School and Girls

MICHAEL DEAN: You went to a boy's school?

BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS: Yeah, it was an all-boys school, which only meant that the second we were with girls, it was like an orgy. [Dean laughs.] Anything a rabbi tells you not to do you can't wait to do on the weekends. The good thing was, and the thing that adds to the weirdness of how much work I can get done is that my school day was long. Really long. In at 7 AM. and out at 6 PM. No joke. Plus homework, plus I was part of a youth group, too, because that's where the girls were, so I literally slept like three hours a day when I was doing all this stuff. That translates to my schedule today, where I still sleep three hours a day and I fill up my day full of stuff. Now it's work and kids and family and blah blah blah. It was a unique training experience, the part of my childhood that carries with me as an adult. I can sit still for as long as I have to and juggle a lot in my brain at once. And it's also interesting that I had that repressed or sheltered life of high school, so there wasn't a lot of drugs and nonsense in my high-school experience. I went right from a private, modern Orthodox religious school to a pretty respected art school, and it was like floodgates of crazy. Half of my classmates were already out of rehab and it was an entirely different experience.

DEAN: Well, that is interesting. That reminds me of Paul Schrader, the director, who had, a very sheltered upbringing.

BENDIS: I definitely announced when I was like 13 to all my friends that I was going to be George Pérez even though they didn't know who that was. In my small peer group, the thing that made me unique was that I was into comics, and you know, because my peer group was so small, it wasn't anything like I was a nerd. We were all nerds about something; it was just mine was comics. A lot of my friends from high school would have to listen to my lengthy proclamations about how I would one day rule all of comics or something. And some of them were shocked that I hadn't broken in when I was 16, because I was the only comic artist they knew, so I was the best comic artist they knew. But when I got rejected from art school for the first time, that was a big eye-opener. It sucks. It ended up that I was not good at all. I was sheltered, but I was very into what I was into. The one thing that's interesting, particularly when I'm writing Ultimate Spider-Man, is that I now have almost an outsider's perspective on the high-school experience because my high-school experience was so not the normal high school experience. But my emotional experience in high school was very universal, it seems.

DEAN: I gather, from the way you were describing it, that you were kind of plunged into male-female relations after...

BENDIS: Well, I did have a girlfriend in high school, too.

DEAN: Where was she at? I guess she went to a different school.

BENDIS: Girls... she'd live nearby and you'd sneak out and do whatever you were going to do. [Laughter.] A little more than we were supposed to, you know. You know.

DEAN: Was there any kind of tension there between that and your religious teachings?

BENDIS: I wasn't really religious at all; I was just going through the motions because that's where I my mom put me to keep me safe. I couldn't wait to eat pork, my rabbi was wrong about everything else. This is how bad I was. Me and my friend, my best friend in high school (who has since high school come screaming out of the closet), we would literally sneak out of school at lunch time, go to the grocery store, buy barbequed pork and eat it behind a dumpster at the supermarket. That's how rebellious we were. Rabbi says don't eat pork -- Fuck you, I'm eating pork! Can't stop me man! That's how retarded it was. We literally went out of our way to eat pork because they said not to. I don't even think I like pork. I just was pissed off.

DEAN: Well, there's a certain rebelliousness in the comics, too...

BENDIS: For sure.

DEAN: ...the characters are all spouting profanity. [Bendis laughs.] I would guess that, your teachers in Hebrew school, their hair would stand on end.

BENDIS: And I happen to know this: Some of them have seen the work, and they're thrilled.

DEAN: Oh, really?

BENDIS: I'll get a little newspaper article, like in Cleveland there will be some nice thing, or The New York Times piece I was lucky enough to get, right? And they go, "Ooh, hey, an alumnus of the school is in The New York Times," because it's a private school - You know how that goes, right? But then they find out, "it's the potty-mouthed dickbag who's making a living from anal sex scenes in Marvel comics, whoop-de-doo for him." [Dean laughs.] It really doesn't work out for them. You really can't raise funds based on my nonsense.

DEAN: Are they seeing more of the articles about you than they're seeing the actual books?

BENDIS: No, they'll see the articles and they'll say, "Hey, look it, he made it," and they'll go somewhere to get it. "Let's go get a comic!"

"Oh, I heard Alias is good. Let's go get that."

"Oh, oh my goodness." [Laughter.] And no one's invited me to the alumni dinners. Which, by the way, makes me very happy. Please do not invite me.

DEAN: You were seeing girls in high school?

BENDIS: Fouling nice Jewish girls.

DEAN: Were they reading comics at all?

BENDIS: Nope.

DEAN: How did they treat your comics?

BENDIS: It was fine. It wasn't any weird thing. You know, I would talk with my big dreams and they would go, "Oh, really?" and that was it.

DEAN: There was a period in the '60s when I was starting to read comics that comics were obscure enough that they were kind of cool.

BENDIS: Because of my social situation, it wasn't so much cool but it was my thing. It made me unique and it was accepted among my friends, you know, when we were hanging around summer camp and it was a rainy day, everyone would read my comics, and we ended up sitting around and talking about them all day. It wasn't anything they gravitated to, but it would be a fun afternoon or something. They respected me for it, didn't shun me for it. But I'm sure that if I went to public school I would be the nerdy loser that no one spoke to, who ate paper. [Dean laughs.]

