Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 27, 2000)
youoNLy ^ THINK you,CAN HOLE? ME" 90 YOU UNPER^TANP? oo,you/youR plane of Existence v IS ONLy ONE ► OH, CALM > DOWN, BIG TIME/ YOUXL PUU, ^ SOMETHING/ J M you wii NEVER.. V SOMETIMES V fTHE BACKGROUNDS' ARE ALL COOL .LOOKING ANO NICELY L COLOREO IN OR l SOMETHING. A } rr's over, YOU KNOW IT'S OVER. I KNOW IT'S OVER. EVERYBODY KNOWS IT'S OVER. K SUCK IT L*V* KUTTER, CAN r YOU KEEP IT UNDER CONTROL OVER THERE? k I'M TRYING TO . V READ// y BOOKS required for Peter Parker.” ' Bendis grew up in the sudui-qs oi i ieveiana, a city that spawned such other comic greats as Superman cocreator Joe Shuster and artist P. Craig Russell. “There’s really nothing to do here, so we all stayed home and drew comics,” says Bendis, who in grade school marked up his textbooks with doodles of Mar vel superheroes and in high school vowed to make a living by the pen. But the art-school dropout says he found his comics muse in the movies. Visions of Light, a 1993 documentary on cinematographers—particularly a segment on film noil’ featuring revered Citizen Kane director of photography Gregg Toland—inspired his art style. David Mamet’s House of Games and especially Scorsese’s The Color of Money, tales of small-time crooks and twisty confidence scams, set the scene for the stories he wanted to tell. Cleveland’s mean streets moved him, too. “I went from nice Jewish boy in suburbia to living on my own in what would only be consid ered a terrible neighborhood, says Bendis. “I was robbed for the first time. I was meeting interesting people. My world was opening up.” He proudly claims to have interviewed real-life con artists and bounty hunters for his breakthroughs: Goldfish, from Im age Comics, in which an ex-grifter re turns to Cleveland’s underbelly for some big-time vengeance and redemp tion, and its prequel, Jinx. “I watched two guys work a three-card monte racket on a city bus and make $500 in the span of one stop,” says Bendis. “I said, ‘That’s a rush I want to dupli cate in comics.’ ” A more bookish sort of research informed the masterful Torso, a true-crime tale about a post Untouchables Eliot Ness chasing a serial killer. (Both Goldfish and Torso were optioned by Miramax but are cur rently in turnaround. Bendis chronicled his surreal Hollywood experience in the hilarious comics memoir Fortune and Glory, published by Oni Press.) “Bendis is the Mamet of modern comics,” says celebrated comics scribe Warren Ellis (DC’s Transmetropoli tan). “He writes about people we want to like, who are funny and touching— but there are very few chinks of light in these tight, noir-y stories. We like listening to these people. We don’t want them to get hurt. That’s what makes his work compelling.” With Spider-Man—which sticks to the wall-crawler’s mythic origins but modernizes the cultural context (ex pect World Wide Web references)— Bendis says he’s entering his “main stream comics writer phase.” But Bendis hasn’t given up on crime fiction; he’s currently writing two monthly ti tles, Sam and Twitch and Powers, both for Image. Plus, he’s got an animated version of Jinx running on his award winning website, jinxworld.com. “The adult in me is still doing adult work,” says Bendis. “But the 12-year-old in | me is high-fiving himself.” • • • ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY On Camp\JS
