Regarding Bendis and Ultimate Spider-Man

A few weeks back I said Bendis learned his pacing from watching Dragonball Z. I'd like to retract that, and posit that he learned it from Victorian-era literature, when authors were paid by the page. Simply put, it's Charlotte Bronte's fault. I haven't been able to say that since 12th grade, when Jane Eyre left me so sleep deprived I ran over the principal. OK, so that didn't happen.

Putting that aside, I wonder if Bendis isn't trying to speed things up a bit. The last few stories have been shorter. It seems like until "Silver Sable", everything was six parts. Then "Silver Sable" was five, "Deadpool" was four, and this "Morbius" story is only two issues. Is Bendis trying to answer the critics, the one's who say he writes too slowly? If so, more power to him. Less decompression would be good, he just needs to give me some advance warning.

Normally he seems to handle just one thing per issue, but like I said when I reviewed this week's offering, we had a Blade flashback, Peter/Kitty discussion, Urich's story, Peter/MJ, and vampire fighting. That's a lot of stuff, so it gave me the initial impression he was wandering allover, with no real plan. In reality, he may have been trying to accelerate his pace. Who knew such a thing was possible?

Despite that, I still can't change the fact that I really didn't want to see Spider-Man fighting vampires. "The Other" pretty much killed my desire to see any Spider-Man dealing with any sort of mystical/supernatural hoopa-joop. But, I am curious to see whether Morbius is once again a product of science gone awry, or if he's a straight up vampire.

Thus, I retroactively increase the score to 3.4 out of 5. One final thought. Bendis, don't do Ultimate Clone Saga. I'm telling you this for your own good. The phrase "Clone Saga" holds a severe stigma amongst us Spider-fans, so unless this is going to be a one issue joke story, like that absurd (and hilarious) "What if Wolverine and Spider-Man switched bodies?" story, you're just asking for trouble. It really is better for you to just go a different direction. Go with the "Jean DeWolff works for the Kingpin" plot. Do some more mutant-related stuff, you know, ex-Brotherhood members come after the X-Men's #1 buddy, Spider-Man. Hell, do more "Nick Fury is a manipulative bastard" stuff. Clone Saga? Just a dud waiting to happen. We're talking "Battlefield Earth" sized dud. Just something to consider