DEAN: And you told them you had the ambitions that one day this was going to be you; you were going to be doing this?

BENDIS: Oh, absolutely. I was drawing them then, I was writing full graphic novels in high school.

DEAN: What kind of graphic novels? What kind of stories?

BENDIS: I have a complete Punisher versus Captain America story I wrote through maybe six entire times. I would draw it and go, "That wasn't good," and draw it again, and not just one page but the whole thing, look at it and go "No, I'll do it better next time" and then do it again, do it again.

The funniest thing I did in high school involving Marvel comics is we got some Creative Writing assignment in class, and I was so in love with [Chris] Claremont's X-Men and the Starjammers story that week that I adapted it to novel form. My teacher gave an A+. "What an imagination you have!" I thought everyone knew what Starjammers was. I thought she knew what it was and she would appreciate the adaptation; I didn't think she would think I invented it, but then I got the A and I went, "Oh, OK." [Dean laughs.]

DEAN: You didn't confess to her.

BENDIS: She was saying, "Boy oh boy, there's like 40 characters!" and la la la and I was like [disappointed-sounding] "Oh." Sounds like me taking credit for Ultimate Spider-Man today.

DEAN: You must have spent a lot of time, I mean for a teenager to spend that much time creating stuff -- that takes a certain amount of discipline, or drive at least.

BENDIS: If you mean sitting in the bathroom when I'm supposed to be in my drama class, yeah. In the bathroom sketching all day when you are supposed to be in Torah class, yeah.

DEAN: It takes a certain kind of focus.

BENDIS: I did have that. It's a personal thing, but it also has to do with the way I was being raised.

Spunky Todd

DEAN: You had another title during that [early Caliber] period which sounds Eros-y, but I don't think it was. Spunky Todd.

BENDIS: That was my next genius bit of material that I did for Caliber, and this one was the man who could read the minds of women, but he can't get a date: more male paranoia, more me feeding off my insecurities of college and dating life. If it sounds a lot like that Mel Gibson movie, yeah, you're right. They stole it! [Dean laughs.] The only good bit of that is that he got his super powers being hit in the back of the head with a Krazy Kat brick, and I like that part, but the rest of it sucked.

DEAN: Was it very cartoony then?

BENDIS: Yeah, it was very cartoony, very influenced by Bloom County and other stuff like that. Just a mishmash of nonsense: Another necessary project just to figure stuff out about my writing and my art. It's ridiculous. But at the time, I was convinced it was the next Simpsons.

DEAN: You were pretty confident. These were your first professional comics works. At the time, did you feel pretty good about them?

BENDIS: I was thrilled I was being published. Absolutely out-of-my-mind thrilled. And it really made my college career much easier. A lot of the guys in my classes at the time were burning out pretty fast. Like we're not even ending our third year and they're already looking for day jobs, you know? For me, I got that second wind big time because now I could apply my goals immediately to published work.

It was very easy for me to convince my teachers that I wasn't a big spastic fuck-up. Because I wasn't the best illustrator in the class by far. In fact, I was probably one of the worst, but I needed to go through this route to get better. Even the kids in my class who thought comics were shit, you got to admire a guy who was actually getting them published. No one else was working, and I was working. It took a lot of stress off my academic career and put it onto my comic career, and that is where it should be. So it worked out very well, actually.

Columbia

DEAN: Why do you have characters like Columbia representing yourself in books?

BENDIS: I use models, in the great tradition of P. Craig Russell and others; I use actors to portray the characters for certain types of artwork. I use myself only because I am a model where I know where I am at all times. Particularly with Jinx, there were the three of us, people I was close to, but Jinx, I wouldn't see her all the time so it was hard. You just panic because you're not going to have your photo reference. I was using myself for convenience, it's not like, "I can't wait to show my short, balding Jewish-ness to the world. This will be awesome! I can't wait to show it to you!" It's nothing like that.

DEAN: The last shot of Jinx is through Columbia's dead eyes.

BENDIS: Don't read anything into that. [Dean laughs.] It's not like I'm begging for help or anything. I'm so removed from the character to myself that it isn't me. I don't act like that; that's a character.

Visions of Light

DEAN: You said you started out writing in order have something to draw, but when you worked out Goldfish in your head, were you working it out in terms of conversations, the things the characters would say to each other?

BENDIS: I was writing and drawing at the same time. It was a mixture of that, and film-noir images and the other experience I'd had just as I started Goldfish. I think I had 10 pages of Goldfish, when I saw Visions of Light, which is a documentary on cinematography. If you've never seen it, you've got to see it.

DEAN: I know the one you're talking about. It is very good.

BENDIS: Well, for me, it was a religious experience. I stood up in the theater and said "Hallelujah," and I'm not even a little joking. I was reading tons of Jim Thompson novels at the time; I was definitely influenced by those in big, big way. I was trying to discover the images that would go along with my own personal Jim Thompson novel that I was writing. I was doing these harsh black-and-white images that aesthetically appealed to me. I didn't understand the rules -- there are rules of film-noir language -- which I didn't know. I went to see Visions of Light and there's like a 10-minute block about cinematography and John Alton and film noir in this movie. And it was them talking about the rules of film noir. It's an overview, but I didn't know there were rules. The chills that came down me -- my whole world was shaken by it. I was already doing it and I didn't know it had a name. My whole year was fucked up. It was film noir and film noir and I was just inhaling it and reading and reading and reading.

