Brian Michael Bendis was born on August 18, 1967 in Cleveland, Ohio to a Jewish-American family. Bendis grew up in University Heights where, despite rebelling against a religious upbringing, he attended the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland, a private, modern Orthodox religious school for boys. He decided he wanted to be a comic book industry professional when he was 13, working on his own comics, including a Punisher versus Captain America story that he revised several times. A fan of Marvel Comics in particular, he emulated idols such as George Pérez, John Romita, Sr., John Romita, Jr., Jack Kirby and Klaus Janson. He later discovered crime comics by Jim Steranko and José Munoz, which he traced back via Jim Thompson’s work to the source novels of both Thompson and Dashiell Hammett, which helped cement his love for crime stories. These in turn led him to discover the documentary Visions of Light, which taught him the explicit visual rules of film noir, an important influence on him creatively.