He never did draw kids well. My biggest complaint about Byrne in his heyday is that he had a habit of heading a title, making wholesale changes and then leaving before he had tied it all up. My friend and I referred to as “getting Byrned”.
honestly, I think this tendency, "later on", was much worse than his simplification of artwork. Its like...WTF? He must have known he could "get away with murder" & was smarmy enough to do it just for that reason, he could, and still get more work. Dude was a gifted talent & giant asshole. Not a rare pairing.
lol. I recall Giffen reacting so strongly to Byrne's middling run on Doom Patrol by killing off his original DP character at the start of his own run (Giffen's run seems to have informed the initial personalities of the team in the TV series). Giffen filleted her to death with a machine gun. Twas a gruesome statement.
Very observant. When he started on X-Men, he was eager and humble. His article on replacing Cockrum displays a sincere humility. His artwork during this time had a 'prove it to the world' energy that is undeniable. He was blowing the fans away and winning. Winning means money, praise, ego, greater responsibilities and hubris ("I don't need Terry. Or Chris. I can do it all!!!") Of, course, concessions in quality occured. We saw it. We could feel it. A very human cycle of thought and experience. I think that's what we witnessed.
Yes inkers are important in comics but there are many instances of inkers butchering an artist’s work. John Byrne has heaped praise on inkers who he thought did a good job on his work and has mentioned those where he felt the combination didn’t work. Reading his own thoughts and accounts of his experiences at Marvel and DC, I’ve never formed the opinion that he was driven by hype ( his own or that of anyone else) or that his talent as an artist and writer, negated the need of others in the making of comics. It’s worth mentioning, and this is from the writings JB himself, Terry Austin was offered the opportunity to join him on Fantastic Four but declined.
Byrne himself claims he simply found a way to streamline and refine his process, allowing him to work faster without a noticeable drop in quality. If you're wondering if that holds true, one simply has to google JB's commissions. From 2005 on, he began to recycle and reuse body shapes and just about every character sported the same goofy grin. Even the grim ones like Batman. Then again, his recent X-Men: Elsewhen 'fan fic' series looked as great as his mid 90s output. Proving he can still deliver... if he feels like it.
There was a huge drop in quality over the course of his run on Fantastic Four. His 'streamlining' , imo, took every bit of character out of his work. By the time he was at DC in the late 80's, his art was soulless compared to his late 70's and early 80's work. But of course all of this is preference.
It's funny how when creators start talking about "streamlining" the artistic quality always seems to suffer, and they don't to tend to see it, or listen when their audience tells them.
I would say the drop in quality was quite noticeable, as I was a big fan of his art in the early 80s, but as the decade went on, the fidelity really started dropping off
Love the quotes on “fanfic”! Byrne can scribble on a napkin, and I’ll accept it as cannon instead of whatever some teenager Disney just hired officially draws
GOOD job on this video,the thing is,George Perez went the exact opposite direction with his artwork,he got so much better during his career. Especially during his Teen Titans run,gradually started getting better with his figures and backgrounds.During his eariler work Perez said he was faking it ( his words not mine )and was known at Marvel as-KING-of the unfinished projects for trying to draw TOO many titles a month.
I personally disagree. George Perez’s art peaked in mid 80s for me. Even when he inked his own art in 90s, it was not as good. And he started to draw more realistic people into his comics than ideal or beautiful people, but that is an artistic choice I disagree with. Then in the 2000s, the portions were off in his sketches; not sure if that has to do with his illness.
@@brianng8350 I disagree with him peaking in the mid 80s,his 2nd run on the Avengers in late 1990s ( thinking 1998/1999 ) his artistic chops were-ROCKING-and had a good writer-Kurt Busiek-too.
His art peaked in the mid-80's to me. I really didn't like his art on his 90's Avengers run, in particular the inking. I think he used a pen instead of a brush? The lines are too thick and uniform in width.
@@gypcasinoable We each have our opinions on Perez,nothing wrong with that.Perez had an inker named-VEY-on his 2nd Avengers and he wasn't satisfied with the guy's work either. LOL. RIP: Mr Perez
@user-be7tc2bd6e All art and preferences/taste are subjective; so, there are no wrong answers. However, the fact you are bringing the writing in the equation and judging it as a package or whole product makes it not purely about his art but childhood nostalgia. The late great Mr Perez has done many groundbreaking/iconic things like Crisis, Judas Contract, Wonder Woman, JLA/avengers book, but I'm going to mention 2 issues he inked himself, which is a rarity - The New Teen Titans #39 and The New Teen Titans vol 2 #1. Just the first page of vol 2 #1 is amazing and gorgeous. Look at those issues and mention any other book that has better George Perez art. And I don't mean the story or the number of characters he drew in a panel, but on purely the art. If you've seen something better from him, I want to know. Personally, the unpublished pencil line work for JLA/avengers he drew from the 80s is equally better than the actual comics we got 2 decades later. I still love his art, but the 80s lines are so much better.
The inker is a lot of times 50% of the quality of the artwork. Terry Austin, for example, is responsible for how great those X-Men issues looked compared to almost everything else Byrne drew. Another example is how great Carlos Pacheco art looked when he had Jesus Merino inking. When they split, Pacheco's art was never the same. Or look at Jim Lee who, except for a couple of brief experiments, throughout his career was wise to always keep working with Scott Williams. I'm sure he knows how much of his career he owes to Williams, even though most people don't realise that. That's why I believe one of the worst trends Joe Quesada is responsible for during his reign as Marvel EiC, is that he actively tried to minimize the importance of the inker, both in crediting work (he started billing colorists ahead of inkers ffs) but also encouraging the awful trend of publishing uninked artwork which most of the times looks terrible compared to what we had before. I hope with time, the importance of the inker is restored, because it's such an important aspect of the art of comics.
