Every morning, you get up, you write a page, and you throw it away. It’s an exercise that a lot of writers out there may be familiar with, and it’s based on the idea that most people have a backlog of chaff they have to channel out before they get to the wheat, so to speak. You vent, you roil, you say the things you need to say, and then you throw it away.

Brian Michael Bendis doesn’t do this. He collects these screeds into script form and then places them in the mouths of characters we’ve never met taking the stage at some sort of comedy club where they indulge this kind of verbal diarrhea, and intersplices it with the REAL story of Detectives Walker and Pilgrim, with only the most tenuous of connections between the two.

I know you like to talk, Brian Michael Bendis, I do. You like it so much that sometimes you can’t help yourself, and you end up putting all these things you can’t bear not to say in the mouths of the wrong people, or simply not knowing when to shut up. And you’re a fantastic comics writer, but what you need more than anything else is someone who can tell you when you need to do that.

I’m looking at you, James Lucas Jones and C.B. Cebulski.

A long time ago, I made the decision to collect Powers in trades. I’ve been waiting for Cosmic for over a year now, and I’d like to be able to say that it blew me away, that it didn’t disappoint, but that would probably be overstating it.

In Cosmic, Detective Pilgrim continues her slide down the slippery slope of relative morality as she recovers from murdering some really bad people by… well, thinking about killing some more. And Walker finds himself suddenly whole again in a way that I think we’ve all been waiting for, so I’m willing to ignore the deus ex machina that gets us there, as long as it delivers.

There’s a lot to like here, as there always is in Powers, which transposes the darkest part of human nature with the brightest symbols of its potential. It’s a world that’s part magic, part filth, and part sudden, blinding violence, and although it might not be enthralling me to quite the same degree as the first several trades, it’s still a world worth visiting.