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TOTAL SELL OUT TP
Highly Recommended (10/10)
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Image Comics
Writer/Artist: Brian Michael Bendis
Additional Writers: Warren Ellis, Mark Ricketts, James Hudnall
Additional Artists: Mike Avon Oeming, David Mack
Editor: Jamie S. Rich
Price: $14.95 US |
If I may get a little indy snob on y'all for a minute here: I was reading Brian Michael Bendis before he was three-time Eisner winner Brian Michael Bendis. In those days, he wasn't writing Spider-Man or Daredevil or the swearingest character Marvel Comics has or the swearingest characters Image has. He was writing noirish crime fiction and pop culture true-to-life stories. And drawing them, most of the time. It was stuff like Jinx, Goldfish and Torso that I think got him noticed, but my favorite stuff was always the smaller stuff, the one- or two-pagers that were stupid and funny stories, the kind of thing that he litters his letter columns with and in which I believe the strength of his realistic dialogue really lies. The downside of me loving this is that I sought all of this stuff out back then, and so there was a reasonably big portion of Total Sell Out that I'd already read. However, for you the reader, the upside is that in this collection there's a ton of stuff from a Bendis that you probably never knew, but if you like his current stuff, you're in for a real treat. You lucky bastards.
I'm not one of those guys clamoring for Bendis to start drawing again. His art is good, but it's his writing that I think makes him great, and if he went back to drawing, I think we'd probably lose at least one of the books he's currently writing to drawing time. But it is a lot of fun to see Bendis's artwork again. Whether it's his cartoony, funny style that most know from Fortune & Glory or the heavily photo-referenced, heavily inked look that most know from Jinx, this is solid artwork. One of the big treats in this collection is a peek into Bendis's portfolio at the end. My particular favorites there were the cops or the perps with their faces in shadow, the fan-geek portrait of The Shadow and some surprisingly detailed portraits of Woody Allen and Alfred Hitchcock, but it's all good stuff.
Really, though, the one reason to pick up Total Sell Out, and it's about all the reason you need, is the unforgettable Bendis dialogue. A lot of the stories here are more text than comics, severe talking heads pieces where the artwork is barely necessary to the actual story. I know some hate that, and I can understand the sentiment, it sometimes bugs me when someone is doing something in comics but not utilizing the whole medium, but the writing is so damn good that I don't care. The actual pictures of the talking heads make it feel like the story is being told directly to you, as if you were hearing it in a casual conversation, and that makes the weirdness or the darkness all that much more entertaining or freaky. And the Bendis cartoony style actually has plenty to do with the humor of the pieces as well.
There are plenty of fun stories in this book. Stories about comics and pop culture abound, which will surprise no one who knows Bendis's public persona through his letter columns or online participation. There are also plenty of stories about people and all the f-ed up shit we do to one another, sometimes played for laughs but occasionally played for something a little deeper. For the most part, they all work for me, although I was kind of surprised to find that the book wasn't entirely humorous. I was also surprised to find some of Bendis's crime work in here, expecting it mostly to be the goofy autobiographical stuff, but I certainly wasn't disappointed. Especially fun in that vein were two stories written by Warren Ellis and James Hudnall respectively and illustrated by Bendis, the former a grotesque conspiracy tale and the latter a crime story with a twist that reads like a modernized EC.
Look, there are quotes on the back of this thing from Entertainment Weekly, Wizard Magazine and Comic Buyer's Guide. Lord knows you probably don't need another voice from some online hack telling you that you should buy it. But just in case you do, this is me telling you you should buy it.
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