Record: Kevin Smith

Once upon a time, I wrote upon a message board where another poster said that, while Kevin Smith may be a good filmmaker (well, I guess that can be debated), he’s a pretty awful comic book writer. And after some of the examples I’m about to give here, I’m beginning to wonder the same thing.

• Smith began the second volume of Daredevil that ran under the now defunct Marvel Knights label in 1998, and in issue #5, Karen Page came back into Matt Murdock’s life, tricked into thinking she fell ill with HIV only to be killed by Bullseye, instead of installing new life into her as a supporting character.
• In Green Arrow vol. 2, he starts off his story with a crime kingpin about to sodomize a young girl (Mia?), before Oliver Queen comes in to save the day. Pretty excessive, if I do say so myself.
• And then, most notorious, and most sloppy of all, for more reasons than one, was his Black Cat miniseries, which got stalled halfway through in 2002, but not before we were left with a cliffhanger leaving us wondering if a gangster is going to rape poor Felicia, and then, when it finally picked up almost two years later(!), even if she evaded that repugnant fate, we still get hit by an artificial retcon claiming that Felicia Hardy took to becoming the Black Cat because she’d been raped in college! Ahem. She took to becoming the Black Cat in 1979 – and initially, a burglar – because she was inspired by her late father’s own criminal career as a professional thief. The miniseries has since been written off by many in the audience, with good reason.

Kevin Smith, clearly, does not have the talent it takes to write a good comic book, let alone a good movie, and I should hope that the comics companies won’t hire him again, no matter how many comics his name alone can sell.