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THE TEN GREATEST, MOST GROUNDBREAKING CREATIVE COLLABORATIONS IN WIZARD'S HISTORY | Check out this roundup of the creative teams that revolutionized comics
Part Four: Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev | | | By Christopher Lawrence | | Posted 05/24/08 | |  | |  BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS / ALEX MALEEV
Brian Michael Bendis couldn't help himself—the temptation was too great.
So, when penning the script for Sam & Twitch #15—the first issue to feature art by Alex Maleev—he included his creator-owned heroine Jinx as a central character.
"I wanted Alex to draw her," the scribe admits, "so that just once she'd look the way I saw her in my head."
Bendis, who began his career in comics as a writer/artist, said he urged the folks at McFarlane Comics to bring Maleev on board for precisely that reason: "Alex drew the way I wanted to."
"My goal," he says, "was to look like that."
The duo found their groove on the Spawn spinoff very quickly, a dynamic they then brought to—and expanded upon—in the pages of Marvel's Daredevil. There, as Bendis says, the two creators "went nuts" from issues #26 to #81, overturning the proverbial turnip truck by outing the secret identity of the Man Without Fear to the world.
It was a boom lowered brilliantly.
"The scene where Foggy finds that Matt Murdock's been outed in the press is such an amazing piece of comic rendering," the writer offers. "It's subtle, not splashy; just a guy, his eyes welling up with tears. It's so perfectly rendered, I think it cemented our whole run. That took us to the 'We didn't f--- this up' level."
"Bendis knew I wanted to push the envelope," Maleev says, "and wrote the stories to accommodate my experiments with the artwork."
Inarguably, they are the best Daredevil team since Frank Miller and Dave Mazzucchelli's groundbreaking four issues in 1985-86, and arguably one of the top creative tandems in the character's history. Not too shabby, considering they hail from completely different worlds—Bendis was a Jewish kid from Ohio, while Maleev lived under a communist regime in his native Bulgaria.
Maleev, however, quickly points out that the creative perspective he and his collaborator share more than makes up for their biographical differences.
"We have a vision in our heads that Brian knows how to put in words and I in pictures," he states. "He writes for me, I draw for him. It's an artistic marriage that thrives on our differences and blossoms on paper."
"I look at Alex and see him in the same vein as when Neal Adams was doing Avengers," Bendis says. "Neal's rendering and the quality of acting of the characters was so far beyond everything else that was going on in comics that you went, 'Wow, this guy's 10 years ahead of his time.' I feel the same way with Alex. When it comes to character acting and such, he can do stuff that no other working artist can do."
As for Maleev, he says working with Bendis—on DD, Halo, Civil War: The Confession, etc.—has made him "not want to work with anybody else."
"I cheated briefly with [Ed] Brubaker and even though it was spicy and explosive, going back to my crib, I felt the comfort and stability Bendis gives me," he says. "So, I am gonna stick around for a while, get cozy again. Keep writing them B, I'll keep drawing 'em."
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Click here for more of the greatest collaborative teams in comics!
And, click here for the previous installment of the greatest collaborative teams in comics!
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