In the wake of the big “Marvel NOW!” relaunch, Marvel Comics’ resident mad genius Jonathan Hickman has taken over the reigns of Avengers—you remember, those guys from that movie?—and its sister (brother?) book, New Avengers. First exploding onto the comic book scene with The Nightly News in 2008 (which he both wrote and did the artwork for), Jonathan Hickman quickly established himself as a unique creative force, melding elements of infographics and epic poetry into his elaborate stories, with beautifully rendered charts and obsessively systematic plot complications. But there’s something about Hickman’s voice as a writer that stands out, an incredibly distinct pattern that I’ve noticed in his work that goes against many of the traditional rules of dramatic storytelling—or at least, the rules as I’ve learned them, according to Aristotle’s Poetics.
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