Bendis Is Burning Down the House of El
I know we’ve been over this before, but we need to talk about Jon Kent. Actually, after watching all the Superman content on Fandome this weekend and hearing people talk about how they’ve worked to preserve and honor Superman’s essence and identity for 80 years, I’m more sure than ever that what Bendis is doing to the entire House of El is fundamentally wrong. Bendis’s impact at DC has been unfaithful to the essence of Superman, disrespectful to the fans, and self-indulgent to the detriment of good storytelling. And that’s maybe the most frustrating part. He wrecked the Kent family, and it wasn’t even for the sake of a good story.
An essential facet of Clark Kent’s identity is his midwestern values, especially when it comes to family. The strength of his relationship with his adoptive parents in every iteration is a testament to that. Yet, Bendis had first Clark and later Lois decide to let their 10 year old son travel space in the care of Jor-El. No. There is no way Clark would agree to split up his family, especially when Jon was so young. Nor would Lois. Not to mention, it doesn’t even make logical sense. The parents who fought so hard for Jon in Superman: Reborn, when they didn’t even remember who he was, would never have trusted someone as potentially unstable and unreliable as Jor-El with their child. They’re not stupid. Clark would have figured out a way for Jon to do his soul searching in a safer way, preferably on Earth. Or he would’ve gone with them and kept the family together. But Clark and Lois had to act entirely out of character, because this whole farce was invented so Bendis could get what he wanted: a teenaged, traumatized Jon Kent.
This is where the self-indulgence becomes apparent. The supposed reason for Jon’s space jaunt was that he was afraid of a potential future where he’d become a murderous teenager. Weaving this weighty existential fear into an otherwise optimistic 10 year old had a lot of potential as a compelling part of his character. Instead, Bendis just skipped it all and aged him up, because that’s really what he wanted all along. He crowbarred in a teenaged Superboy in order to revive the Legion of Super-Heroes and get a Superman and Lois divested of the responsibilities and complexities of raising a young son. Essentially, Bendis is forcing the characters to fit what he wants to write, instead of respecting them as established characters with existing backstories and identities. It’s self-indulgent and disrespectful to the preceding writers, the characters, and the fans.
While we’re on the topic of disrespect towards his predecessors, we have to talk about Super Sons and Bendis’s leading role in killing it. That title was doing really well, and it was accessible to young readers, which is something DC had been missing. However, Bendis convinced the editors that it had to be cancelled because he claimed readers would get confused by two different, contemporaneous Jons. It’s a ludicrous excuse. It’s not as if anyone was confused by young Clark’s past appearances in Superboy or Legion of Super-Heroes; they certainly didn’t have to cancel Action Comics to publish those titles, or vice-versa. Readers understand them as separate entities. Either Bendis genuinely thinks readers are stupid, or he needed an excuse to control Jon’s narrative without competition. And, as one of the top five most-read titles on DC Universe the same year it was cancelled, Super Sons would’ve been fierce competition.
So let’s take stock of Bendis’s new landscape. The Legion of Super-Heroes was revived and Jon has left home once again to join them in the future, so teenaged Superboy is a Legionnaire. Tale as old as 1958. Maybe that potential murderous future is still in play for Jon, in which case we might end up with a violent, teenaged Superboy—something we’ve seen a dozen times. Meanwhile, Lois and Clark have a son, but he’s in a different millennium, so they’re more or less back to the traditional Lane-Kent status quo of reporting and heroing. All the threads Bendis has set up are things we’ve seen before.
In contrast, what he eliminated in the process was all the fresh potential introduced by Rebirth. Jonathan Kent was something totally new: a half-Kryptonian raised by loving parents with strong morals and values, much like Superman, but with a connection to and awareness of his alien heritage and a broader superhero community, which his father did not have. By aging Jon up off-page inside a volcano, Bendis replaced all that uniqueness with a Superboy ripe with trauma and abandonment issues, who did most of his growing up without his parents. This is the exact opposite of innovative storytelling.
Why do it, then? Why chuck all the uncharted territory to return to a familiar status quo? Why be so unfaithful to the characters if not for the sake of a really, really interesting, new story? The Legion of Super-Heroes originally existed to show young Clark Kent, who struggled with feeling like an outsider, that he wasn’t alone. Young Clark didn’t have anyone to relate to. Jon doesn’t have that problem. He has his dad, Damian, and countless other contemporary superheroes. There’s no reason for him to go to the future to find that sense of belonging. So why do it? I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Super Sons and Teen Titans have writers, but Legion of Super-Heroes was wide open for Bendis to reboot and slap his own name on. Oh, we’re back to self-indulgence.
All this is to say that, as far as I’m concerned, Bendis is a writer who doesn’t get that these characters are so much bigger than him and who has been given too much undue liberty and has used it to set the House of El on fire. Unless he retcons all the damage he did to Jonathan Kent, I’ll never put a single cent of my money towards anything that has Bendis’s name on it. I’d encourage anyone who feels similarly to do the same. Money talks. Get loud.
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