DEAN: Can you say something specific about what you realized or learned from that documentary?

BENDIS: In the documentary, someone says John Alton's rule is: Don't be afraid of using black; be afraid of using white. Oh my god, oh my effing god, that fucked me up. That was it! The city is the lead character of the story, not the people speaking? Oh, my god! These things were driving me insane. That's why Goldfish sucks less than the things that precede it.

DEAN: You could definitely see that in Powers, that the city has a certain life and character of its own.

BENDIS: Thanks, and Daredevil. Alex went to great lengths to make sure that Hell's Kitchen is speaking to the audience.

DEAN: You also used photocopies, photographs, stuff like that.

BENDIS: It's called Xerography. [Laughs.] The poor man's computer, Kinko's.

DEAN: What was the intent with stuff like that?

BENDIS: I wanted things as film noir as possible, and there was an aesthetic feeling you get. It wasn't just simple Xeroxes, some of these things are 10th-generation Xeroxes, and I would play with exposures -- I was like a crazy person -- to manage to get the best feeling out of it. Softcel focus, off of a Xerox. It was just something that aesthetically appealed to me. I'm sure I stole it from Steranko somewhere. I'm sure Sienkiewicz did it somewhere. I stole it from somewhere; I know I did. But it aesthetically spoke about what I wanted to accomplish artistically, to what I wanted a page to feel like. I wanted it to feel dirty and inky. There were two ways to do that; you could do the splatter inks, or you could do it this way, and this way really appealed to me.

DEAN: For stuff like Torso, it gave a kind of documentary quality to it.

BENDIS: By Torso, I actually changed. By Torso I actually said, "Can I use the computer to accomplish this?" There wasn't any Xerography in Torso; Torso was all done by computer. Much like Alex separately was doing on his own. There is room in Photoshop to create a film noir piece. Everything in comics is Photoshop gradation.

DEAN: But there was some photography, right?

BENDIS: I drew the foreground characters, then the photos were applied to it. In Torso, 90% is actually photos from the crime scene or the period that I scanned in and manipulated for the purposes of the story. But what I wanted to do, the reason for that was, I wanted to constantly remind people that the story was real, that it actually happened, and I thought the best way to do it was to use an actual background. Whatever locations I couldn't get from photo-reference, I actually went to the places and took photographs of the buildings that exist now and took out the mailboxes and stuff like and made them look like it was the 1930s.

Alisa

DEAN: Before we get more into Torso, you had met Alisa [Bendis' wife] at this point, right?

BENDIS: Yes, I had met Alisa at the end of Goldfish.

DEAN: About what year would that be?

BENDIS: It was 10 years ago. We were just looking at a picture of me in Greg Horn's art book, and we agreed that that was the summer we had met.

DEAN: So Jinx would be post-Alisa?

BENDIS: Jinx was all through Alisa and again I hear the man in a good relationship wondering why he shouldn't be able to write a decent relationship in the book itself. This one I'll cop to: It's about these two people, learning to trust. "You know what? I haven't trusted anybody until now. Why don't I try trusting someone, see how that works?" While I was actually doing that in my real life.

DEAN: Those are issues that young people are dealing with, which I think would be one reason why those books appeal to people. I would say in Goldfish maybe more so than Jinx, well even in Jinx I guess, the characters were not entirely mature. For instance, you had Columbia: If he would get mad because he was insulted or something like that, he would pull out a gun and try to shoot the guy, which is not really a subtle...

BENDIS: Well, there are a couple things going on there. I only know these things now in retrospect, and I also know them in retrospect because enough people have read them and gotten back to me with their feelings on it that I know that this was part of the appeal to it. Jinx says something about having gone down a road. And then she looks back and she doesn't even know how she got on the road, and why she's on the road, and it 's so far off from where she had actually planned for herself, that she doesn't even know how to get off the road. She didn't know where to go. It was about her life taking a furious detour. I couldn't believe how many people related to this experience. I thought this was a very specific experience to me, or something. This was the most reaction I'd ever got on anything I'd written up to that point. And what I did not realize was that many people of my generation had gotten into some dot-com boomer thing, and they were 25 and done. It was over, whatever they got into collapsed. And they didn't know what to do with themselves, and some of them had money and some of them didn't have money, but they were like 26 and they did not know what to do with the rest of their lives at all. They had no goals. That was a big part of what people related to, which was bizarre.

DEAN: I see those kinds of realizations cropping up all through your work, later on. Even as late as the Powers storyline where you have a super-powered character suddenly become aware that he doesn't remember his childhood. The sense of how did I get here, how did I get to this point in my life, and what do I do with it now?

BENDIS: I guess, while you're writing; you can't help but get to the big questions. You can either shy away from them, or you can just pose them.

DEAN: Some people do a good job of avoiding them.

BENDIS: Yeah, you're right. I don't even know how you do that. It's a little scary. Oliver Stone talks about this a lot, but he has a tendency to ask a question and not answer it, because he thinks just asking the question is good enough. I don't know if I necessarily agree with it, but you can't argue with it. There's certainly nothing wrong with asking a question. I do know people want at least a hint of an answer. Readers are not coming to you to be more confused.