I grew up and first got into comics in the 80s, so based on his work in X-men, Superman, Fantastic Four and She-Hulk it's hard for me to not think of his art style as the "default comic style". He's said some really dumb things and holds many opinions that I do not, but this is true for a lot of creators whom i used to worship. I think his work speaks for itself though, and in the long run will be much more influential than his various opinions.
@@toby2581 His opinion was Marvel should hold all rights and not pay back creators. He got in conflict with Frank Miller, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Marv Wolfman, pretty much everybody because he thought that would be a good look for him to Marvel that he was loyal. And ended up being dropped by Marvel the same way than the others.
@@toby2581 This is what industry professionals said at the time. To make it short they took him for an idi0t supporting the people exploiting creators that included himself: "Not everyone agreed with Byrne at the time. Frank Miller felt strongly enough to write to Comics Scene to assure people that, “…John Byrne's remarks ‘On Creator's Rights’ do not represent the beliefs of every member of the comics profession. We are not all such happy ‘cogs.’” Mike Barr commented that, “John Byrne is one of the most talented pencillers to enter the field in recent years, and I would very much like to work with him one day. But after reading his column, ‘On Creator's Right,’ I hope John doesn't mind if I negotiate my own contract.” The backlash against Byrne and his comment that he was a proud company man would come back to haunt him for years to come, and gave Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby inspiration for their character, Booster Cogburn, in Destroyer Duck (a company man who couldn’t be killed) and Joe Staton also parodied Byrne in the pages of E-man. " ohdannyboy.blogspot.com/2012/09/when-i-am-working-for-marvel-i-am-loyal.html
@@toby2581 When it came time to the lawsuit by Marv Wolfman over the rights for Blade once the movie came out, John Byrne was one of the witness. Reportedly Byrne kept making faces at Wolfman, like a child, every time his name was mentioned. To the point it was asked next day for Byrne to not make faces or not stay in court for lack of behavior. That is reported on the link i shared. Byrne is talented but his opinions on creator rights issues are not only backwards but, given the chance, he actively takes side against them. There is nothing to praise on that given taking the side of Marvel vs Jack Kirby was supporting Marvel not returning 5000 original pieces by Kirby for example. He is a company bootlicker.
Chris you nailed it. John was the first artist that I recognized and sought out his work. Subscribed to Avengers, FF and X-men because of him. Bought anything he drew. Loved Rog 2000 when I eventually found it. His runs were just epic. Austin was the perfect inker for him. As you noted his art changed and became simpler. I always assumed he was just burnt out. That flame had burned so hot for so long that it just ran out of gas. Cant say I blame him. Snowbird issue really pissed me off tho.
I remember the infamous Snowbird whiteout issue of Alpha Flight came during "Assistant Editors Month", when the main editors at Marvel were all out of town for some reason, and their assistants had taken over and they were all eager to strike a blow and make their own marks by engaging in various offbeat experiments in the books being edited. It was all very tongue in cheek, and the experiments were all very deliberately one-offs that would not be repeated.
His X-Men run with Terry Austin was incredible formartive for why I still love comics and went into creative work. You're spot on about his use of negative space, as I still refernce that in my photo/cinematography work when I"m doing storyboads and shot-planniung through production, Appreciate the work!!!
Grell was a lot like Byrne. Given time and interest on his part, a written, penciled, inked book by either was a masterpiece. Once time caught up (or maybe even interest?), the art took a beating. Main character and maybe something small per panel and general rush.
Byrne NEVER knew how to draw children. That was consistent through his career. One could argue his art dropped when he was doing too many comics at the same time and backgrounds disappeared, 90s I feel his main declining was letting his personal grudges interfere with his writing.
I draw. I'm a hack but babies and kids are harder to draw. You have to know all the proportions of another 3 groups. Infants kids teens. If you're just used to drawing adults, its alot to remember
John could draw the Power Pack kids okay. His rendition of Franklin Richards was atrocious. Franklin looked like a 30 year old in a small boy's frame. Jon Bogdanove's Franklin work in Fantastic Four vs X-Men was spot on. Franklin looked like a four year old. John is a superb artist. One of the best. His pencils of Latveria, for example, in FF issue 258 was jaw dropping. The detail of the city as Doom watches the citizens rebuild and go about their lives always impressed me. I just think he overthought Franklin with the square jawline and thick eyebrows. If he drew Franklin loosely and quickly, Frank would have turned out much better.
A lot of very good artists and painters have trouble with children and babies. When one looks at Medieval and Renaissance painters in museums their baby Jesuses looked like an old man's head stuck on a doll's body. Really creepy.
Just finished your video on the art of John Byrne. I think some artists work can fall at times but Byrne has proven over and over again that he has what it takes when he loves a project. Just look at his recent Elsewhen art. He’s going back to basics with that X-Men tale and knows how to layout scenes better than most modern artists working today. I wish you had mentioned his time on NAMOR as well as his DC output on his trilogy series GENERATIONS. He has such a love for these characters that he goes back to them again and again. You also said you wished Byrne tried other genres but he has with sci-fi (a variety of STAR TREK comics - regular and picture book, DOOM PATROL, & LAB RATS), horror (THE DEMON) and spycraft (COLD WAR). He also tried his hand at creator-owned books but they were essentially X-MEN of a different name. I think the fact that he’s not working in comics right now is a sad state of affairs based upon his own stubbornness to work with others as well as his strong opinions on all matters that some find offensive or distasteful. I also think comic companies should allow him creative control for his pure vision to hit the comic stands - similar to Dan DiDio giving Neal Adams carte Blanche to write/draw anything he wanted (to less than stellar results for a man not known for his writing). No one is perfect but no one can do what John Byrne (a writer, artist and inker) did for the comic industry. He revitalized characters while creating new characters for the big two. He also told some great stories that people can read again and again for years to come. And for that, I deeply thank him.
Still, he needs to check his ego at the door when it comes to writing/drawing comics. Then he might get more paying work. But then again, he is sounds like an egotistical bastard from what I’ve heard from interviews and his own writings.
