Masterpiece

by Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev (illustrator)

From the Eisner award-winning creators behind Daredevil and Scarlet comes an all-new crime comic epic!!

Emma is a brilliant and driven 16-year-old. She has paid for school with her next level inventions and is well-known for her funny and honest webcomics. Then, one day, one of the most famous billionaires on the planet confronts her with the truth about her world.

Emma discovers she is the only daughter of two of the greatest, most charismatic master criminals of all time. The suavest, most liked criminals ever. The criminal’s criminal. The ones that wrote the rulebook. There are movies about them starring the biggest movie stars. Her parents were the authors of the greatest casino robbery of all time, the greatest museum heist of all time, AND they took the world’s most famous billionaire for a cool billion...before they disappeared never to be seen or heard from again. Ghosts.  

Zero Preston is the greedy billionaire her parents brilliantly ripped off before they disappeared. He has been looking for payback for years. He finds Emma...who clearly does not have his money. Zero threatens Masterpiece into pulling a grand, impossible job against his corporate enemy. This “Master of the Universe” will have his satisfaction.

Masterpiece fashions a crew of her peers and her parents’ old associates to pull off one of the greatest heists of all time.

Among the cast of characters comes the return of the legendary criminal The Paragon.  A Robin Hood for our times. This exquisitely well-dressed, long con master criminal returns to his calling when faced with the truth behind the sinister corporate forces of Zero.

Collects the comic book series Masterpiece #1–#6.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Crime, Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Action

176 pages, Paperback

First published December 3, 2024

About the author

A comic book writer and erstwhile artist. He has won critical acclaim (including five Eisner Awards) and is one of the most successful writers working in mainstream comics. For over eight years Bendis’s books have consistently sat in the top five best sellers on the nationwide comic and graphic novel sales charts.

Though he started as a writer and artist of independent noir fiction series, he shot to stardom as a writer of Marvel Comics' superhero books, particularly Ultimate Spider-Man.

Bendis first entered the comic world with the "Jinx" line of crime comics in 1995. This line has spawned the graphic novels Goldfish, Fire, Jinx, Torso (with Marc Andreyko), and Total Sell Out. Bendis is writing the film version of Jinx for Universal Pictures with Oscar-winner Charlize Theron attached to star and produce.

Bendis’s other projects include the Harvey, Eisner, and Eagle Award-nominated Powers (with Michael Avon Oeming) originally from Image Comics, now published by Marvel's new creator-owned imprint Icon Comics, and the Hollywood tell-all Fortune and Glory from Oni Press, both of which received an "A" from Entertainment Weekly.

Bendis is one of the premiere architects of Marvel's "Ultimate" line: comics specifically created for the new generation of comic readers. He has written every issue of Ultimate Spider-Man since its best-selling launch, and has also written for Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate X-Men, as well as every issue of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, Ultimate Origin and Ultimate Six.

Brian is currently helming a renaissance for Marvel’s AVENGERS franchise by writing both New Avengers and Mighty Avengers along with the successful ‘event’ projects House Of M, Secret War, and this summer’s Secret Invasion.

He has also previously done work on Daredevil, Alias, and The Pulse.

Reviews

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sprawling crime story about the daughter (literally called Masterpiece. And Emma.) of two missing masterthieves, who have stolen from a horrible billionaire, who now wants the daughter to pay for her parents' crime. Emma/Masterpiece is a bit of a genius, it seems, and now the billionaire asshole wants her to become a criminal genius for him. But then there are twists, that become twistier and twistiest.

This probably sounds silly, and it is a bit, but Bendis makes it into a pretty engrossing thriller. It's the first six chapter/issue story that I've read in the last 6 months, that actually deserves to be that length. I even liked the ending! And I want a second book!

Bendis does his multi-stepped text balloons he is so fond of, but this time he doesn't overload them with dialogue. So that's pretty great, also.

Alex Maleev's art is uniformly excellent.

BYE!!

(Thanks to Dark Horse Books for providing me with an ARC through Edelweiss)

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

By BMB's lofty standards this one was...OK.

Relentlessly OK. Almost grotesquely OK.

And that's OK.

[Eilonwy · Rating 4 out of 5]

3-1/2 stars, rounded up

Emma is a normal teenager, going to high school and selling a webcomic for millions of dollars (okay, maybe not all that normal). But her routine is upended when she is dragged out of class by goons, presented with a personal history she never knew, and forced into working for one of the world's top evil masterminds. Can Emma and her crew outmaneuver such an experienced bad guy?

