Brian Michael Bendis

Brian Michael Bendis - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Brian Michael Bendis

Brian Michael Bendis (born August 18, 1967) is an American comic book writer and artist.

This profile of Brian Michael Bendis covers Early Life and Family Background, Caliber Comics, Image Comics and Oni Comics, Marvel Comics and DC Comics.

Starting with crime and noir comics, Bendis eventually moved to mainstream superhero work. While at Marvel Comics, Bendis worked with Bill Jemas and Mark Millar as the writer on the first book of the Ultimate Marvel imprint, Ultimate Spider-Man, which debuted in 2000. He relaunched the Avengers franchise with New Avengers in 2004, wrote the Marvel storylines "Avengers Disassembled" (2004–2005), "Secret War" (2004–2005), "House of M" (2005), "Secret Invasion" (2008), "Siege" (2010) and "Age of Ultron" (2013), and co-created the characters Riri Williams, Miles Morales, and Jessica Jones.

Bendis has won five Eisner Awards for both his creator-owned work and his work on various Marvel Comics books.

Though he has cited comic book writers such as Frank Miller and Alan Moore, Bendis' writing influences are less rooted in comics, drawing on the work of David Mamet, Richard Price, and Aaron Sorkin, whose dialogue, Bendis said, was "the best in any medium."

In addition to writing comics, Bendis has worked in television, video games and film. He has also taught courses on graphic novels at The University of Oregon and Portland State University. In 2014, Bendis wrote Words for Pictures: The Art and Business of Writing Comics and Graphic Novels, a book about comics published by Random House.

Early Life and Family Background of Brian Michael Bendis

Brian Michael Bendis was born on August 18, 1967, in Cleveland, Ohio to a Jewish-American family. Bendis grew up in University Heights where, despite rebelling against a religious upbringing, he attended the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland, a private, modern Orthodox religious school for boys. He decided he wanted to be a comic book industry professional when he was 13, working on his own comics, including a Punisher versus Captain America story that he revised several times. A fan of Marvel Comics in particular, he emulated idols such as George Pérez, John Romita Sr., John Romita, Jr., Jack Kirby, Klaus Janson and Frank Miller. He later discovered crime comics by Jim Steranko and José Muñoz, which he traced back via Jim Thompson's work to the source novels of both Thompson and Dashiell Hammett, which helped cement his love for crime stories. These, in turn, led him to discover the documentary Visions of Light, which taught him the visual "rules" of film noir, an important influence on him creatively.

While in high school, he submitted a "Creative Writing assignment", a novelization of Chris Claremont's X-Men and the Starjammers story, which gained him an A+ grade for imagination and inventiveness. At 19, Bendis began attending the Cleveland Institute of Art, while working at a downtown comic book store where he eventually sold some of his early work. Between the ages of 20 and 25, he sent in a large number of submissions to comics companies, although he ultimately abandoned this approach to breaking into the industry, considering it too much of a "lottery."

Caliber Comics of Brian Michael Bendis

Best known as a writer, Bendis started out as an artist, doing work for local magazines and newspapers, including caricature work. He worked at The Plain Dealer as an illustrator. Although he did not enjoy caricature work, it paid well and funded his interest in writing crime fiction for graphic novels. He eventually moved into both writing and illustrating his work, before he began producing work for Caliber Comics, including Spunky Todd.

Through Caliber, he met many of his longtime friends and collaborators within the comics industry, including Mike Oeming, Dave Mack and Marc Andreyko, and began the first in a series of independent noir fiction crime comics when he published two issues of Fire in 1993 and five issues of A.K.A. Goldfish in 1994 with Caliber. In 1995 he illustrated Flaxen from a script by James Hudnall, with David Mack providing inks to the story featuring former Playboy Playmate Susie Owens as mascot of the Golden Apple Comics chain [of comic shops] in Los Angeles.

Bendis's best-known early work, Jinx, starring the titular bounty hunter in a crime noir version of the Sergio Leone film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, began publication in 1996, and ran for seven issues from Caliber.

He characterizes much of this period of his professional life in terms of working as "a graphic artist for almost twelve years", undergoing a period within that of "nine years" living as a stereotypical 'starving artist'.

Image Comics and Oni Comics

In 1996–1997, Bendis moved from Caliber to Image Comics, where Jinx and his other previous crime comics were published by Image's Shadowline arm in trade paperback. At Image, he also produced five more issues of Jinx.

Impressed with A.K.A. Goldfish, Image founder Todd McFarlane sought out Bendis, which led to his writing Sam and Twitch. Although set in the Spawn universe, Bendis approached Sam and Twitch primarily as a crime comic. He wrote Sam and Twitch for twenty issues, as well as most of the first ten issues of Hellspawn, another Spawn spin-off title. This non-creator-owned work allowed him to, in the words of Rich Kriener in The Comics Journal, " the responsibility of caretaker to his resume, in that he would answer to a vested owner about developing a property as a tangible asset with the future in mind," rather than only working on his own characters under his own terms.

In 1998, Bendis co-wrote and illustrated the Eliot Ness-starring Torso with Marc Andreyko, again for Image, and in 2000 he produced three issues of the autobiographical Fortune and Glory for Oni Comics.

That same year saw the debut of the superhero police/noir detective series Powers, co-created with and drawn by Michael Avon Oeming and published by Image. Powers won major comics industry awards, including Harvey, Eisner, and Eagle Awards.

Marvel Comics

Around the time Bendis began Sam and Twitch, his friend David Mack began working for Joe Quesada's Marvel Knights imprint, which Bendis was a fan of. Based on Bendis' work on Jinx, Quesada invited him to pitch ideas for Marvel Knights, which included a planned, but ultimately unproduced, Nick Fury story.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Michael_Bendis), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.