DEAN: We were talking about Alisa. You met her; did she have any kind of background in comics, or reading comics?

BENDIS: Not at all. I never actually dated anyone who had any background in comics. It was always the thing a woman either found charming about me or didn't. I know it made me more interesting than every other goddamn accountant that they dated.

DEAN: How did you meet Alisa?

BENDIS: I was the staff illustrator for the Hillel Foundation in Cleveland, which is the Jewish college group. They're all over the country; they're national. The Cleveland chapter, I had a lot of friends there and they'd always hire me to do their graphics and stuff like that. It was a decent gig. And she was hired, and we joke about this, but it's 99% true: I was flirting with her, to get more money out of her, and she was flirting with me to get the price down, because of the budget, and we were a little too good at it. [Dean laughs.] By the time we'd actually met, I was very taken with her mentally. I just liked her. She was a whole lot of fun. Actually she met me the day I shaved my head, for the first time. I had just gotten rid of my hair, so it was a whole new me. I did come into the office and people were going, "Woo, woo," you know, because it was such a decision, especially among my Modern Orthodox Jewish friends; you don't do things like this. So we were very taken with each other and we were very serious right off the bat. I had had long-term relationships, almost my entire adult life, and she was the first one I said, "Marry her, got to marry her."

DEAN: How long before you married her?

BENDIS: Within the year we were married.

DEAN: Fast.

BENDIS: I knew soon. You could just tell.

DEAN: And she was OK with your comics aspirations?

BENDIS: Yes, and she married me literally penniless. She married me, I had an Image book, 2200 readers, and that was it. You know, what is also funny is that she's a nice Jewish girl and, boy, there was a whole lot of years there where it didn't look like that was going to happen.

DEAN: Was that mostly because you were drawn to non-Jewish girls?

BENDIS: My rabbi was wrong about everything else, so I couldn't wait. So my girlfriend in college was like a 6'1" blonde violinist from Iowa. [Dean laughs.] We dated for like three years. She was like this shiksa Mecca. I did everything my rabbi told me not to do. I'd just sit there in bed with her and eat ham. It was a fantastic experience. My wife, very full of life, very, very generous person. A very, very good person. I tend feel that I am not as good as I could be or as generous as I could be and just being around her made me feel like a better person. When she reads that, she'll like that. [Laughter.]

DEAN: I'll try not to cut that out. [Whoops. MD]

BENDIS: You know it's just one of those things where you meet the person and you go, "Oh, finally, thank you."

DEAN: She also, I guess, became pretty active in terms of running things for you.

BENDIS: Totally believed in it like no one I've ever met in my life, other than David Mack and some of my other friends, who had the same philosophy of life. She was the one who totally believed in it. Even when we were dating. There was a funny moment while we were dating, where she was aware I was making a living. I did have jobs, I had enough money to pay my bills, but didn't pay my bills, because it seemed counterproductive to earning the money, to have to give it away. So there was one point where she took my checkbook and my bills away from me. She was like "Give me those." And that was the last I've ever seen of them. So I'm very glad we got married because I wouldn't know where my money is.

DEAN: When did Jinxworld actually take place?

BENDIS: Around that same time. Any corporation, any business, situation that was built around me and my work, that was Alisa's doing. I wouldn't even know where to begin. I knew it needed to be done. I was aware that once properties were being sold, or being established, corporations and things needed to happen, but to this day I wouldn't know how to accomplish that.

Goldfish the Movie

DEAN: Besides the streamlining you mentioned, the cutting of certain long scenes, can you think of some differences between the Goldfish comic and the way you treated things in the movie script?

BENDIS: Oh yeah, just having completed one this week it's inherently a different language. First of all, in comics, you're directing the piece when you're drawing it, or even writing it for comics. You do a lot of directing. Or at least I do. You're picking camera angles. Also you're in the character's head a little more, when you're doing the comics. They're novels; they're internal. Even though they're visual, they can still be very internal. Whereas film is external. It's about what you're seeing, and you have to leave room for the actors to express a lot of what the underlying themes of the character are.

DEAN: Can you think of some specifics for either Goldfish or Torso? Changes you made?

BENDIS: Jinx, I think the biggest change we made to Jinx is there's more of a "ticking clock" going on, which is the technical term for there's a deadline she'd have to get done by, or the world will explode. It's called the ticking clock because usually in the James Bond movie, it literally is a ticking clock. You know, 10, 9, 8... Instead of it being, "Let's see if we can get this money and get out of town," it's "We've got to get this money before someone else gets this money." So someone's chasing her.

DEAN: So you're playing with time.

BENDIS: You're playing with time, and a sense of urgency really does help a film along, where in a novel you can do it -- you just don't always have to. With an internalization of the drama, you can just get their anxiety to push across the plot.

From Caliber to Image

BENDIS: We would all still be there, we would be thrilled to give [Caliber Publisher] Gary [Reed] all the credit in the world for giving us all the opportunities that he did, but in reality he gave us every lesson you could learn in this business including the screwing-us-over lesson. He did he make us all smarter and tougher at the end; I guess we owe him for that, as well, but I don't think I needed to learn that lesson. I got my film back, I took my books, I published them somewhere else, it ended well.