I 100 percent agree with you. John Byrne has always been the artist that represented the greatest comics for me. There is no equal for me. He should be drawing a Marvel or DC book always. I would buy any title he is on without hesitation and support the entire run. Also I agree that he should be given some creative freedom. He has proven he will do something great with it. I watched Snyders Justice League recently and I thought how so much of what I saw was inspired directly by Byrne. I feel like Byrne took so many of Kirbys creations and supercharged them - the scenes with Darkseid notably. I could go on and on about how much I love Bynes comics.
The reason why Byrne doesn't currently draw comics is sadly his eyes are deteriorating after he had some surgery. It's the reason why he stopped his Elsewhen X-Men because it became physically impossible for him to do the work. It is always sad when someone starts losing their sight but with an artist it is extra horrendous.
Yeah...Pretty on point, Chris. When he started to ink himself, the weight-lines of his inks started to get hard, weird and kinda fuzzy over time. Cheers!
I remember people feeling incredibly ripped off with that Alpha Flight # 6. I think it's undeniable that Byrne's artstyle began to appear "lazy", but since I didn't pick up all the books, I couldn't pinpoint exactly where like your video. No question though, Byrne will always on a list of comic artist greats. Happy Thanksgiving, Chris. All the best and keep 'em coming.
everyone forgets every title that month did something goofy cuz it was "assistant editors month" - plus he was writing, drawing and inking two books - prob needed the break - a 2 day break at most
I was a huge fan as a kid. I agree his art did fall off but most artists do. He came in and his style was wild/exciting and then he refined his style. Hit his peak. With that said not sure if you seen his X-Men fanfic recent art. It's excellent. Only pencils but full pencils.
2 things happened with Byrne at around the same time and together they created what you see as the drop-off but I feel you are coming at it from the wrong angle by not referencing his writing output. The first thing was that, as mentioned in another comment, he streamlined his process to work faster and part of this was his discovery of japanese brush pens - very rare back in the day. There's a letters page in an issue of the FF where he addresses fan's criticism of the art by explaining that he had started using brush pens instead of traditional dip pens/brushes and found he was able to pretty much dispense with a lot of the pencilling thus increasing the workflow but as the brushes dried out and he couldn't get replacements quickly he basically used the old brushes longer than he should have and the fibres begin to break up making the art look very sketchy. So he basically did away with the pen and moved purely to brush art, something which is very clear when you know what to look for. Secondly, IMHO Byrne at this stage progressed from being an artist or a writer/artist to becoming a bona fide storyteller. His priorities changed from creating his best art to creating the best storytelling that he could and sometimes that means the less important background details, figuratively and metaphorically, are overlooked in the rush to advance the story one is telling. Byrne is not alone in this - the same happened to Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, Paul Craig Russell, Walt Simonson and even to Byrne's hero Neal Adams. Byrne did notice this - or was made aware of it at least - and for a time he employed an artist to fill in backgrounds for him because he was concentrating on the figure-work as he considered that to be where the "real" story is. The crucial factor in these changes was, I think, the first issue of his main FF run where he inked himself under the pseudonym Bjorn Heyn. Terry Austin was intended to be the inker on this run but for reasons I can't recall that didn't happen and Byrne inked himself - albeit in a very Austin style manner and as any creative person will tell you the mind is always looking for ways to move forward so, having discovered he could progress from writer to penciller to full artist to "creator" of each issue it became the law of big numbers - the more issues he created the farther away he got from the tightness of that first issue because why waste time creating detailed breakdowns or tight pencils when you are going to ink over them anyway and you can do the creative editing in your head as you go along. Didn't always work, I have to agree on that but when it did...boy did it work! No single reason, then, simply creative progress from his point of view I reckon.
LOL yeah I recall buying the issue and having the same question - I really did think it was Austin on inks for that issue before the penny dropped. Was lucky enough to get a copy of the IDW artists edition covering these early issues and Byrne really put everything into the detailed inks back then. Whether it was because he learned from Austin's work or whether he simply created really tight pencils thinking - as was the original intention - that Austin would be inking, who can say. My only criticism of that time was Byrne making eveyone soooooo thin, especially Quicksilver who looked very different to the way Byrne drew him in the Avengers and would have benefitted from a few cheeseburgers imho but that said, the fastest mutant (yes, he's still a mutant in my book) alive would naturally have to be built for speed rather than muscle so it did make sense. Still a brilliant run and one that will never be surpassed if the quality of today's material is anything to go by. @@M.E.plusminus
@@billstorie5161 Oh, I loved his slim & even thin figures, which to me especially made sense with Mr. Fantastic. As a teen I didn´t see it but in retrospect I clearly recognize some obvious changes in his artwork, especially towards the end of that run ...less background and more simplified figure work - which of course still looked so much better than the artwork of nearly every other book around that time. More than 60 issues of fun and dramatic storytelling + outstanding artwork - you don´t get that nowadays. Makes me feel a bit sad for the younger generations who grow up with trashy, lifeless, badly written + drawn propaganda comics (thank heaven for pirate sites and their myriad of back issues).
I think John Byrne was the first comic artist I learned to recognize his name and art when I was little. Back then my favorite superhero was Superman and his Man of Steel series (here it was published in a tpb with the full run, I remember reading it back and forth for that whole summer) and it was definitely a pivotal moment for me as a fan but also an artist. His art felt so dynamic and powerful , great work with perspective and detailed backgrounds , and great character acting and expressions. But yes, I remember being hyped when he came back to do Spider-man in late 90s and being more disappointed than anything. It felt rushed and lifeless, a pale shadow of what it used to be. I didn't know a lot of these comments , and truly fills like he's not a pleasant person to put it nicely. As much as I want to try to separate him as a person to the artist, at one point I think himself gave up on being a good artist in favour to believe his own hype, something that I also feel happened to another gifted creator like Alan Moore. He created artwork that I love and was really magical and special in my childhood and for that I am forever grateful. But that's one living artist I wouldn't want to meet in person, he just sounds like a douche.
