mis: Thanks!

Scott: I’m not sure if this will actively hurt the presence of female writers in mainstream superhero comic books. I think Marvel hired mrs. Pierce more for the fact that she was a novelist with an established fanbase than that she was a female writer. If anything this will have just shown them that hiring people from outside the industry isn’t a guaranteed success. And hey, White Tiger and Jodi Picoult’s Wonder Woman might not have been good, but on the bright side G. Willow Wilson’s issue of Outsiders: Five of a Kind was a perfectly pleasant little superhero story, especially considering what she had to work with. I’d like to see more of her superhero work.

Mr. Martinez: Thanks for your comment, it’s always nice to get some feedback from a professional writer. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the medium is (obviously) a requirement for anyone wanting to write comics. However, I can imagine that’s a lot harder if you’re accustomed to another medium.

philippos: Well, I’m not expecting any writer to slog through hundreds of issues of backstory when they want to write a specific character, but the thing is you shouldn’t really need to do that to “get” a character in the first place. Besides, Angela and Sano had only shown up in Bendis’ Daredevil before this (and Sano for only five issues), which is required reading if you want to write this character in the first place.

Palladin: I should have mentioned that this book was published during the Civil War event, which probably affected the sales of the first issue at least, but there’s still the fact that it dropped a lot of readers over the course of five issues. That means those people actively stopped reading the book for whatever reason.

As for the characterization, I’m not sure being an established writer in another medium is ever compatible with getting the characters consistent with hundreds of previous issues. If DC & Marvel have really given up on editors who write, we will see more of this kind of inconsistent characterization, & it will be the norm.

But I do think that a lot of this is inexperience. I have Ann Nocenti’s first published comic-book writing in Spider-Woman, & it sure wouldn’t win any prizes. But she got better.

As a comic book fan and novelist, I have to second your observation that being a skilled writer in one format doesn’t automatically translate to the other. It’s a big reason why I’m not happy with the current trend of drafting popular novelists into the world of comic books. Sure, they draw some attention, but if they don’t produce good comics, then what do we really gain?

I’ve always been interested in writing comics myself, but considering how badly many novelists do it, I’ve always had second thoughts. It’s not that a novelist can’t write a good comic book. They just have to know the strengths and weaknesses of the medium. Doesn’t look like the writers did this time.

Flashbacks? Seriously. Wow, that’s clumsy.

Thanks for posting this. A great and ruthlessly honest review that needed to be written.