I enjoyed this as a collection of the first six comics in this series because it is a complete arc in itself. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it as much issue by issue, because a fair amount of issues 3, 4, and 5 are about Emma putting together a team, and as individual additions to the story line, it would have been frustrating if that was all I got for a full month.

I loved the artwork for this, although some of it was a little dark and I would have liked to be able to see the characters better rather than a bunch of shadows. I liked all of the characters, too. They were all given just enough background to make them seem real and relatable and for their motives for joining this crew to be understandable. The whole "evil criminal mastermind" thing doesn't always work for me, but it was pretty easy for me to buy into this story without getting into grouchy technicalities and questions.

I'm not entirely sure what made me pick this up. The cover is creepy and when I reread the back cover description after getting the book home, it didn't really appeal to me. And yet, I'm glad I grabbed this. It was a great distraction from real life, I enjoyed it, and I'm hoping there might be another installment down the road.

[Zedsdead · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sinister billionaire (and is there any other kind? opines Bendis) kidnaps a high school girl right out of class, informs her that her genius-thief parents stole a fortune from him, and sets her to punishing a different sinister billionaire who happens to be on his shit list.

Bendis's take on Ocean's Eleven delivers the typical serrated Bendis dialogue, a scathing critique of the uber-wealthy class, and...a squib of a heist story, honestly. It's five issues of slow, painstaking buildup as Masterpiece assembles her crew, and then all of a sudden it's over. Wait, what just happened. That was the heist? I thought she wasn't done putting her team together.

[blows raspberry] This could have been great. Wasted potential.

[James DeSantis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun but overall kind of slow storyline. Basically we have a girl named Emma who's a genius and her parents were thieves. They're gone now and one of their old baddies is back to get revenge. So she has to bring together a group similar to what her parents did. I did enjoy the chemistry between the main cast a lot, and the art is solid, but the plot moves WAY to slow for six issues. I felt like we were never going to get it moving. Outside of issue 1 and 3, the plot didn't progress in a all that interesting way sadly. A 3 out of 5.

[Alex Sarll]

Emma Lawford thinks having to stand up in front of class at her new school and introduce herself is the worst thing ever, until the FBI burst in and arrest her, except they're not the FBI, they work for billionaire Zero Preston, who was ripped off by Emma's missing parents, who turn out to have been master crooks, and now he think she owes him, except...and so on. It's very much the 'guy comes through the door with a gun' school of plotting, except the significant guys never use guns, which makes you wonder how they're still alive, Batman rules seemingly applying even though this also sort of wants to be a gritty crime story; there's much play on Zero having made another fortune from glossy, Ocean's-style films about the parents, which weren't the truth...but when we see the two crews contrasted, the 'real' ones are still really dashing, just not so well lit. And at one stage there's the amazing insight that to really hurt one of the world's richest men, you go after his reputation. Which...suggests a comic from a lot longer ago than this is? Elsewhere it has occasional sensible things to say about the plutocrat mindset, but none of them are new, and as little sense as the whole made while I read it, with hindsight it's making even less. It's not that Bendis and Maleev aren't recapturing the feel of their Daredevil run here so much as that they've skipped straight to the wonky later years where it really wasn't working anymore.

[Rory Wilding · Rating 2 out of 5]

For someone who was one of the hottest writers in comics throughout the 2000s, it’s interesting to see where Brian Michael Bendis is nowadays. From arguably single-handedly saving Marvel Comics with an incredible line-up of runs – many of which influenced the Marvel Cinematic Universe – to his time at DC, Bendis seems to be at a point where he doesn’t need the Big Two and would rather retain his independence with his Jinxworld imprint. As his imprint has found a new home in Dark Horse, this brings us nicely onto Masterpiece.

Please click here for my full review.

[Jiro Dreams of Suchy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy the oceans 11 movies like I enjoy fast food- if it’s Wednesday and there’s not another doable option it’ll work. Not a ringing endorsement. It is a fine heist story with a twist (they’re not as much stealing as redistributing) but it was interesting enough.

[Paxton Holley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really probably more of a 3.5 star read. This collected the 6 issues of the story.

This reminded me a lot of Thief of Thieves. A young girl discovers that her parents were world famous thieves…like so world famous that there’s a series of blockbuster films all about their exploits. Her parents have died, but one of their old victims returns to wreak havoc on her life as payback. So she’ll have to get her parents’ old band back together to figure out how to get out of the mess she’s in.