It was very recently that I’ve been exposed to John Byrne’s douchey side through some comic book podcasts. He sounds very much like a guy who pats himself on the back, and become self-important. Barry Windsor Smith also comes to mind.
I think for me it was Sal Buscema, but only because people bragged about him so much. He did a pretty good job with the Hulk but he was no John Byrne. John Byrne was probably the second artist where I remembered his name. Kinda hard not to notice the talent.
I ran hot and cold on Sal Buscema. He had a good, clean style, simple without being simplistic, and when he was on his game he was excellent. But he definitely wasn't always on his game, and there were definitely times when his artwork could fall back into a whole lot of the same old same-old. The same held true for a writer who was big at Marvel around the same time as when Buscema was at his peak, Bill Mantlo. He could tell some very good stories when he felt like putting in the effort, but wow, he also did huge amounts of really, really lazy writing. The reason I bring up Mantlo is because he and Sal Buscema worked together fairly often, and when they did, the quality of the stories was just all over the place.
I wish Joe Sinnott inked the entirety of Byrne's Fantastic Four run. The FF issues they did together in the late 70s always looked better to me than when Byrne inked it himself.
At some point on his FF run he went from using brushes and ink nib pens to felt tips when inking his own work and it muddied some of the detailed stuff he did I think when he jumped to DC to reboot Superman he switched back
I think Byrne did plenty of experimentation to challenge himself and keep up his interest in a project. His Alpha Flight had a style distinct from his X-Men which was distinct from his FF which from his Namor. And look at his OMAC mini-series from the early '90s. Brilliant in both writing and art! (We need a reprint, DC!) I will grant you that detailed backgrounds are better than bare ones, but sometimes the ideas just don't come. As for line weight, I understand its importance, but it's less important than other aspects of comics art.
I really liked his X-Men run, and liked mostly his FF run (before the streamlining). I even liked his visuals for post-Crisis Superman. But he himself has been off-putting enough since the mid-80s that it made me less and less able to get into the stories his art is attached to, unfortunately. It's one of the reasons I became less into finding out about artists' personalities and, to a degree, personal lives.
There's so much art that just looks wrong once the colors go from flat fills to the cheap gradients of the mid 90s. A look that still plagues (IMHO) comics to this day. There are so many art styles that are paired with the wrong coloring.
I really felt this with Neal Adams' late-career art. Details and rendering in the pencils and ink were as excellent as ever but their overly-clean digital gradient coloring didn't look right.
Thanks for saying this, I have found it hard to read any comic released from the mid-'90s to the present precisely for this reason. I don't get why they had to ruin colors in comics.
Yeah. It's a big problem for me. Most of what I read today is the Marvel Epic Collections and Omnibuses. Usually bronze age and early modern stuff. It's much easier for me to suspend disbelief when the colors are more flat. Aesthetically it's so much more satisfying. Marvel and DC seem to have completely abandoned that style. Huge bummer. @@miguelbayonrivera2467
@@miguelbayonrivera2467 I feel the same way. I always felt ink was the essence of comic book and cartoon art. The Comic-con International award is called the "inkpot" for a reason. Modern coloring too often overwhelms the line art. And a lot of modern artists stop at contour lines leaving the rendering, shading, etc. to the colorist, which I find less interesting.
John Byrne as great as he is,always suffered from "every face looks the same" .....including kids I've seen some of his recent work (last 10 or so years) & I personally don't like it as much
Byrne’s run on X-Men and FF is what brought me to comics and are still my favorites to this day. Not a fan of his political views though and that includes his views as a “company man.” On a side note I was surprised that Chris didn’t mention his run on Namor. It was quite big back in the days.
I noticed the same thing in his artwork, starting with his FF run: thin lines with little variation in thickness. But the biggest change for me was how much leaner all his figures became, especially the men. I also think that Terry Austin was a huge reason for the X-Men run being some of the best art Marvel ever published
The first time i saw Byrne's art was his work in X-Men. I already knew the Claremont/Cockrum team, but Byrne made me really pay attention to the comic. His art jumped off the page on that book, his Kirby/Adams influence was evident. Then i read his initial FF run and i was like "He thinned everybody", but i liked the change, especially with the detail to the backgrounds. That page where Doctor Doom has everybody of the FF on that simulation is sick. For me, Byrne's art of this period has a manga feeling to it. (George Pérez art had that vibe too). The characters drawn with a simple but solid anatomy and the background unbelievably detailed, making the characters pop off on the art, just like Ōtomo Katsuhiro 80's work or Ishinomori Shotarō late 60's/early 70's work.
Always love his art... but I remember getting turned off from his writing and storytelling with his response to people being upset with his Vision storyline. His response was basically "he's a toaster people are mad that I "killed" a toaster?" ....It was such a WTF take from a creator. It would be like if when writing X-men he'd brutally killed Nightcrawler and responded with "He's not even human...he's a monster. Why should you care."
I really enjoyed Byrne's art in Fantastic Four. It's probably where I first took note of it when I was handed a paperback in the late 90s. But as I've gotten older and seen more of his stuff I started to feel like there might have been a point where it dipped a little bit. That's why I'm very happy to see this episode. I've been waiting for it for a few years now. Thanks for keeping me informed, I'll keep reading comics.
Thank you thank you thank you for paying tribute in a respectful video dedicated solely to John Byrne! John Byrne was THEEE man and he has always been FUCKING AMAZINGLY AWESOME as an ARTIST! He was not only the Hallmark artist of DC and Marvel between the 70s and early 90s, but I don't even think there could have been an artist BIGGER than him at any point during his run. Still to this day he is probably the CORNERSTONE ARTIST of ALL comic book artists today. I did not draw in his style, I preferred a Jim lee, Mark silvestri, Alan davis, but WITHOUT a DOUBT I knew he was the PINNACLE of high quality art, with Rapid Release and consistent in his delivery! John Byrne is not simply a catalyst great visual artists, but he is also a magnanimous writer and inspirer to those who would ever dream to read a comic book draw a comic book or imagine the world inside comic book art! Thank you again this was phenomenal!