DEAN: You got everything reprinted at Image?

BENDIS: Yep. [Image Publisher] Jim [Valentino] agreed to do the trades and I go, "Listen, I don't mean to be whiny, but these have to be great productions. I cannot put out another crappy version of Goldfish. I absolutely can't do it." So it was a nice deal to put these books out the way I wanted them put out. I didn't know Jim Valentino, coming into Image. He had signed a couple of my friends and I sent him my books with a clear air of "Help me! Please help me..." Because I literally did not know what I was going to do, self-publish or pack it up. That's how close it was.

DEAN: Had you met [Todd] McFarlane when he was dealing with Caliber?

BENDIS: No, there would have been no reason to. I was in Cleveland; I wasn't hanging out in Dearborn or anything. McFarlane's world and my world seemed as far away as you could possibly get. Our existence at Caliber, versus early-mid '90s consumer craze, which was just a total opposite experience. To even look at that world of mainstream comics, it was just like an alien planet. There was nothing about it that remotely resembled what we wanted to do, what we were trying to do.

DEAN: And yet that's where you ended up.

BENDIS: That was the time when everything was a double-page spread and pin-ups. It wasn't about any writing; it was just all about pin-ups. The storytelling, every device was alien to me, what they were doing. So we just ignored it and went about our day. Jim gave me the green light right away. He said, "What do you want to do?"

I said, "I'd like to finish Jinx."

And he said, "Come to Image and we'll give you a home and here's the deal."

And I was like, "That's really the deal? Wow, that sounds like a great deal."

I was able to make the cut sales-wise. Of course, there was a two-month window, when I guess retailers didn't realize that [Image] Shadowline books were black and white, and they ordered like 15,000 of them, and I had missed that window by, like, a month. Just one month at 15,000 would have helped me out. But it worked out really nice even still. I would still be there, if Jim was still there.

DEAN: I don't know if you would have been picked up by [Erik] Larsen or not, if he were running things at the time.

BENDIS: I don't know. He's always been very nice to me. I don't know him at all, but in the conversations I had with him, he's been pretty intelligent. He did pick up Kabuki and Colleen Doran and others. My entire Image experience, from the Shadowline, through the Larry Marder time, through Jim running Image, it was a very good experience. I don't think they get enough credit for what they have morphed into. They really just want people to have a safe home for comics. I know Image started out of such a salacious legend, which you guys have reported duly, but what Jim has tried to make out of it, you can't fault on any level. There's a safe harbor, and the book is as good as you want to make it: "We'll market as good as you want to market." It's self-publishing. [Creators] don't know it's self-publishing. But that's the magic of Image. Checks always came on time, all the time I was there. It was kind of a funny thing, but I was at Image longer than Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld.

DEAN: About what year was it that you went over there then?

BENDIS: I was there like eight and a half years -- '97, '96 something like that, I'm really bad at that stuff.

DEAN: The amazing thing to me is that Caliber lasted as long as it did. It had a long run there, publishing things like Dante's Inferno.

BENDIS: Some things really sold well at Caliber. The Crow did really well, Kabuki did 40-50,000 in black and white. That's boggling. It really did extremely well. But like any publisher there's a lot of stuff that's negligible. His heart was in the right place a lot of that time. He would just look at a story and go, "Oh yeah, go right ahead." Like I said before, having a place to fall on your ass a couple times, you couldn't put a price on it. I really needed to see my book in print, and say, "Oh my god, I'm fooling myself," pull up my sleeves and go back to work. I really needed to do that. But that doesn't mean he was right to keep our money and screw up our books.

Artists

DEAN: You say you're rarely disappointed, but you visualize this stuff, and you're writing it visually, you have a concept of what it should look like. Don't you ever get it back from an artist and say, "No, that wasn't what I meant at all?"

BENDIS: Rarely. First of all, a lot of people I'm working with right now, I've now worked with for a few years so we have shorthand in understanding, I know where to push them. And even back when I was working with David Mack on the Daredevil story, I'd been so in tune with David's work for so long, I knew what he could do that he wasn't writing for himself. And I pushed him to paint things that he wouldn't have painted on his own. Which I know at the time, may have been a little frustrating for him, but it ended up being a really wild, exciting experience for him. It opened him up.

In my instance, I'm writing for artists I couldn't possibly draw like, like [Mark] Bagley. I could never draw like Bagley draws. There have been instances where you go, "Boy," and you then have to reexamine the page. I have one artist friend who told me he was working with a writer. And that he would change the scene because he thought of something cool. And the writer was so annoyed with it, he just ignored it and just kept his script written the way it was. And the reader reads it and goes, "What the fuck is going on? The script is saying one thing and the art is doing another thing." That is not my job. So what happens is, Bagley 90% of the time draws the script identical. And I say to every artist, "I'm writing it the way I would direct it, if that's the word. You can go that way, or you can go your own way. Here's where we got to get to; get us there." And it's mostly the fight-scene choreography where they ignore me. They do whatever fights they have in their head or a photo reference for, or whatever they want do. But then I go back in and I do correct the words and a lot of the time I'm adding some of my best one-liners, based on the look in the eyes that's funny. Or, in the biggest compliment I could give to any artist, I yank the dialogue right off the page, I just take it right off, because this art says it all. That happens with Bagley a great deal.

