping to find third and fourth rate work in the pages of the Avengers.
Of course, Bendis has a serious problem with his plot for AvX #0, because he's presenting supposedly sympathetic and smart-minded characters behaving in an ignorant and despicable fashion. The solution which he settled upon appears to have been to simply ignore logic and good conscience entirely, while loading up the the strip with flat wisecracks, reader-distracting asides and, on the part of the Vision, dialogue which only sounds deeply revealing and sensible until the actual sense of it is considered. And so, Bendis has the Vision declare that he "cannot forgive" his ex-wife for using his "body as a weapon against my friends and my home". It sounds like a reasonable, if hardly rational, motivation until the reader considers what it is that Bendis is actually having the Vision say. At first glance, the Vision appears to be stating that he considers Wanda to be at fault for the terrible things which happened to him and his fellow Avengers, but of course, Bendis can't have the android saying any such thing, because the reader would simply wonder why the Witch was being blamed for something that clearly wasn't her fault. So Bendis has to complicate the issue and obfuscate the fact that the Vision's unfairly berating Wanda. And so, the Witch's sin becomes clumsily twisted until it becomes that of her choosing to use the Vision's body to harm his team-mates.This clearly makes no sense at all. Why is it that the Vision cannot forgive Wanda for the highly specific matter using his frame "as a weapon against my friends and my home"? If he regards her as being responsible for the ill events, then it doesn't matter how Wanda used him to attack and kill her comrades.
And yet, as we've said, that would be a ludicrous charge, so Bendis has to throw in the misdirection of the overpowering and mis-use of the Vision's body. "That I cannot forgive." declares the Scarlet Witch's ex-husband, a remarkably poorly reasoned argument which the rest of the Avengers - including two super-geniuses - simply swallow whole. Who could possibly line up behind the Vision, or at the very least shamefully avoid challenging him, when he's declaring that Wanda's unforgiveable sin is not hurting the Avengers, but using the Vision to do so while, as the android himself says, she was at her "lowest". What does the maddened Wanda's seizure of her husband's body have to do with her culpability, why is it such an important and unforgivable issue when all else goes unmentioned, and why is it that none of the Avengers notice how stupid this argument is? At the very least, they might have noted that the folks who were hurt and murdered during Wanda's attack were also her "friends" too, that the Mansion was her "home" as well.Yet Bendis gives the android some very specific words and phrases to speak which ought to have inspired the other Avengers to speak out, and it's particularly noticeable that he has the Vision declare twice in separate word balloons that Wanda "chose" to do what she did. So, can it be true that the Vision believes that Wanda was capable of controlling herself during and after the Disassembled period, even as he also says that she "may have endured" the manipulations of others? Is he saying that she did have free will, and yet she possibly didn't? Is it that she is responsible, and yet only to a degree? Because she can't be both blameworthy and potentially blameless if the Vision is going to say the things that he does. Why, given the astonishingly weakness of the Vision's argument, do none of the Avengers suggest that no-one in their right mind commits the acts which Wanda did? Could it be because that would mean that Bendis's story would then trundle peacefully off into a scene of the Vision being quietened down in a darkened room while Wanda is offered a cup of tea?
It's another example of Bendis delivering highfalutin phrases which just don't stand up to any kind of scrutiny. It would be lovely to think that Bendis is outing the Vision as a man who's an overpowering phobia about the control of his own body. That would be an interesting spin on the character, given how his man-made frame has been mocked, reviled and even repeatedly torn to pieces before. Such would be a fascinating business, to present the android as a man who's so profoundly neurotic about the association between his artificial substance and his free will that he just can't bear the thought of losing control over his own actions. Yet of course, Bendis doesn't seem to be saying anything of the sort, for if he was, it would be the Vision and not Wanda who was being portrayed as the blameworthy party in this scene. Instead, it appears that Bendis is saying nothing more meaningful than that the plot needs the Vision to hurt Wanda at this point, and so that's what he has the Vision do. The android's behaviour makes no sense, his very words are piffle strained through psycho-babble, while everything that Bendis has him say and do violates the character's entire life-history without any explanation being offered for the while sorry affair. But given that character means little if nothing at all to Bendis in these Avengers tales, and accepting that all that counts is soap-operatic effect, then why shouldn't the Vision behave so despicably? What does anything matter beyond the latest reader-shocking twist of the arc?