Great topic. I do remember his return to Marvel in the 90s (Xmen Hidden Years and the Spiderman one) both looking flat, dull and soulless in comparison to his vibrant and fun X-Men and FF.
I think technically, to some sense, he isn't wrong about comic creators creating products first, stories second, when they work contractually for a company, but it's just not the point. Creators deserve credit and ownership over their personal creations, direct or indirect, which are then sold as a product on behalf of a company. It's the same thing for musicians. If you sign a contract with a record label, you deserve all rights, credits, and ownership of said music you produce for them but that contract you signed also obligates you to produce said music as a product for the company's benefit. To not see what most other artists were fighting for at the time and why it was important, and then to publicly speak out against them (especially historically critical moments like Siegel and Schuster) is absolutely baffling. At the very least I'd have thought he'd simply not comment. Perhaps his perception of the comics industry is a partial contributor to the devaluing of his own work. He allowed himself to become rapidly burnt out producing 'products,' rather than pushing to create precisely what it was he enjoyed creating; the art of it all. That could explain his need to continue X-Men fanfiction.
It was around the time that he added Alpha Flight to his portfolio of titles that the art started to suffer---at one time Byrne was Writing drawing inking the FF Drawing Alpha Flight & writing The Thing---that's a heck of a lot to keep up with & it began to show
The inker on FF #232 was named "Bjorn Heyn," which is an anagram of John Byrne. The Snowblind story was the realization of a long-running joke and took place during the "Assistant Editor's Month" company-wide event. Byrne only provided the words to the first Hellboy arc, working from Mignola's completed art, he didn't co-plot.
A few corrections & context: 11:00 - While Byrne did pencil several issues of the Fantastic Four in 1979, those issues were written by Marv Wolfman. He didn't take over writing and drawing the FF until 1981 with issue #232 (after he'd left the X-Men, as you say). 11:50 - While yes, Byrne had four Marvel comics on the stands at the same time with July 1980 cover dates, that doesn't necessarily mean that he penciled all four of them in the same month. Amazing Spider-Man #206 was a rush job done when Roger Stern realized that someone had miscounted the issues and no one had assigned a Spider-Man #206 after Marv Wolfman's run ended and before Denny O'Neil's run began with #208. In addition, O'Neil's first issue had J. Jonah Jameson his normal self while Wolfman's run had him on the run & not in his right mind. So Stern wrote a story explaining JJJ's personality change & Byrne penciled the 17-page story in a rush to make the printing date. With the two-parter that ran in FF#220-221, that was a story that was originally done for a special comic to be issued through Coca-Cola. When that fell through, the story was repurposed into two regular issues of the FF. So the most that Byrne probably did there was a new splash page or some material recapping what happened in FF #221. So that was definitely a case of repurposing old material that had been sitting around for a few months. 13:12 - FF #266 with the Kerry Gammill pencils was a fill-in issue that they were burning off, most likely because Byrne had just recently changed the FF's uniforms in FF #256 and the costumes were now outdated. (BTW, you'll notice that the story teams the Thing with the Invisible Girl. That's probably because it was intended to be used as either an issue of the FF or Marvel-Two-in-One, the Thing's team-up book, whichever one needed a fill-in first. Marvel did a lot of that sort of thing in those days.) 13:21 - I don't know if complaining about sparse backgrounds is really a valid complaint when the examples you show are Doc Ock's room at a psychiatric facility and Johnny Storm's unfurnished apartment. Neither one of those settings are going to have a lot in the way of decoration. 16:20 - Byrne explains his reasons for leaving most of these books on the FAQ on his Forum at Byrne Robotics. And honestly, most of them sound like valid reasons for leaving to me. Usually it amounted to him being told mid-story that he couldn't finish off his story the way he'd planned. That was the case with Indiana Jones, the Hulk, She-Hulk, and the West Coast Avengers. I'd probably do the same thing if I were in his shoes. (And BTW, Byrne actually did more issues of Wonder Woman than he did of the X-Men, so you have to count that as long run, too.) 20:47 - Most of the Kitty/Peter "romance" in the X-Men happened after Byrne left after Uncanny X-Men #143. Kitty was introduced in issue #129 and didn't become a regular character in the book until the very end of #138, just five issues before Byrne left. The only real romance between the two was in the Days of Future Past story of #141-142, where both characters were adults and the age difference no longer mattered. Other than that, it was pretty clearly just a teenage crush that Colossus didn't reciprocate or act upon. It was just a 13-year-old girl having a crush on an older boy of 19 or so, something that happens every day. Anything that happened after that you have to lay at Chris Claremont's feat. Also keep in mind that Terry Austin is an inker who tends to add a LOT of background detail when he's inking a job. (posters on walls, graffiti, extra buildings in the BG, etc.) So naturally that stuff wouldn't be there when Byrne is being inked by someone else. But yeah, Byrne's kids have always been weak. I attribute this largely to him not having young kids of his own. (Kieron Dwyer was somewhere around 12 or 13 when Byrne married his mother in the 80s.) Byrne's young kids look like little people more often than not.
You forgot to mention, Byrne also wrote and drew Alpha Flight while doing FF. A friend of mine noticed the change in his art also. We used ask each other, who'll have the good art next month.
Don't forget John Byrne was working on Iron Man before his run on West Coast Avengers/Avengers: West Coast, and continued to do so for a while. It was getting a bit wonky, towards the end, with other artists and writers (of wildly inconsistent quality) coming onboard while he was abandoning Iron Man, though he'd done covers for that title during that time. One of them was a body-swap story involving an unstable mutant with radio transmission powers who ended up switching the minds between Tony Stark and the then current Crimson Dynamo.
