Alias Part 2: B Level

[cyberghostface]

So here we are with the second arc of Bendis' Alias.

#6...

The issue opens with Jessica and Carol Danvers eating lunch together.



Carol says she heard it on the grapevine. Jessica says they're not going out.







Jessica attempts to schedule a personal meeting with him while posing as another guy online.

Later, Jessica meets a young teenager who wants to work for her.



She turns him down.

Someone knocks on Jessica's door and it's a woman looking for Jessica's assistance.





#7...





Jessica tells the woman that she must be mistaken, because she's not related to Rick and has never met him. She still takes on the case but can't promise anything.



For space reasons, I can't post them but throughout the arc there are excerpts from Rick's book in prose form with illustrations by Bill Sienkiewicz.

Later, Jessica is reading the book when a young woman walks up to her and asks if she has powers. Jessica asks how she would know, and she responds that she is a mutant and her power is detecting others'.





She asks them if they know him, and they tell her that he sometimes hangs around the park telling people stories. Jessica later finds an advertisement for Jones' concert and goes to see it.



After it's over, she goes into the dressing room but when he sees her he runs off.



#8...

Jessica grabs his arm.



Jessica tells him to go home to her to find out, but he says he can't because of the Skrulls. Jessica asks him why he told his wife that they were related, and he says he didn't, that his wife is crazy and concocts theories in her mind with little foundation.



The "boom" is just the sound of a car but Rick runs off. Jessica chases after him and asks him about the Kree-Skrull War.





She asks how come he doesn't just go to Captain America, and he says its because Cap was mad because of what he wrote in the book. They decide to go to the Baxter Building instead, but the Fantastic Four is away.



He runs off and gets lost in the crowd, leaving Jessica alone and baffled.

#9...

Jessica leaves a bunch of calls for the Avengers explaining what happens, when she gets an e-mail from the gay guy whose wife hired her. He agrees to meet Jessica at a Starbucks. He, of course, thinks that Jessica is another guy.

She later gets a call from the Avengers' butler Jarvis, who tells her that the Rick Jones who she has been following is not who claims to be.



Jessica is understandably pissed, for lack of a better word.



Jessica asks "Rick" how the trouble he got into worked out, and he responds "not in front of the civilians".

Later, back with Jessica's other client, the one who discovered that her husband was gay; thinking that Jessica is a guy, the husband schedules a date with her at a Starbucks. It turns out he's a psychotherapist.

Comments

[mrosa]

Those massive black panels must take Bendis weeks to write down. Do you think his art collaborators ever manage to really get them right, or do you think they change them a bit?

[mrstatham]

You mean those sections outside the panels that actually aren't intended for anything and have more to do with the artist not wanting to stick to the traditional methods of panel layout and experimenting with how their work flows, and how that's not even remotely unique to Bendis, or would you like to troll some fucking more?

[mrosa]

No, like that half page of just black.

[stolisomancer]

Bendis has a whole bunch of his recent comic scripts up for you to peruse at his website, Jinxworld. He doesn't do too much specification about how a page should be drawn and tends to give his artists a lot of input into how it should look. The big black areas are likely Gaydos's.

[mrstatham]

This. I know it's hip and cool to blame Bendis for stuff these days, but with Oeming or Gaydos or Maleev, he always seems to let them work as they like.

[pyrotwilight]

"Later, Jessica meets up her client's husband at the Starbucks. It turns out he's a psychotherapist. "

Wait, I thought the "husband" of the client was the fake Rick.

[cyberghostface]

I'll edit to to make it clearer, but she has two clients. One is the wife who's looking for Rick, the other is the wife of the guy who was having gay cybersex behind her back.

[pyrotwilight]

Ahhh, right. I had forgotten about that client by the time fauxRick's story was done.

[kd_the_movie]

bravo to Bendis with the Rick Jones story. Even though I knew that Rick Jones is married to Marlo and lives out West so, I was still strung along for all of the story till the reveal. I mean after all this is comics so what you know about a character can be undone in a sentence.

[glprime]

Yeah, we regularly grouse about how idiotic the Marvel citizenry are on average, especially the NYCers who are dealing with way more craziness on a daily basis, and yet they remain almost willfully ignorant, and YEAH, Bendis enjoys "realism" and uses people being crass, dumb, misguided, delusion, to show this.

But some of these things jump out at me, like: "I don't watch network television..." You work in a bookstore. You undoubtedly sell periodicals and Current Events works. You should know who the fuck the Hulk is.

On a more personal note, "...that tool, Spider-Man..." YOU'RE A TOOL, TOOL!

[bariman]

On a more personal note, "...that tool, Spider-Man..." YOU'RE A TOOL, TOOL!

I would normally say that he reads the Daily Bugle, but who reads newspapers anymore?

I would amused that the Ultimate Daily Bugle had an online component, and they hired Peter Parker to manage it. Yes, Spider-Man is the Webmaster.