Anonymous asked: People online seem to be under the impression you don't like the Scarlet Witch or the Vision. Is that true? I thought you did Dissassembled because you wanted to tell a story, not out of spite.

brianmichaelbendis:

 of course is not true. 

nobody writes stories to spite fictional characters.  to spite real people? sure. :-)

 it’s a very weird wrestling fan mentality that puts the creative person as the ‘heel’ character because  the reader doesn’t like what happened to their favorite character. 

or the reader doesn’t wait to find out that even though something bad happened this month that the hero will be triumphant the next month.

 people would constantly write to me: you must really hate daredevil, you must really hate Spider-man…

 people become so passionate in love with their favorite characters that they don’t realize that it is our job to make those characters interesting and that the only way to make them interesting is to have things happen to them. to put obstacles in front of them for them to overcome.

  and it’s overcoming those obstacles that make them the characters that we all love so much.

  there isn’t a Marvel character that I have written that I don’t feel sympathy  empathy or complete love for. 

 and some people just hate change. for these characters to thrive and survive they have to have change.

Actually, Garth Ennis has gone on record saying he doesn’t like Wolverine, and the way he portrayed the character in The Punisher certainly made that clear.

It’s funny, I used to think Bendis had it in for Iron Man. Had him hit with a mega Skrull computer virus, turned him into Janet Van Ultron, got him drunk-hexed at the UN by an insane Scarlet Witch, he definitely put poor Shellhead through the wringer!

I say this in jest of course, I don’t honestly believe he’s spiting a character or characters, but it does bring up the question about what you do as a writer when presented with a character you don’t particularly like or understand. That has to be a challenge, like if I became a famous comic book scribe and had to work X-Treme into a story (!).