When it comes to John Byrne, I've only ever been familiar with his two Hulk runs. Both of which were just okay in my opinion. I know he's had legendary runs on Man of Steel, Fantastic Four and She-Hulk, so I will have to check those out.
l always chalked up the decline in his artwork the result of having too many projects in mind (and actuality) and age. It is a grind and maybe people don’t take that into account. He put everything he had into his early stuff and it’s rightly for the ages. Would l prefer he draw as he once did? Of course but he is human. I can’t legitimately crap on a guy who emptied the tank every month for years and gave us all inspiration, enjoyment and a foundation that people world over have earned a living off for decades. Where would popular culture be without that groundbreaking run on X-Men?
I first came across John Byrne in the pages of Doomsday +1. And I was blown away! It was dynamic and different and a pleasure to look at. I was so excited when he took over from Dave Cockrum on Uncanny X-Men. And you are not wrong about the changes in his style. His early work was always dynamic, and always highly detailed and easy on the eyes. Later on he may have "refined" the process to get in more work over time, however there was a noticeable drop in the quality. Well, that, and as has been shown, sometimes an inker can change or bring down the quality of the art.
The page cited at 15:00 as an example of Byrne’s art getting simpler later in his FF run is actually from pretty early in his run, from WAY earlier than the other issues mentioned. It’s from issue 244.
Your assessment of John Byrnes is on the mark. I noticed this trend as well. The hidden years had establishing scenes, but interiors were sometimes none existent. It was like his style shorthand was in full effect. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with pacing yourself. It's hard to recognize when you may be burnt out from lack. Of interest vs. getting a steady paycheck?
Byrne was one of those creators who needed someone looking over his shoulder to make sure he's doing his best. By the time he hit late FF he wasn't being watched anymore. By the time of his Trek comics it was obvious how much this hurt him. As a man, well, he was a great artist.
@@robi6317I agree with the hard disagree. I swear the JB haters are the only ones left in the hobby. He sold A TON of books and had A TON of fans before real comic fans were purged with that horrible Watchmen thing and the Marvel sellout that caused the speculator market. Comics were fun before that.
I always found it interesting, and a bit weird, that he had the FF's unis change from blue with black trim to black with white trim. Just seems like an odd choice, particularly that the uniforms were actually altered (and such a fine detail that the blue became black and the black became white, causing the black drop shadow on the 4 on the chest emblem to disappear into the white background while the blue 4 became black). Of course, other artists seemed to ignore that, and just made them dark blue (though given the coloring limitations of the time, it's probably similar to how Ditko originally intended Spider-Man's costume to be red and black, and the blue "highlights" eventually overtook the suit to become the one we're familiar with today).
I grew up reading comics with John Byrne's and George Perez's artwork in them in the mid-70's and continue to do so even today. I own several sketches from both of these men that they did for the teenage me at Chicago Comic Cons in the early 80's. These two guys will always be my personal favorites. In one format or another, I own almost everything Byrne has ever done and most of Perez's work as well. These guys will forever be my favorites and re-reading their books always fills me with nostalgia and joy. I'm very glad they were the comic artists I grew up with.
Remember drawing is not like riding a bike I went on a hiatus and here I am doing basic anatomy training again It is as frustrating and pencil throwing as it sounds to "forget" how to draw I wasn't the best artist before but I started getting confortable sketching skulls and monsters I forgot how to draw people and now I'm re-learning
Yup. I have an old school bud who had "IT" back when he graduated, but just never was able to both keep up doing art, as well as seriously pursuing a career in comics. Next to impossible to regain the edge one had 50 years ago. As well, the industry doesn't give a rip on taking a chance on a never was.
Speaking as someone that is approaching 60 years of age, I wonder if when John Byrne's artwork became more simple looking he was going through something in his personal life that affected his artwork.
Nah. Frank Miller definitely went this route because he wanted to - and ultimately became a caricature of himself - but I'd argue that Byrne essentially still draws everything the same way and just decided to cut down on the level of details to streamline and speed up the entire process. If you don't believe me, take a look at that X-Men fan fiction he has been working on for the last few years with fully finished pencils where there is no pesky deadline getting in the way.
I completely agree that there is a huge difference in the Byrne FF prior to 265 as opposed to after. I hadn't realized the art style became so simplified right there to but his early she-hulk completely changed a lot on the book - plus the resurrection of Doom didn't pay off as much as it should have. I don't think your point is all that novel but I don't think anyone else drew the line in the sand so clearly. Is there a director's cut of this video where you discuss how Claremont's X-men run completely changes when Jean Grey is resurrected by Byrne or will that be the follow up to this video?
I have an old F4 special drawn by Byrne, and what really cought my attention was the introduction of the editor decribing his as the best hugs in the business. Quite a unique point to bring forth but fitting the issue since it involved Sue and Franklin ( I think it was a crossover during the onslaught saga )
Well, you're correct about Byrne's art. He said he was "streamlining" his art. I would call it "simplifying" his art because he and other artists realized that they were going to be paid the same page rate whether they spent 3 days doing a single page or doing 3 pages a day. A good frame of reference is the '80s when artists like Barry Windsor-Smith and Neil Adams couldn't keep up with their monthly deadlines because they were spending a lot of time on their art. Marvel was having to pay their printer penalty fees when it missed printing deadlines, or else throw in reprints while it waited for pages. Meeting deadlines was more important than great art. I always bought comics based on the art. But when Byrne started simplifying his art, that's when I stopped buying Byrne's stuff.