This was a lot of fun. Cool characters. Great art. Lots of fun. I hope this continues in some way.

[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this would have gotten the same rating either way, but I would've enjoyed this more as the start of a series and not a run on its own. The characters are really underdeveloped and it's very flashy, full of tropes to get you hooked without any actual substance. We're thrust into Emma's story and there just isn't space given to learn and/or care about her, her friends and family or literally anyone else who pops up.

[Michael Kocinski · Rating 3 out of 5]

A by the numbers Bendis book. Nothing really out of pocket, it’s basically a straight ahead crime caper with a double cross thrown in. It’s hard to pass by a Bendis/Maleev comic, and this is another decent product from them. Some of the dialog, fight scenes, and plot elements felt very phoned in, very rushed, and it made me wonder if this was planned as a longer story? It’s good. I was entertained.

[Jack Phoenix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my full review of this book in an upcoming, major library publication.

[Dakota Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I swore off BMB after a series of stinkers, but Masterpiece intrigued me enough to pick up. "At least the art will be good," I thought, and I was right with that. The storytelling too is also...good. Not great, but satisfying enough to keep your attention and not hurt your brain.

The gist is that a young girl builds a team of rogues to take down the big bad billionaire who killed her parents. Of course, the twist is that billionaire actually instigated all this by "hiring" the girl to take down a different billionaire. BMB's waterfalls of dialogue vaguely explain this whole deal, but it's really not worth paying attention to. The quippy, pacey fun of a goofball team taking down a douche bag is satisfying enough, even if it never really clicks. BMB leaves Masterpiece open to a sequel which I guess I would pick up.

[Mariano · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Bendis, what can I say. Yes, all his characters are almost the same, but I still like it after 20+ years of reading his stuff. And this is classic Bendis + Maleev. One of those thrillers that just keeps you reading. I would have liked a little bit more expression from the protagonist instead of she just accepting everything is the classic Bendis witty way, but it's not that big of a deal.

Only for Bendis + Maleev fans

[Trike · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is pretty much incoherent. Half the time characters are being deliberately cryptic and the other half of the time they don’t finish their thought. In this supposed heist story there’s no heist to be had, and various people just waltz into the opposing enemy’s sanctum as if it were a public building.

“They can’t hear us, I’ve got the best security program running right now.”
“Oh hey, I’m one of your targets. Just dropped by to say hi.”
“How did you get in here???”

“Wake up old man, I’m here to gloat and slip you some LSD.”
“How did you get through ten layers of security with a well-paid armed security team right outside my door???”
“Do you want to hear my so-called ‘plan’ or not?”

Then there are the little continuity errors, like when Lawrence smashes his phone and then three panels later is using his phone. For a minute I thought maybe this was dream logic and everything was an hallucination, but by the end that didn’t seem to be the case. It’s just bad writing.

This reads less like Bendis than it does as someone trying to imitate Bendis. Read Genius, Vol. 1 by Marc Bernardin instead.

[alexander shay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm always a fan of a good heist/thief/etc story, but this graphic novel isn't really that. The characters are enjoyable and the overarching plot is interesting enough, but I found it hard to connect events at times. It felt like things that needed to be explained to make connections between one scene and the next were sometimes missing, or like characters were figuring things out with massive leaps of logic that didn't make sense. It was also hard to tell at times which characters were speaking, and a lot of the dialogue seemed random, unrelated to the current conversation, or just disconnected in between the two characters that it didn't read like a cohesive conversation. Altogether that made things much harder to follow than they needed to be and I couldn't really explain the finer details of the plot if I was asked to. The ending was also a bit of a let down for those reasons.

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emma is a gifted 16-year-old who has a webcominc and has just started at a new school when two goons pretending to be FBI agents yanked her out of class so that billionaire Zero Preston can confront her with her unknown past and demand unreasonable things from her. So this is how Emma learns that her parents had been master criminals who had hoisted a bunch of money from Preston in the past. Since they have gone missing Preston want to use Emma for his revenge on a fellow billionaire. Well , is Emma going to stand for that or will she take a page from her parents's playbook and turn the tables on him? Read along and enjoy the ride!

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another Bendis crime story...
oh..joy..

Emma (real name, 'Masterpiece') is kidnapped and threatened by the richest man alive. She's the daughter of the world's best thieves that stole epically from our main villain. He gives her an ultimatum...
'Steal from someone I choose and make it hurt them as much as your parents thefts hurt me.'

