Mary Jane leaving Spidey & joining Iron Man & Stark!

I hadn't heard that theory. It's a good one. Knowing Bendis, it will probably be something contrived, maybe a shared secret, bringing them together; so he can tease people with the possibility of and MJ/Stark relationship issue after issue without ever paying it off. Then he'll probably revel they are related.

I'm not huge into the IM character, so a lot depends on the writer and their take for me. I was reading IM regularly until Fraction. I started off really liking Fraction's run, then started to lose interest toward the end. I didn't necessarily dislike it, I just got apathetic about it. I picked up a few issues out of Gillen's run, but I had started buying more Indy books and and my Marvel order felt the pinch, and since IM wasn't a favorite, IM got cut. I expect Bendis will come up with some interesting ideas and cool concepts, but they'll never really pay off and the stories will just sort of fizzle out.

Not to turn this into an anti-Bendis rant(although, in fairness, I probably started this thread as a bit of that ), but as someone who was a huge fan of his, his trajectory in recent years has been disappointing for me.

I started reading him as an Indy writer with issue #6 of the first volume of Powers because everyone was talking about that first arc, "Who Killed Retro Girl", and his take on superheroes in general. I loved it. I was thrilled when he jumped to the Marvel Universe to follow Kevin Smith on Daredevil and was blown away. He killed! I was initially disappointed to learn that Geoff Johns wasn't going to continue on Avengers but when I found out Bendis was taking the reins, I was like whoa! What's the Powers and Daredevil guy going to do on a book like Avengers?

Well, the answer was a lot of things I didn't like, a lot of things I was ambivalent about, and a few things I thought were really good. On the whole, I wish he'd never touched Avengers. Then he jumped to X-Men, and I liked some of the things he was doing at the start, and I kind of forgot about the things I didn't like about Post-Powers-and-Daredevil-Bendis.

Misleading covers, misleading interviews, misleading story-lines. Attempts to provoke outrage and controversy just to get attention or spike sales. Ignoring years of continuity. Ignoring his own recently-created continuity. Storied that make no sense. Plots that never come together or go anywhere. Rushed, thrown together endings, or no endings at all.

He didn't use to be like that.

You look at the first run of Powers, or his run on Daredevil.

Books that got their sales by the good quality of the content inside. No deception and misdirection and page after page of repeated panels of art, repetitive dialog, and a page count frequently lower than other books(and this was a guy who use to have to ADD extra pages to issues because he had SO MUCH story to squeeze in). Tightly referenced continuity, well-constructed plots with good payoffs. Stories you'd want to buy a collected edition of just to have it on your shelf.

There's still bits of that. Kitty's speech comes to mind. That, and a name built off of earlier work that the stuff he currently produces no longer truly resembles is what he is running off of. I try to think of another writer who has done that and I immediately think of Frank Miller. Maybe not in the same way, but the man who wrote Daredevil in the eighties and the guy writing the current Dark Knight books for DC are miles apart. Artistic tics and tendencies have become ascendant and run amuck. The same with Bendis, he has become a creature of his excesses and tendencies. He's in danger of becoming to writing what Greg Land is to art, and I have no desire to buy another book by either of them, especially since both have the talent necessary to produce much better work, and chose, for whatever reason(be it style, money or simple expediency), not to.