Ultimate Marvel Team-Up

BENDIS: The first book that I actually created for Marvel that was specifically for the purpose of this addiction that was growing for me was this Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, which I don't know if you saw.

DEAN: Yes, I did.

BENDIS: But this book, when they said, "Hey, what do you want to do next?" It was a very cool phone call because that was the first time Marvel ever said that to me.

And I pitched this Marvel Fanfare idea. Because what I wanted to do, it was like an exercise. I wanted to get a different artist from every walk of life of comics and just try to enter their world for them, and ask them, "What do you want to draw?" Go to Matt Wagner: "Who have you always wanted to draw? What's the coolest thing you could ever possibly imagine doing at Marvel?" And then write it for them. And then every month it would be a different experience, because I was literally going from Chynna Clugston-Major to [Bill] Sienkiewicz to [John] Totleben.

DEAN: So you would have to adjust yourself to the character and to the art-style?

BENDIS: It was always a wild experience. It was exhausting. It was very hard, it was the hardest job I ever had, because it was very different experience from being with Alex for five straight years, really getting to know what can and can't be done.

Three-Act Structure

BENDIS: The Robert McKee stuff, it's such a great path to go on to, and then start building your own ideas and philosophies. So many people don't have any idea how to write anything, and they don't know what three-act structure is, and they don't know what is character development, or character arc. They don't know what any of this stuff really is. Even though they inherently do know it, because that's what you've been raised on. But they don't know how to apply it, and they don't know what it means. So when people come up to me and say, "I don't know what to do, what should I do," I go, "Why don't you read this book." Because it's a nice starting point: Also, only some of it applies to comics. You can tell an excellent comic story in three acts, but it doesn't have to be three acts to be an excellent comic story.

I loved studying the three-act structure. Oh, it's so much fun, because it does work and you can apply it, and it really is exciting to get all those pieces and those ducks in a row, right? But once you've done that, now I sit there and go, "Uh, why don't I do a story that's got no second act, just to see what would it feel like?" So you start fucking with it and playing with it and see what you can do with it. In Daredevil right now me and Alex are doing a story that takes place in three different time periods at one time, and we just threw the structure right out the window: It's just bananas. And I think it's more dramatic with no structure than the same story with.

DEAN: I don't really know McKee's stuff that much but I just balk at the idea of any kind of formula.

BENDIS: That's the thing. It's not a rule or a formula. But there is stuff that inherently in storytelling works. The three-act structure works. And it works for a reason. And you have to really study why it works. It's kind of like the painters. [Pablo] Picasso had to learn how to paint before he could learn to be Cubist. You got to learn what this stuff means. A lot of writers, particularly in this business, they're just writing stuff they think is cool, and there's no structure, and there's nothing there but "Wouldn't it be cool if a dinosaur came?" It wouldn't kill everybody to study a little bit. And it's fun! I'm telling you, studying the three-act structure is a blast. But you're right. Anytime someone says, "Here's the rule," without even knowing I'm doing it, my eyes roll into the back of my head and look for ways to break it.

DEAN: See, I think it would be "a blast" to look at how it applies to all these movies and stories I've read and seen, other people's stuff. But then I hate the idea of saying that, "Oh, now I have to abide by these rules too."

BENDIS: When I wrote Jinx, I was unaware of the three-act structure. Other than, like, it's in me because you're surrounded by the three-act structure. So when I went in to look at Jinx again, knowing that I needed to get it into a three-act structure for a screenplay, I was like, "Hey, look, three acts, I had it!" I was all excited that I had done it. Same thing with Goldfish, I'd already done it on my own without knowing. And that was fun, knowing that I didn't know the rule, yet was applying the rule. The problem is no one in comics wants to talk craft. Mainstream or indy writers, particularly, won't talk about writing, I think, because they are terrified people will see right through them.

DEAN: So when you have a digression, like you had in Jinx, in the mall, that's still following, more or less, the three-act structure?

BENDIS: Yeah yeah yeah, comics aren't movies, and you don't have to do what a movie does. Again, I'm using the most commercial term for a movie. And even when I'm doing Ultimate Spider-Man, I don't write three-act Ultimate Spider-Man stories. Sometimes they end up being three-act Ultimate Spider-Man stories, but that isn't the goal.

DEAN: Was there a Goldfish and a Jinx screenplay?

BENDIS: There's two different -- well, Jinx I'm starting to work on now. That's the one that Charlize Theron is attached to. With Goldfish, I think the biggest change I made is the kid dies at the end of the book. And I was sat down and it was expressed to me why that wouldn't really work in a movie, particularly that in film, people really can't watch kids die at all, in any situation. You never, ever see a kid die anywhere unless they're dying of cancer or something.

DEAN: Even in the comic, you try to keep it off-camera.

BENDIS: What made me think that they are right is that I looked at the comic, and I was even trying to hide it [there]. I didn't actually show it. Because looking at a kid with his brains blown out is more than people can handle to the point where it's distracting to the story. This was kind of an interesting lesson to learn, and I'm glad I learned it. When you're telling a story about a guy reuniting with his son, and then you get to the end, and you deny them that moment, it really is kind of a betrayal to the audience. And there's kind of an unwritten law between you and the audience saying, "Yeah, he'll get to see the son." And if not, it has to be for a much greater reason than I had. We all saw the trailer to Castaway. The Tom Hanks movie? In the trailer, they actually show you that he gets off the island, which seemed insane to me. They did test marketing and people wanted to know. They said, "I'll go, but you promise me he gets off the island." There's truth to that. People do want to know, and it's about denying them the moment. You promised them something, and then you took it away from them. And in the novel, you certainly can get that across as the tragedy that's meant to be. In the movie, it's just inherently unsatisfying to the story. Does that make sense?

