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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