Powers, Volume 1: Who Killed Retro Girl? Review (Brian Michael Bendis, Michael Avon Oeming)

Two coppers investigate the death of a superhero in Powers, Volume 1: The Subtitle Explains the Premise!

I’ve read quite a bit of Bendis’ work but never his best known earliest comic, Powers - until now. And I wasn’t impressed.

It boils down to five issues of Detective Man and Detective Woman (I forget their names but those suffice) talking to lots of people before a cliched culprit is revealed in the final issue, whose motivations are eye-rollingly obvious and silly. It’s so boring.

From the first page, you’re hit with the Bendyman classic of word balloons - and plenny of ‘em! It rarely lets up, even occasionally forgoing word balloons so that entire blocks of text can be printed down one side of the page with images on the other side. Goody.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the dialogue was even slightly entertaining or relevant but mostly it’s simply a case of Bendis’ verbal diarrhoea in full flow to mask the total absence of an even halfway compelling story. There are literally entire pages where characters repeat the same words to one another to no effect. This is how issue five starts:

“Nothing.”
“You have nothing.”
“I have nothing.”
“Nothing… nothing?”
“I have nothing at all.”
“It’s been two days.”
“You think I don’t know that? I know that.”
“Two days is forever in a murder investigation.”
“I know.”
“And you have nothing.”
“I have two days’ worth of nothing.”
“Damn.”

That’s an entire page! FFS, give this man an editor!

So I can’t really blame artist Michael Avon Oeming for recycling panels over and over within the same page to keep up with Bendis’ nothing script, which he does often, though it does make for a crap-looking comic. Functional is the best I can say of Oeming’s art.

I really hate the trope of having information conveyed via TV news reporters and that trope is used abundantly throughout this book. It’s such a lazy and tedious method. And it’s still more blocks of useless text to wade through that only adds up to “Police are continuing to investigate”.

I’d say the first volume of Powers hasn’t aged well but that would mean that it was originally good and I don’t think it ever was. Maybe it read better 20 years ago before Garth Ennis came along with The Boys and this post-modern take on superheroes was less worn-in. I just don’t think Bendis is that great a writer. He puts out a lot of stuff, and some of it is undeniably good, but the vast majority isn’t and Powers is firmly in the latter, early work or not. Definitely don’t bother with this dreary and overwritten rubbish.