DEAN: Yeah.

BENDIS: And I really did agree with them. I felt like a huge studio whore because I agreed with them. I was like, "Am I nuts or are they right? That's weird." I was surrounded by a bunch of notes I totally disagreed with and ignored, but that one I certainly agreed with. Again, I don't think a happy ending is the only ending, but they were talking about denying something you promised, and I thought that was an interesting way to look at it.

Fatherhood

BENDIS: A lot of my friends, even Valentino, were, like, "Do a Fortune and Glory about the baby," and I was like, "Who am I, Bill Cosby?" I don't have any unique perspectives, you know what I mean? It's all been said. Yes, fatherhood is wonderful. No one needs to hear that from me. That's two feet away from writing your children's book, now that I have a child. I do understand, by the way, that it would be the mindset, because as writer, I'm reading these children's books going, "It took two people to write this? Goddamn!"

I just wanted to deal with this really complicated neurosis, and there was something very cool about using the Marvel universe to express this over-accentuated fear. I was scared for my baby to be born? Well, [Jessica's] got Norman Osborn punching her. That's the Marvel version of an actual emotion.

Avengers Disassembled

BENDIS: I'll tell you, what was funny was the segment of the comic-buying community that I'm not a part of which goes, "Kill more of them, it's awesome!" And I go, "Wow," because I don't have that bloodlust, but I do see that it appealed to people who wanted to see shit like that.

DEAN: When it was working at its best, in the early issues anyway (I don't mean to say it got bad), the referent for me was the early issues of Fantastic Four, with the Galactus sequence. There is a sense of dread you get, the story is building very slowly, and each calamity seems to be bigger than the last.

BENDIS: Definitely, it was a pile-on, and it looked like there was no way out, and there was no way out. You're not used to seeing that in a mainstream comic book. I can't say I'm disappointed with the reaction to it, because it has been a very impassioned reaction, so it's fun to be a part of. But you know who just said the same thing to me you just did. was Joe Quesada. He said every Marvel comic was an event back then and if Stan was still ship captain, who knows if we would even recognize the Marvel universe.

Animated Spider-Man

DEAN: The other thing we haven't talk about so far is the Ultimate Spider-Man in the cartoons. That's a Hollywood experience, I guess.

BENDIS: Yeah, that wasn't Ultimate Spider-Man, that was just Spider-Man. What they offered to me was, they wanted to do a TV show that had the language of Ultimate Spider-Man but in college. Not that there is a lot of talking, but Ultimate Spider-Man in college.

DEAN: So it's not quite Ultimate Spider-Man, because he's in college.

BENDIS: Probably the movie had something to do with that mixture, too. I was hired to write the pilot, I was unaware the pilot had no home. I thought the pilot was already picked up. I was ignorant. I wrote the pilot, it was picked up, and I was like "Whoo hoo!" And I go, "Oh, what's that?"

And he goes, "You're the executive producer. You got your pilot picked up."

And I go, "I don't know. I've done film, but a fucking show writer and a cartoon? I've never done any of this." And I literally was alone in the room with a bunch of people -- they were stuck with me contractually -- and I didn't understand any of it. Because there's a bunch of people in animation that -- I really think I'm making more money talking to you now than the people in animation are. For the amount of work it was.

So I wrote it, and then the movie ended up making a fortune, and became, like, this generation's Star Wars, and the need for the show became unnecessary. The show became "Well, if it's better than the movie, that hurts the movie, and if it's worse than the movie, it hurts the movie." And that's not how I thought of it. I just thought it would make a great show. Basically, there were just way too many corporations involved. There's MTV, MTV legal, Marvel, Marvel legal, Marvel East Coast, Marvel West Coast, Sony, Sony Animation... I didn't enjoy it at all. It wasn't even a normal Hollywood experience; it was way too much. And then my wife got pregnant, and the meetings were boring. It was like, "Why does it have to be a spider?" [Dean laughs.] I just stopped coming. I never actually quit; I just stopped coming.

DEAN: That sounds like a bad experience.

BENDIS: It could have been worse. The thing that really is not fair is that the animators killed themselves for the show, and they did such an awesome job with no budget. They were really like gung ho about trying something new with animation. I'm so about guys like that, and they worked so hard that to bad-mouth the show is not fair, because there's some legitimately interesting shit that they did. I just know what the show could have been, and what it was supposed to be. I have a real scary story. I wrote the pilot; the pilot ended up being the third show they aired. So the first show aired was a show I had not written, looked at or even seen. I had never read the script. But my name is on it like three times, because I developed it. I, the one who thought up "Peter Parker" and "Spider-Man" [Dean laughs], so I got a developing credit. It didn't occur to me that it would be reviewed. Even though it was on television and it was Spider-Man, it didn't occur to me that anyone would see it. But the week before it came out, there were all these reviews. Entertainment Weekly did it. And there's my name in every fucking review, and they were all good reviews. They were all like "A"s. And there was my name and I had nothing to do with it at all. So I'm going online and saying, "By the way guys I swear to God I did not write this episode, and it's not fair to the guys that did." Because I always feel bad for some guy who wrote this episode. I don't even know who wrote it. I got all this good will. I wish I could have saved it for Avengers, but I wasted it on a show I didn't write.

