First, I'd like to thank Jay "Third-Person DM" Garcia for making me aware of this title. Powers is written by Brian Michael Bendis whose Ultimate Spider-man was the de facto shooting script for the first Spider-man movie, as far as I can tell. Powers is one of a long tradition of "What if superheroes were real?" comics that have been steadily gaining in sophistication and popularity at least since Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen (which you should all go out and read right now).
The book sets itself up as the little used genre of cop-mystery-drama. It just happens to take place in a world where heroes and villains (referred to collectively as 'powers') are common. The former are supported by law and a great deal of corporate sponshership in large part because they're the only people who can stand up to the later. On a structural level, Bendis' brilliance is that all the details of his world logically follow from a few simple premises. He gives us a mirror image of our own world (or at least of America), but with an added element, powers, that makes it more intense. I already said that Raimi's Spide-man movies have done this very, very well. I'll now say that Bendis does it better than I think I've seen anywhere else, and I keep track (I'll have more to say about the other comics that have taken on similar tasks at a later time).
Bendis constructs extremely believable characters, primarily through dialogue that positively sings in its fluidity, a factor that contributes to the feeling that you're watching a cop show like NYPD Blue or Da Vinci's Inquest. You get to know how his characters speak, how they joke with each other. You could almost read the words without the balloons and know who's talking. The interesting thing, though, is that he's by no means married to his two main characters (a pair of cops who end up handling power-related cases on a regular basis). We meet dozens of other people and sometimes spend several issues with them because what they have to do or say is simply more important to the plot. Bendis has, in the tradition of writers like Tolkien or Gibson, made his world the main character. I can't help but think of Eisenstein's early Soviet propaganda films in that they didn't have characters because it is the collective and not the individual that is important. Instead, he told stories about events of importance that effected large numbers of people (I'm thinking of Strike! specifically). It's an extremely insightful move to do this in a book that's all about examining and re-examining the nature of the superhero genre, as opposed to focusing on individual characters as if they were movie stars (and doubly ironic since the heroes in Bendis' world are like movie stars).
A last word about art. It's not my speciality, so I tend to have less to say about it, but Mike Avon Oeming's minimalist (and Bruce Timm-inspired) art is the perfect compliment to Bendis' writing. Though his figures and panels are low on detail, his page-layout philosophy is complex and daring. His panel structure varies greatly in structure, but he favours a few specific techniques, such as small panels jumbled over top of a large image that is both the 'establishing shot' of the scene, and the background on which the other panels float. This allows him to plant one, dominant image in the reader's field of view, while still having dialogue and action take place around it. We can never take our eye off of that central image, even as we read through the scene. This is one of the places were comics can do things that film can't. The establishing shot of a film must leave an impression. The central image on a page can remain for as long as it takes to view that page. He also makes frequent use of the 9-panel page, which can get boring, but he's willing to use several small images to focus in on a particular action as it unfolds slowly. He'll sacrifice three entire panels to show one facial expression, or a bit of body language, thus forcing us to slow down and contemplate the page and the moment. Finally, he uses negative space with more sheer chutzpah than any artist I've ever seen. Sometimes barely half of the page actually has panels on it, while the rest is filled with an ominous blackness. Oeming is clearly aware that the panel is not the only source of visual focus. He can make the same image look smaller, less significant, more isolated, weaker, more frail, etc., by surrounding by darkness.
Posted by orion at July 9, 2004 2:57 PM