She then does the whole 'Oceans 11' team setup schtick. Five issues of set up and one (VERY rushed) executed theft. I have my ups and downs with Bendis books. Thankfully, this is a smaller mini and it's not overly wordy.
----
Bonus: Imagine the movies, 'Wanted' and 'Oceans 11' mixed together a bit...

[Clint · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
A fun generational heist story with great looking art by Maleev and aspirationally cool characters from Bendis, but it spends a lot of time building up to its climax only to sort of hurriedly hand wave through the details of it when it finally arrives. Bendis similarly tells how superlatively skilled each character is, but doesn’t really do much to show or exemplify their strengths in any specific detail. I liked the story’s bullet points and overall message and vibe, but I wish the connective tissue were a lot more substantial.

[Thorbjorn Helstrom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really this should be 3.5 stars. I enjoyed the book and the characters were interesting, but they did start to feel like just summaries from a game character selection.

The idea of revenge kept changing and I'm sure that was meant to be the character development, but to me it came off as confusing.

If you want a good crime read, then this is a good choice. If you want a great one, well this isn't but it felt like it could have been.

I don't know if Bendis and Maleev have done more with these characters, I'd certainly read them if they have and hope it develops with more depth.

[Jonathan Crabb · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to stop reading graphic novels by Bendis. When he has some interesting character content like Xmen / House of M, he can do some cool stuff, but good gosh his other stuff is boring and poorly written if you ask me. This graphic novel was kind of a take on oceans' eleven getting a gang together to do a job, but the story didn't move quickly nor did it do a compelling job of keeping my interest. The art is decent so I didn't one star it, but if I could have I would have given it a 1.5 star. Staying away from Bendis moving forward.

[Jota Houses · Rating 2 out of 5]

Después de poner el listón altísimo con su etapa de Davedevil, este tomo es una bajona tremenda. El arte de Maleev es igual de bueno pero la historia no es mas que un planteamiento para presentar una especie de equipo de ladrones juveniles a lo «Ocean's eleven» que no termina de tener ni pies ni cabeza. Emocionalmente me ha dejado frío y no le compro tampoco el argumento. Por sí mismo lo hubiera dejado pasar como un comic mediocre pero saliendo de donde sale es una soberana decepción.

[Michael Kahan]

I love a heist movie. I'm aware this is not a particularly unique trait. But I think what makes the best heist movies work is how kinetic they are. Maleev's art does look gorgeous in the action scenes and Bendis' script does make sure that the heist is more cerebral, so that the action doesn't become stale. It's not gonna beat 'Ocean's 11' for best heist media, but nothing is. This was a fun read.

[Madalene · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's creative about this book is stating out loud the different pieces of a traditional noir comic book crime fighting team, and letting it be recreated by a second generation in the initial world building issues. The center of it being an orphaned teen girl is material that seems ripe for a movie adaptation, though unfortunately destroying the lives of evil billionaires feels far further fetched than the other plot points.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Odd pacing mars a pretty predictable plot. There's good in this story about a young woman finding out her parents were criminal masterminds and someone's out to get her for it, but the BigBad's motives are cheap and the Oceans-Eleven team she assembles is too easy. Honestly, three stars might be overly generous. I might pick up a second volume but if it's just as predictable, that'll be all.

[Shaun M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun crime romp about sticking it to the rich and powerful. What's not to enjoy about that? Perfect for fans of stuff like The Italian Job, Oceans 11 and the like. Without spoilers, the only thing that kept it from being a five star read is that it seemed to wrap up really fast after a lot of great build up. But still a damn good time.

[Peter Holz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best part about this book was the art. Sensational. However, I found the story confusing and lacking cohesion. I was never really quite sure what was going on with our disparate group of protagonists, or even how the conflict was resolved.

[Kanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masterpiece was overall a good book. The artwork was nice. It just felt 'incomplete' and directionless at times, and also there were too many of those dialogue bubbles (if that's what they are called).


Say hello to Emma.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a lot I liked about Masterpieces- some very cool art moments, and likable characters. But I felt like everything wrapped up a bit too quickly and I wanted more. The end sets up for a sequel, which I would definitely check out.

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bendis sets up an interesting heist team focused on taking out the uber-rich. Solidly plotted, with good art from Alex Maleev. Didn't quite hit for me enough to be jazzed about the next chapter, but fun to read anyhow.