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Quote: Long runs can be positive, but I don't really get that Bendis was going anywhere with his. Was there a lot of character progression that I wasn't hearing about? It seemed mostly to be a book that bided the time between events.
Quote: I agree, although you can argue he did progress the characters of Luke Cage, Spider Woman, and Jessica Jones by putting them front and center in his books, which were the major titles of the Marvel Universe under his guidance. If you had told me eight years ago the Avengers would become more important to the company than the X-Men, I would have thought you were crazy, but its Bendis who is mostly responsible for that (though Millar helped with his Ultimates run).
Bendis has, for quite awhile now, been writing about Avengers teams that really don't feel like "The Avengers" to me. It's felt more like the Marvel Knights than the Avengers, at least when I stopped reading. And while I don't like the stories and dropped his Avengers quite awhile ago, it is hard to argue with the commercial success of the book.
Which brings me to the ironic part; Bendis brought up the Avengers popularity by throwing Spider-Man and Wolverine into the mix, by focusing on characters like Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, etc, and because of that we now have a cartoon featuring the Avengers I know and love, and are getting a movie featuring the same (albeit with an Ultimate influence).
Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes really feels like the Avengers, but we wouldn't have it if not for the Marvel Knights version in the comics.
~Hat~
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... has a lot to do with it being the only property they had left where they actually owned all of the rights. There's no doubt that putting a hot creative team on The Ultimates really showcased the core characters to a wider audience, but I feel like necessity has more to do with the Avengers cartoon and film than any run in the comics does.
They had signed away the rights to Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, the X-men and others. Once they became their own studio, the biggest characters they had left were the Avengers and so all efforts went into developing that property. I honestly believe that would have still been the case had "The Ultimates" and Bendis' run never happened.
