Did Bendis work on Ultimates? For some reason, I thought that was Millar.

Either way, I'm not a fan, though I like most of Bendis' work.

Bendis is writing the normal Avengers line. Badly. Apparently someone told him in a dream that all the Avengers must die, and he's just following that dream. But I love his Powers to death.

I didn't much care for Ultimates. Every single character is a dick.

As far as the strangling goes, didn't they finger Slipknot for that?

Slipknot was cleared by Wonder Woman's magic lasso o' truth. Plus he was in prison at the time of the attack on Jean.

Holli. DX, are you both Avengers fans?

Me, I like Ultimates, pretty much, but I don't think I've ever read an Avengers issue that wasn't crossing over with the X, so I have no sense of what went before, and not attachment to it.

The first issue of Avengers I ever read was #4, the one where they fished Captain America out of the ocean. It was one of my favorite books for a while.

My first Avengers -- and it could actually be considered my first comic book in some ways, at least superhero comics that I consciously bought -- was somethign like #96, where Pietro kidnaps the son of the creator of the Sentinels and runs him across Australia in order to shut them down so that his sister Wanda could be saved. So very cool....

I love The Ultimates. Fun shit. And yeah, Holli, it's Millar. Though Bendis wrote Ultimate Six, which was the Ultimates + Spidey.

HULK WANT FREDDIE PRINZE JR.!

So who has Bendis offed?

I'm trying to work out how much fucking with the Avengers is too much, and within what context.

I'm conflicted about the current Avengers storyline. I don't really see the point of tearing down a 40 year old institution, and most of the characters seemed, well, out of character or just cardboard cutouts standing around in the background. Tony pulling funding shouldn't automatically force everyone to give up what they've worked so hard at for years, especially if the inspirational heart of the team (Cap) is still willing to make a go of it without the fancy bells and whistles. (OMG! THINK OF JARVIS! WHERE WILL HE GO?!? WHAT WILL HE DO?!?)

That said, I think the method he chose wasn't that bad once you swallow the bitter pill of the basic story premise. It's not as if Wanda hasn't cracked and tried to kill the team before (more than once!). And although it's structurally questionable to have Dr. Strange pop up, lecture the team in their own book, and save the day while everyone else stands around, I have to admit Bendis wrote the good Doctor himself better than anyone has in years. I chuckled when he asked "Why didn't you people come to me when this happened?"

Oh, they might have wanted to mention that Wanda's delusional pregnancy ended up creating the twins out of big steaming chunks of Mephisto while they were at it. And, since Cap, Ms. Marvel, the Wasp, and the Beast were all present they might have brought up the revelation from years back that Wanda's magic wasn't a result of her mutant power, it was granted to her at birth by the elder demon god Cthon so it could use her as a host body and take over the friggin' universe.

Big WTF?!? moments for me were the implication that Cap and Wanda had gotten romantically involved (wasn't Wonder Man standing right there? Has Cap no common sense?), Wonder Man himself not popping like a soap bubble when Wanda collapsed (she brought him back from the dead a while back because she missed him so much!), and Nick Fury mentioning she was Magneto's daughter as if criminal behavior is genetic like alcoholism. (Dude, maybe it wasn't so much being conceived by Magneto as being treated like a hot potato during her formative years and raised by a talking cow and then a band of Gypsies before she was recruited as a mutant terrorist?)

As others have said, my issues with Bendis stem solely from the normal, mainstream Avengers. Ultimates doesn't bug me--I even enjoy it in small doses--but it's meant to be a through-the-looking-glass Avengers.

Avengers, like Justice League, was always supposed to be something more, and Bendis treated it like it was a house of cards, waiting for a light breeze. Hawkeye and Ant-Man dead, characters retconned to where there's been no development for years. I just don't believe it would fall apart that quickly, or easily. The last thing it took to destroy the Avengers entirely was most of them being apparently dead. And I know the team's coming back with a bunch of new members-yawn-but as much as I love Luke Cage, Jessica Drew and Spider-Man, they ain't the Avengers.

Okay, I just re-read IC 1-6, and I'm still stumped.

One question: when Dr. Light attacked Sue, why wasn't Supes with the rest of the JLA?