As for Alias...I really couldn't get into to it. Maybe it's because I had already read a lot of Bendis' work before starting Alias and his kind of dialog was start to wear thin on me; maybe it was because I already knew about Jessica Jones and her thing with Luke Cage because of New Avengers. Whatever it was, I just didn't find the book all that compelling; I was halfway through the second arc when I just lost interest in it. I might go back and read a few selected issues (#10 and probably the Purple Man arc), but I just don't find the book all that interesting. Though I may have felt differently if I started reading it when it first came out.

Someone mentioned something about Bendis takes Jessica Jones along with him to 'New Avengers'...why not, he retconned/shoehorned her into Avengers continuity (so much so that in Secret Invasion, she's one of the older heoroes who 'reappear'...can we have both versions revealed as Skrulls already and kill them off? And please take ghetto-fab Luke with them also...

Since then, his AVENGERS material has only further strengthened the impression that if a plot isn’t pure crime fiction or have material taken from action movies and/or books, Bendis doesn’t know how to handle the material. His heavy reliance on mind control as a plot device might occur because he doesn’t know how to handle energy-manipulating powers or doesn’t want to write the material. When scientific topics come up in stories, they’re mishandled. In the MIGHTY AVENGERS arc, a computer virus, an electromagnetic pulse, and launch control centers were plot elements; Bendis thoroughly mishandled each one, even though they were all easily researchable. Compared to the editorial standards used by prose publishers, Bendis’s AVENGERS material isn’t publishable.

SRS

So, yes, there is a difference of about 180 degrees. I know because I am grammar nerd.

Punisher Max has never been about Frank Castle. It’s about his victims.

Except for the arcs where it is about him - like the one where his families grave was dug up, or The Tyger, or Born.

And what a series. Probably my favorite piece of Bendis' Marvel work (although I haven't read any of his more recent stuff).

I have had the same problem as Captain Buttfeeler with Bendis's prediliction toward parenthetical dialogue.

When you're writing dialogue -- I don't know what you do, so I don't know if it comes up or not -- you're supposed to use double-dashes for asides.

Parentheses in dialogue, it's an interesting idea, but it's unneccessary and it reads very bizarre to me. There are already commas, semi-colons, colons, double-dashes, and ellipses. What is being covered by parenthesis that these punctuations don't handle?

Punisher Max has never been about Frank Castle. It's about his victims.

So really then, what makes Punisher MAX as good as all that? How does the series take Castle from the one-note, infantile maniac he was in the good ol’ days to something worth consideration? Or does it just present the one-note version of Castle, but do so astonishingly well?

Ennis's version of Castle appears to be one-note at first read, but his whole run, including side projects like Born, presents a fully fleshed out character who has taken to severely expressing any sort of emotion. Though the earlier MU Punisher got by on a wacky supporting cast with some dark humor, most of that has been stripped from the MAX title. Ennis has instead resorted to stories based more upon the evils present in reality and used the wish-fullfillment aspect of superheroes in that context. After finishing a storyline, one almosts hopes for someone to rid the world of evil as permanently as the Punisher strives to do.

I'd also recommend "The Slavers" TPB as that is probably the best storyline out of Ennis's run and it is one of the few comic stories that have left me so emotionally drained at the end.