Dark Horse; $19.99

When the serialized first issue of the original Fortune and Glory was released by Oni in December 1999, writer-artist Brian Michael Bendis was on the rise. He’d gone from his creator-owned Caliber titles such as Jinx to Image with Torso to Todd McFarlane’s corner of Image with Sam and Twitch. The next year he’d hit with Ultimate Spider-Man at Marvel, which would become his home for quite a while.

Fortune and Glory was his take on his first adventures in Hollywood, and both the series and collected edition that followed made for great reading. It was that rarest of birds, a charming tell-all.

In Fortune and Glory: The Musical, we find Bendis still early in the Marvel phase of his career, and he’s been recruited to write the book for Marvel’s ambitious Broadway debut (and eventual trainwreck), Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Things start getting wonky immediately after getting the call: To start with, Bendis doesn’t like musicals, and it sort of goes from there.

As with the original Fortune and Glory, there’s a lot of appropriate name-dropping, plenty of reflection, and no small amount of insight.  

Bill Walko handles the art duties along with colorist Wes Dzioba (Bendis long ago switched to mainly writing rather than illustrating) and captures the story in style familiar to – but more polished than – the work Bendis did on the original. It’s very enjoyable (even so, as a fan since his early days, I confess I wish Bendis had illustrated it himself).

– J.C. Vaughn