Do you remember a time when the Marvel universe wasn’t a shitstorm of umbrella storylines? Yeah, I can’t remember either. One year after the next, there’s some overarching “STORY” that seems to infect every title on the rack. It’s standing there like a goddamn herpes sore on every cover. Whether it is THE INITIATIVE or DARK REIGN or SECRET INVASION, you can bet you’ll never just read:

“The Avengers” or “Uncanny X-Men” anymore.

No siree.

And that isn’t to mention all the spin-off titles that are there to prey on the completionist blowhards. Oh hey, look, DARK REIGN: AUNT MAY, comes out this week! Cha-ching! Oh man, did you remember BEN ULRICH NIGHT MAURAUDER: THE INITIATIVE? Yeah man, that was great! That was the issue where they stuffed sixteen shitty pages into a comic book, slapped THE INITIATIVE onto the cover, and made some easy money.

And at the center piece of this corporate ass reaming is Brian Michael Bendis. A caveat before I lose my mind. I think Brian Michael Bendis is an excellent writer. I dig Powers. I dug the first three thousand issues of Ultimate Spider-Man he wrote. I even read Goldfish.

However, what I recognize Bendis these days for is the fact that he looks over the Marvel galaxy like some fucking Czar. Brian Michael Bendis seems to be the Darth Vader of the Marvel galaxy, ruling every title’s underlying storyline with an iron fist.

And meanwhile, Joe Quesada is a pudgy Emperor Palpatine, cackling in the corner. YESSSSS, he hisses. MOOOOOORE DARK REIGN SPIN-OFFS, he implores. And Bendis is all like, “Thy will be done” and shit. And then next month you’re reading DARK REIGN: SPIDER-MAN VS. DARK DUALING JUGGERNAUTS X-TOPIA and wondering what the fuck is going on in the Marvel universe. If you need a fucking checklist to read a storyline, there’s something wrong afoot!

Keep up with me.

Why Bendis, Ian? Why you all hating on him?

That’s a good question.

He is the mastermind behind all the overarching storylines that seem to infect almost every single title. Secret Invasion? Him. House of M? Him. The current DARK REIGN umbrella that is bleeding into everything? Him. And you know how I called him a talented writer? Well, he’s a spread a bit thin these days. When you’re pumping out fourteen titles a month, while guiding the overall vision of the entire universe, your shit gets weak.

So it’s two-fold. I’m tired of swallowing his concepts in titles that would previously have nothing to do with him. Why do I have to have DARK REIGN in my Uncanny X-Men Why are there now fourteen Avenger titles? Not only does his Mighty Avengers and New Avengers fall under the BIG EVENT  moniker every month, but also now we even have Dark Avengers to pick up.

And his writing is tired. It’s formulaic. All you need to do is throw in some witty dialogue (usually by Spider-Man, who seems like his go-to guy, his crutch) and a fight scene. Bam, there’s your new issue of New/Mighty/Dark/Naughty/Superb/Splendid Avengers. Oh wait, don’t forget to throw in a scene where Norman Osborn cackles menacingly in some corporate tower or something! Shazam.

I wouldn’t call him a bad writer; I’d call him super diluted.

Ian, you’re a douchebag, what he’s doing is creating a cohesive universe.

Listen, I’m all for a cohesive universe. It’s neat to know that all the characters seem to exist within the same realm. It’s comforting to know that Wolverine isn’t going to be running around as some Autoerotic Shaman in Uncanny X-Men, and be perfectly normal in the fourteen either titles they squeeze him into.

After all, who can forget the debacle that was DC killing Batman twice last year? Holy shit, egg on their face, right? So it’s good that Marvel can prevent that from happening. And it’s even cooler what they’ve done with Luke Cage and Iron Fist. Bendis resurrected Luke Cage, daps to him for that. Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker turned Iron Fight into a must-read for their run. And then, reflecting those resurrections, they actually become “players” in the Marvel game.

That’s cool. That works.

I was pretty stoked with the coherence of the universe even last year. It felt nice that tight writers like Fraction and Brubaker and Bendis and Millar had created a world. A functioning, breathing world. I was willing to overlook the obvious cash grabs that were going on.

And then shit just sort of spiraled out of control.

HOLY SHIT, AWESOME NEW AVENGERS INITIATING THE SECRET DARK REIGN#2!

There is cohesion, and there is infection. There is a tight universe, and there’s hindering other writers. Where’s the threshold? What differentiates the two of them? I would argue that when the overarching storyline, whether it’s DARK REIGN or The Initiative, prevents good writers from telling the stories they want to in their own titles, things have run amok.

What’s the point of creating a cohesive universe, if writers can’t tell their own stories within that universe? Every time I see a talented writer having to shoehorn their title into some MEGAEVENT, I get discouraged. I don’t want to read some corporate shilled crap. And I’m sure they don’t want to write it.

The X-Men titles border on being unintelligible because of their own intra-events. But now we’ve got like MESSIAH EGO COMPLEXITY 2 overlapping with DARK X-TOPIA and DARK REIGN? Are you serious?

Say what you will about J. Michael Straczynski, but I respect the dude for standing up against it. I had stopped following his Thor for a while, but it was recently announced that he was going to stop writing it. Why, you ask?

“The one concern at the back of my head was that of being pulled into a Big Event that could affect the forward momentum of the book and alter its direction. I’ve said elsewhere that in many cases — and this isn’t just Marvel, the trend is pandemic”

Amen, dude.

Marvel needs to strip back all the bullshit. They need to take their absurdly long events, and keep them in a neat mini-series. Don’t want to read Civil Oblivion Maximus? Just don’t pick up the stand-alone. I’d even be okay with throwing in a couple of bullshit spin-offs. Civil Oblivion Maximus: Green Goblin’s Green Balls.

That’s the worst part about DARK REIGN. There’s no core title. There’s no mini-series. It’s redundant tendrils have drilled their way into almost every Marvel title. A reader can’t skip DARK REIGN without skipping the MARVEL UNIVERSE right now.

That’s fucked up.

- Caffeine Powered