Quote Originally Posted by Cryptid View Post
Again, I don't think that's quite right. It's true that Hickman is more focused on high concepts than interpersonal drama, so that there are fewer designated "character moments" in his stories. But the compensation is that his plots involve feuding factions with internal power struggles. His characters express themselves in how they align themselves and how they relate to their factions, so the plot expresses character as often as it overrides character. He operates at a high pitch of urgency that shows all the characters pushed to extremes, which makes casual scenes rare, but these big threats intensify the differences between Steve and Tony, T'Challa and Namor. The characters express themselves through their politics rather than their personal lives, but we still see their values, convictions, and limitations on full display.

And this means that Hickman does better with characters who are as obsessed with the big picture as he is. He writes Reed Richards better than pretty much anyone (which must explain why he has written so many versions of Reed Richards). He writes a pretty good Iron Man, a good Doom, a good Beast, and a surprisingly good Smasher, a character both released and overwhelmed by the cosmic tapestry that she stumbles into. Casual characters like Spider-Man and Johnny Storm are not his strong-suit, in part because revealing the core of nobility beneath their goofy exteriors is old hat, but he writes them passably well as far as I'm concerned.

Part of the issue is that few comics writers believe in writing tight plots. Bendis has his strengths, but economy has never been one of them. He writes many scenes that only do one thing: a fight happens, a motive is explained, two old friends chew the fat about nothing at all, a character makes a bold declaration of purpose. The side-effect of this style is that the comic talks about itself a lot, which helps with clarity, and there are scenes devoted to exploring the attitudes of characters in ways that are barely related to the main action. If you're used to that, Hickman looks cold. But if you're used to something like Hitchcock or Raymond Chandler, where the plot gradually uncovers the characters by their choices and attitutudes toward the main action, then someone like Bendis looks incredibly loose and sometimes sloppy. So it's a matter of style and perspective, for sure, and there's no reason you shouldn't like what you like, but I don't think that Hickman ignores his characters. He reveals them in terms of his plot, which makes his stories lack intimacy without lacking personality, I think.
This was a nice apology for Hickmans style and a decent criticism of Bendis' style. I think both writers have their uses depending on the circumstances. Certainly, during Bendis' era, there were no big epic cosmic problems to deal with, it was ordinary in-house Earth based, and Manhattan based usually drama. Once we got to Heroic Age, Marvel had to find someone that was going to need to step away from the crusty interactions between people and their personal politics, and just lock in a game face to address bigger issues. From that perspective, Hickman approached the Avengers, and he pushed it towards the inevitable crisis point.