Yet it's not just the Vision who's bent deliberately and ridiculously out of shape in the scene. Bendis has the Vision coldly spit at Wanda while the whole business is being watched by six other Avengers; Ms Marvel, Spider-Woman, the Beast, Thor, Wolverine and Iron Man. None of them - not one - speaks for Wanda or attempts to reason with her persecutor with any conviction at all. Carol Danvers, who cajoled Wanda into visiting the Mansion with the promise that "Everyone will be very happy to see you" doesn't even step forward to stand beside her friend and lend a shadow of support until after it's all over, when she finally offers a token "Wow! Could you be any more of a --?". (Are we really supposed to believe that Ms Marvel would respond so cravenly? After all, and despite her token resistance, she simply does what the Vision commands and flies Wanda away, a contemptible business. Still, it is the women who do what they're told here, and the blokes who make the decisions about who gets to do what with whom.) Indeed, all of these apparently noble, if understandably compromised Avengers stand back while the clearly irrational, and genuinely irrational, Vision takes control of all of their affairs. Who is and who isn't welcome at the Mansion surely isn't a matter for the Vision alone, and yet here everyone chooses to wash their hands of any responsibility while allowing the emotionally fragile and entirely innocent Wanda to suffer. Even if they are all in support for the Vision's stance, and Ms Marvel for one clearly shouldn't be, you might think that they'd be exceptionally wary of upsetting a woman who once rewrote reality in order to try to reduce her own anxieties. Old abilities have a habit of returning in the super-people universes, after all, and common sense if not kindness would dictate something other than allowing her to be sent to Coventry in such a cold-blooded fashion.
But no, it appears that the likes of the Beast - the compassionate, empathetic Henry McCoy - and Thor - who once welcomed the Swordsman back into the fold despite the latter's habit of trying to murder the Avengers - are unable to even suggest that a touch of politeness, compassion and group decision-making might help. "His call." declares Wolverine as Wanda leaves, which begs the question "why?". Why is the Vision to be granted such power, such freedom from moral responsibility and even sense? That he's suffered terribly is beyond doubt, but then Wanda herself has been twisted and broken by outside influences and psychological troubles herself, and all of the Avengers must surely know - if I may be forgiven repeating the key issue here - that we do not regard those who've lost their free will as the authors of their own terrible misfortune, no matter what they've done. Yet apparently the Vision is the injured party here, as if he was a patriarchal husband cuckolded by his irresponsible wife, and so whatever the Vision wants must happen. It's shameful stuff, and whether Bendis's intention is to show the Avengers as a shower of cretins and bigots, that's what he's achieved. How is it that not one of them spoke and fought for her with any conviction and spirit, how can it be that not a single Avenger sought to lend her any substantial comfort at all?
There are two other wonderfully pathetic moments in Bendis's script for these few pages, and it ought to be said that we're only discussing five sides here. The first is the sight of the Vision weeping after he's driven Wanda away, a closing panel which seems to demand that we see him as a kind of brave martyr to his own suffering rather than either a brusque bully or a resurrected and yet traumatised, and therefore also blameless, android. It's typical of BMB's work on the series, in that what counts in his scripts is not who the characters are or what their motivations might be, but the sentimental and sensationalist impact of their behaviour upon the reader. Finally, there's another one of the supposed master of dialogue's impossibly clunky, stupid lines, in which Tony Stark concedes to Wolverine that the Vision quite rightly possesses the right to treat Wanda pretty much however he wants, before whimpering: "I just - - always liked them together." One of the most brilliant men in the Marvel Universe, who is himself a survivor of a savage addiction which caused to do some profoundly terrible things, isn't, it seems, concerned with either Wanda's well-being or that of her ex-husband. Indeed, he's not even capable of wondering about the rights of the Avengers themselves, for it's surely not up to the Vision to assume the ad-hoc power to pass judgement on any other member of the team. But instead of anything which might reflect either his personality or common sense, Tony just simpers that he liked the Witch and the Vision together, as if that had anything to do with anything at all. Again, if that really is the most important, the most pertinent and caring thing that Stark can say at that moment, then he's as much of a miserable excuse for a human being as his fellow Avengers in the scene are.
But then, every single character in this five page sequence except for the Scarlet Witch herself is entirely repugnant. Earth Mightiest Heroes? Earth's most conspicuously bigoted and gutless ignoramuses might be a more appropriate tag-line for the series. When even Carol Danvers doesn't have the guts to stand up properly for her friend, the reader's capacity to feel the slightest admiration or even liking for these straw women and men entirely dissipates. Even in the unlikely event that Bendis has set all of this unpleasantness up in order to later reveal how emotionally blighted and psychologically ill-informed these Avengers are, the truth is that none of them beyond perhaps - perhaps - the Vision should be feeling and behaving as they are in that scene. But then, that's not the Avengers, that's a bunch of hard-hearted, self-interested, keep-your-head-down know-nothings, and I hope the Phoenix does for them, I really do.
When it comes to his Avengers scripts of recent years, Brian Michael Bendis never disappoints. His work is always terrible. I look forward to his How-To-Write-Comics book next year, secure in the knowledge that it'll explain the principles of graphic storytelling for the super-team comic-book as helpfully as Grant Morrison's Supergods illuminated quantum physics.