DEAN: Well, even on the shows you didn't write, didn't it seem that they picked up from you your kind of rhythms and the way the characters talk?

BENDIS: Not at all. I saw an episode -- I can't even say. It's not even fair for me to comment on it, because I didn't watch it that much. I was very spoiled. My feeling was writing Spider-Man the comic is maybe one of the greatest experiences of my adult life. I thought that writing a TV show would be doubly exciting, and it wasn't doubly exciting. So, my impatience was skyrocket-high.

But I did get to go through the experience of having actors act out my script. That was fucking crazy, I had never done that before and that was really weird. I must have looked like I was having a complete nervous breakdown in the booth, because one of the Sony executives kept coming over and going, "Are you all right?" It was unnerving; they are all very good voice talent. They really could act; they were really giving it all they got and they all did it as an ensemble. They all did it in a room together, which was great. That was one thing I got them to do. Who cares, but I thought, that one way to make this show special is to have them all interact, get a little Altman thing going on, you know? Oh, shit, it's fucking Spider-Man and I'm doing Robert Altman. [Dean laughs.] Nobody gives a shit. And I'm trying to write the Nashville of superheroes.

DEAN: It probably worked; maybe they were doing that for the other episodes too.

BENDIS: I don't know.

Marvel Continuity

BENDIS: John Cleese was recently interviewed, and he's talking about how there was a season of Monty Python where he was writing scripts, and then he would finish the script, and read it back. And he wasn't plagiarizing the Goon Show, he thought he was writing an original script, but he was really remembering something he'd heard, like, 15 years ago. It was a total subconscious thing. But he was reading it and he'd go, "Oh, this is a Goon Show script." A lot of times, I'll think of an idea, and I'll go, "Am I remembering that, or am I thinking of a new idea?" And you have to go back. And Tom Brevoort and Ralph Macchio, are excellent when you call up and go, "Has Xavier ever..." and they go, "No, but that's a pretty good idea," and I go, "All right, good, good," particularly with X characters or Spider-Man. So many stories have been told, how can you remember everything you've read?

DEAN: Even the regular narrative thread of X-Men is boggling enough. The idea of an Ultimate X-Men...

BENDIS: Yeah, you couldn't even have read all of the X-Men, particularly; it's impossible to have read every single story. It's one thing to purposely rip them off -- which I have no problem doing -- but to do it accidentally is embarrassing. You can only declare it homage if you know what you're doing. So I actually end up doing research, not unlike the crime comic research I do. I spend half my day doing crime research; I spend the other half of my day doing Savage Land research, so it's a fun mix of stuff. And I'll do it myself, too. I'll go to Tom and Ralph for pointers and make sure that I'm covering my ass and not missing anything, because, if you miss it, particularly with the Marvel Universe, you'll get caught. If you're accidental, it's embarrassing. Because someone goes, "You know they already did that in blah blah blah," and I'm like, "No, I didn't know, OK." And if you cop to that, they're like, "You have no business writing Marvel comics! How dare you?" You know, that kind of thing.

Secret War

BENDIS: It's going until 2009, so...

DEAN: Is that how long it's going to go?

BENDIS: You know, when you see issue four it's fucking gorgeous. The paintings are coming in so slow. When we solicited, we were good. We were getting a painting a week, we could do this, and it would come out quarterly and it will be fine. The paintings are getting more difficult because you're getting to the big fight scenes and a lot of villains, a lot more heroes, a lot more painting. And I was really grateful for this so that instead of A) firing [Gabriele Dell'Otto], or B) hurrying it up, they said, "It's fucking gorgeous, and it will come out when it comes out, and it will sell forever."

And I said, "Thank you for looking at the long term." Because it will, I do wish it were on time...

DEAN: It can be the death of the best books, when they...

BENDIS: I know, but I'll risk it going up. I'm officially one of those books that people reward for bad behavior that you always read about. But I think most people know it's a quality issue.

Entitlement

BENDIS: What I enjoy immensely are the people on the message board. There is a large group of people who read my books and have a wide variety of the same interests as I do, and that's a lot of fun. We have a lot of fun talking about DVDs, movies and lots of shit like that. We have a lot similar interests, and it's fun to meet people with similar interests. But every comic book is someone's first, and someone's last. Every book is an excuse for someone to drop your book, so I write it thinking that very sincerely. Entitlement is what kills a lot of people in this business, or in any creative business. The minute something connects with an audience, they go, "Oh, well, I deserve this, I've earned it," and they go into shock when no one's there for the next one. Most people do know that me and David and Mike and all these guys that came up out of Caliber are much more comfortable at that level, and any kind of success is actually wildly uncomfortable, so I don't take it for granted; I take it very sincerely, particularly, with The Avengers doing better than anything everything I've ever done. I don't take it for granted at all; every issue I have to earn it.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #266.]

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