Where I have noticed a big drop off in quality is in face work. Every character these days kind of looks the same, with the same stylized small chinned, wide mouth face, and usually drawn from a 3/4 turn angle to boot (just look at the uniform expressions at 17:37 on that WW cover....). His earlier high quality work tends to have a lot of great detailed backgrounds, a la George Perez (the other superstar of the same era), with distinctive faces. His art is still stronger in terms of storytelling than 90% of artists working today. It's just not as consistently "wow" worthy. George Perez, on the other hand, maintained and even improved quality to some degree even into his older age and with escalating health issues (just look at his "Legion of Three Worlds" stuff - wow!). Another contrasting duo I would point to is Todd McFarlane (whose are has declined in very similar "corner cutting" ways to John Byrne's) and Alan Davis (whose art hasn't declined as far as I can tell).
I'm not an '80s kid, but I read a few of his FF and X-Men stories back in the '90s. _Phoenix: The Untold Story_ was one of the very first comics I read as a child, and I was automatically smitten with the gorgeous art in that one book, though I was too young at the time to take an interest in learning the names of any comic creators. Fast forward to 2005, when I began reading the trades collecting his Superman run, and I automatically recognized him as the same artist who'd worked on those '80s comics. However, I didn't realize he was also the artist who'd worked on _Spider-Man: Chapter One_ and ASM in the late '90s. The art in those titles was so middling, they made no impression on me whatsoever; I never would've expected they'd been made by a top comic artist, let alone one of the first to impress me.
@Duragizer8775 Spider-Man: Chapter One was Byrne's falling-off point for me. He became reliant on his own style, which felt like he was just phoning it in, and the "re-imagining" of Spidey's origin was completely unnecessary.
Also: Byrne didn't draw Fantastic Four from 1979 through 1986. It's true that he did a handful of fill-in issues in that period, including the conclusion of Marv Wolfman's Sphinx saga. But in 1980-1981 the creative team on FF was Doug Moench and a young Bill Sienkiewicz. Byrne's actual run wouldn't start until July of 1981 with #232.
The video mentioned that Byrne quit Sensational She-Hulk after only eight issues. This was due to a conflict with the editor. But he later returned to the book when it had a different editor and stuck with it for 31 straight issues, for a total of 39.
I have been waititng on you to talk about Bryne for a long time now! Thank you sooo much! He is my FAVORITE artist and his X-men run is the reason I started reading comics!
Byrne was my favorite artist in the 80's to this day his art is some of my favorite. I definitely felt disappointed in his art especially in the 90's. But after getting older myself i can see how to every artist experiences a drop in quality maybe due to burnouts, or boredom or just getting older.
A remember coming across those Wonder Woman comics a few years ago and I couldn't comprehend how they were made by the same genius who did his famous X-Men run.
I agree. The Wonder Woman Byrne issues were awful. I can't remember if it was poor writing and/or poor art that put me off ‐ tho, it might have been both.
When I heard he was doing Wonder Woman I was so excited, imagine my disappointment in seeing the finished product. I hated the hair, the costume the bracelets. I remember how gorgeous he drew Phoenix and Storm, their eyes were luminous, and thought W.W. would get the same treatment, but no, her faced either looked hard or haggard. I tried to get into but just couldn't, and only got worse further down the line.
There are some issues of various comics in my collection that I have picked up and without seeing who did the art, I'd go "Who did the pencils on this issue, looks kinda good?" I'll then get surprised to see John Byrne did the art. I will admit his greatest work was in the late 1970s and most of the 80s. I know he has gotten knocked for making his female characters look similar with just different haircuts. Great video, Byrne is one of my favorite artists but if I had to choose between him and Perez, I'm always going with George! :)
I remember when I first picked up the Hulk in the 90's, Dale Keowen was the artist on it. I didn't know artists at the time, was just getting started, but I'd seen Superman at the local Stop N Go and other stores and seen the covers. I quickly thought it was the same artist, in my opinion, especially in the faces, Keowen is/was inspired by Byrne.
@@jumu446 very true, and if you look at either artist's work now, it's very much their own, but you still see Byrne in Keowen's faces, at least I still do.
I'm so glad you mentioned those Star Trek photo comics he did. Those things are insanely bad. Really, you could do a whole big thing on all the weirdness of Byrne's career. Like the debacle with the woman Kitty Pryde was named after, or his thoughts on younger women.
I-LOVE-John-Byrne, and was ready to fight you, video-unseen until i realized you pointed out some things in my teenage viewing that had me confused - like that issue of Alpha Flight with Snowbird, and that FF issue where Reed shrinks Doc Ock. I think my first issue was a giant-sized Fantastic Four where the Puppet Master had all of the team's consciousness in miniature clay bodies. And i was ONLY just yesterday telling my friend about the Dr. Doom issue (where Doom's hand is ripping the cover) about how Doom embued Tyros with the power cosmic. John Byrne and Chris Claremont are the absolute *pinnacle* of my adolescence. Thank you for this.
I always thought the same thing. His art in the 1970s up until around the issue of FF you mentioned were incredible. But I also noticed a slight drop after that. It was still really good, just not up to his earlier work. I never cared for him inking his own pencils. Great video....
The FF issues where the drop off happened were when John brought in the She-Hulk. My theory: Byrne was so enamored with the character he wanted to make her look as realistic as possible as opposed to the more simple cartoony style he drew people's faces. Drawing her more realistic meant drawing every character the same way which took more time and thats why the backgrounds were simplified.
I always felt like Byrne saw She Hulk as his big shot. Despite having an FF run considered second only to Kirby, and and X-men run considered far superior to Kirby's, She Hulk kinda became a signature character for him. Despite not creating her, I think he saw the potential in -and wanted to be associated with-- Stan Lee's last marvel creation. And he did -if it hadn't been for him bringing her into the FF or creating her solo series, she may have just been a footnote.
There's no denying Byrne was enamored with She-Hulk, but I don't think he ever drew her looking more realistic than any other character he'd previously drawn. I think the real reason for the change in art around that time is because he was taking on more work than at any other time in his career (besides writing, pencilling and inking two titles a month, he was also doing 5 or 6 covers at the same time), and he needed a quicker way of drawing to meet his deadlines.
