Longtime Marvel comics writer Brian Michael Bendis surprised fans of the medium today with a simple tweet:

This is real. I love you all. Change is good. Change is healthy. I am bursting with ideas and inspirations. Details to come! Stay tuned DOCPm8KUMAIXHXY.jpg — Brian Michael Bendis (@BRIANMBENDIS) November 7, 2017

Bendis has switched teams, so to speak, agreeing to an exclusive deal with DC Comics, according to io9. As Comics Foundry founder and Entertainment Weekly Creative Director Tim Leong put it, this was the comics version of Kevin Durant opting to join the Warriors.

Bendis had been working with Marvel since the beginning of the century. He wrote for virtually all the big franchises: Amazing Spider-Man, Daredevil, and The Avengers, plus Ultimate versions of X-Men and Fantastic Four. While he had worked with DC characters before (see the 2007 collection Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, Volume 2), Bendis has long become synonymous with the Marvel universe.

Even for folks who don't follow comics, Bendis' work has likely come across their cultural radar. Powers , his original story that combined familiar crime-procedural genre fare with a superhuman world, became the PlayStation Network's first original TV series in 2015. His young black and Latino character Miles Morales gained headlines in 2011 when he became the title hero in Ultimate Spider-Man (another character of Bendis', Riri Williams, has done the same recently for being the heir apparent to Tony Stark in Ironman ). And Bendis also co-created the comic series Alias, which introduced Jessica Jones to the world long before Netflix did (the writer worked on the TV series , too).

As Ars has noted before, Marvel as of late seems to be dominating the competition between the two giant comic houses. Including the New 52 initiative, DC's recent mainstream offerings have been fairly hit (Wonder Woman) and miss (Batman v. Superman). And in the increasingly important world of TV and film, Marvel has comfortably outpaced DC on both the big and small screen—Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Logan, Deadpool, Jessica Jones, and on and on. Snagging perhaps Marvel's biggest comic writer may possibly help DC start closing the gap.