Since I still can’t comment on Blog@Newsarama, a direct quote from a comment there:
When did women become the ’sacred relic’ that can’t be touch? It’s okay to torture men but not okay to torture women?? The mind boggles….
Oh, indeed it does, my young friend. Beyond a doubt, it most certainly does.
But keep fighting that good fight, sonny! I say it’s high time these haters learned that there’s more than one type of equality…and I’m just the man to give to to yuh…!
Uh.. there were supposed to be some more italics there, folks…
But what so much gets dropped out of human conversation, who’s gonna notice one more little thing?
A Trout In The Milk 
This was cheering, however:
“Having a woman hurt or characterized as weak within a story isn’t misogyny if the plot development or characterization serves a thematic purpose. Unfortunately, the plot mechanics of Bendis’s “Avengers” stories have been so terrible that the stories are, basically, themeless. When the plots depend on mischaracterization, scientific illiteracy (the repeated mishandling of EMP, for example), or discontinuities for their impact, one has to conclude that the publisher effectively has no editorial standards.
…one thing that’s become obvious over the last few issues of NEW AVENGERS is that he would much, much rather be writing crime fiction than superhero fiction and, towards that end, is trying to write superheroes and their foes as if they were crime fiction characters. Mechanically, the results are terrible; the heroes have been unsuited for their roles within the plots, as if someone tried to shoehorn romance fiction characters into hard SF stories. Bendis is so obviously a genre writer (competent or not) in the wrong genre that there’s no way for Brevoort, et al., to justify publishing his stories from an artistic quality standpoint.”
An excellent point from Steven R. Stahl, and it got me thinking…it’s true, I believe, that Bendis lacks a theme in his Avengers work, and indeed almost all of his work for Marvel. Essentially it seems he has very little to say in the straight superhero genre; where Alias did (and Powers does) have a point to make underneath all the affectation — and I don’t think it would be inaccurate to say that Bendis’ affectations as a writer are even part of that point — outside of being a showcase for some very good Spider-Man dialogue, Bendis’ Avengers is mostly interesting as an example of how talent sometimes isn’t enough, to get the job done.
I like Bendis. Enough to quote him, sometimes. And he’s done some impressive straight superhero work elsewhere, most notably in Ultimate Spider-Man. But as an architect of a straight superhero universe, and person in charge of its major properties, he’s not got much on the ball.
But, at least he isn’t Millar, whose flaw is that he does have points to make with all these things…
Completely off-topic:
A while ago I speculated that the Outsiders might be DC’s version of the Defenders. I now retract that notion.
See, I just got the first ‘Spectacular Spider-Man’ black-and-white collection out of the library, and have perused it intently (man, Marvel couldn’t spell in the ’70s!), and I now have a better comparison.
The Outsiders are DC’s version of the Champions. (I think it’s entirely possible that DC doesn’t have an equivalent to the Defenders.)
Hmm, the DC analogue to the Defenders?
If you think in terms of a team where a lot of the charcters can’t stand each other, and would rather be off doing their own thing, I’d argue Suicide Squad.
But in terms of the Defenders being sort of an odd collection of characters, dealing with weir threats the more conventional teams would be equipped to handle, maybe the Doom Patrol is a better comparison.
Wow, I’m going to have to think seriously about Outsiders = Champions, now…ha.
The Englehart Defenders = Suicide Squad…double ha, and I’m gonna have to think about that too.
But, Defenders = Doom Patrol. I’ll say yes. Particularly since I think, if they aren’t, then the next step’s the Metal Men.
I think the Metal Men are as close as DC has come to having an equivalent of the Fantastic Four. I don’t know; maybe.
Wow!!!
You could be right, there!
Brilliant!
I thought the Fantastic Four were based on the Challengers of the Unknown model, only with superpowers.
Given the number of metal men stories which apparently involve their “deaths”, I’d be inclined to compare them to the X-Men on that, even if the “hated and feared” bond is probably stronger between the X-Clan and the Doom Patrol, but I already compared them to the Defenders, so I don’t know anymore.
That’s true…but one of the ways the FF differs from the Challengers is that their powers make their personalities a lot more, ah, elemental — by which I don’t mean the old Four Elements thing, so much as I mean that they really live right in that link between character and expression that all superheroes depend on…and at DC, maybe only the Metal Men are as, ahem, as cartoonish as the FF are, in this sense. As in: with the FF as with the Metal Men, a little kid would not just be able to notice that the characters and powers all reinforce each other, but I think would be able to articulate it pretty perfectly. Whereas with, say, the Doom Patrol, they might not be able to say “these people are all handicapped” even if they did in fact get that they were all handicapped.
I dunno: does that make sense?
Oh! And as for the Metal Men dying…well, the FF split up all the time, too! Hey, I think it works…