@@Mokkari77 but Byrne's She-Hulk looks just the same as those other characters you mentioned. Byrne's female faces have always looked identical, and it's only the hairstyles that make the characters look distinctive. I'm not sure what you're seeing when you look at his She-Hulk but I can't see anything different about the way he draws her.
@@carlgibson285 My assessment was that Byrne did try to differentiate some female characters more than others. Storm vs Jean Grey during his X-men run, for instance, or Sue during his FF run. It seemed to me that he even tried to distinguish She-Hulk from Wonder Woman, with the latter being leaner & grittier after having basically made She-Hulk visually based on an idealized Wonder Woman.
Great video on an interesting and highly influential creator. Another artist who creates interesting work and then, unfortunately, starts sharing their thoughts and then..... But I agree that his early work is amazing and I was always happy to see it on the grocery store rack (bottom shelves on the right, it was the 70s and 80s). The fact that a top talent felt the need to shove his nose a little deeper into the corporate overlords (You HAVE the job John) at the detriment of the MAN who is HIS KING and biggest source of inspiration is pretty sad. But again, great video!!
I guess it could still be connected but the Kitty/Colossus breakup occurred during Cockrum's run. Never though much about the age difference when I was a reading as a teen. I always hated that she went to Excalibur not long after. Solution: Rogue. No romance possible. It's strange to think I got into X-Men post-Byrne. My first Marvel was Byrne's destruction of Skrull homeworld which was pretty great.
"Key" books for me in the early 80's, when collecting, were any Byrne artwork books. Highlight of my collecting days was when I was able to attend a Creation Events convention where he was a guest. He was the biggest thing in comics for sure but conventions were small and mellow and you could hang out in front of his desk getting signatures and watching him draw as long as you wanted. He was really nice to all of us fans/collectors.
Excellent overview. And I agree with his overall professional arc. One note on the children illustrations: John Byrne was never particularly skilled at rendering children. Or animals. They all tend to use the same anatomy, just morphed into child proportions or animal shapes. It's very formulaic. But in general, his was the art I tried most to emulate when I was learning to draw.
I noticed the change in style during his FF run. I agree that the early Byrne FF art, where he did his own inking, was phenomenal. When Jerry Ordway came on as inker during the Time Travel story just never gelled.
Yes, during 1981 when he began drawing and inking the FF. After the first few issues (from 232 on) where he did full pencils (expecting Terry Austin to ink) the art was a combination of Kirby/Ditko style. After that Byrne just penciled outlines and rendered the rest in ink is where the art quality suffered.
Hey Chris, love your show! Always entertaining and educational. This episode alone I feel you are missing something. Next Men, in my humble opinion, was peak Byrne. It was an absolute masterpiece. When I go back and look at his X-men and FF runs, the art is an example of an early manifestation of his talent that, to me, evolved later. Although his detailed backgrounds (there are plenty in Next Men) are eye candy, and demonstrate elbow grease, the simplification and abstraction of his art was a kind of progress. Cheers
Excellent video I like Byrne's marvel work especially his x men and FF runs his Superman run is considered a classic as well as she hulk but I believe is art fell off after spider man chapter 1 and x men the hidden years
Thank you for this trip down my comic memory lane. John Byrne was hugely influential on my love of comics in the 70s and 80's. He's a comics legend in my eyes.
That famous pic used in this video of Superman launching into the sky smiling with his arms down is the picture that pops into my head whenever I hear the word Superman. It's indelible to me.
I was hoping to hear a little more about Next Men. I recall thinking his art on that book was nowhere near as detailed as what I had seen on Alpha Flight or Man of Steel, but I liked the concept behind the story.
I was well aware of Byrne before his X-Men days 'cause of Marvel Team-Up, Iron Fist, Starlord, Avengers and his earlier FF stint. Of course, his X-Men stuff was his peak! Loved his FF run almost as much as Lee/Kirby! Much of his DC work, especially after Legends, and Superman fell flat. (And I sampled all his Marvel/DC work up to The Demon and Doom Patrol!) But his storytelling (art-wise) is always dynamic. One of the few 'worthy' comicbook geek friends I had as a child was a John Byrne cultist....but I preferred George Perez and we'd constantly debate the issue until Perez OWNED the 80's with some JLA, Titans, Crisis, History of the DC Universe and Wonder Woman.
Claremont, Byrne and Austin were the team. The dark Phoenix saga is the first comics I ever owned. The cover were Cyclops is walking away from the x men burned in my mind.
Thanks for this video! There's so much to talk about with John Byrne, you could probably make two or three videos. The thing about Byrne's work is that the vast majority of it is done with characters created by other people. I've tried to figure out what interests Byrne creatively by looking at his original work, but it's difficult. I thought Next Men was great at first, but the stories often seemed to deliberately swerve away from saying anything significant. There's an arc of Next Men called Faith (the one that introduced Hellboy) that has one of the characters imagining the story of Jesus, but with the characters re-imagined as people he knows. It comes so close to saying something deep, but just doesn't. I remember reading that one over and over, trying to figure out what the point was. I mean he definitely seems to be going somewhere with it, but swerves before the story can get there. Maybe one needs to read his novels to come to a fuller understanding of what he wants to say. I don't know, I've only read Whipping Boy and didn't care for it. But there's also Fear Book and Wonder Woman: Gods And Monsters.
Great topic, probably one of my favourites if we are talking about comics. I was obsessed, as many people, with his earlies runs on FF, X-Men, Alpha Flight, Cap, Superman,... and I am a huge fan of Next Men and 2112. Imo that was his Swan Song. Excellent art, peak story telling. He disconcerted me a lot in the late 80s. As you said, maybe the last third part of his run with FF was the beginning of his fall. WCA ŵas a very exciting era for me. My favourite artist and my favourite group together at last. The result was confusing (the plot!) and the composition of the pages were more vague than in the past times. A genius imo, with all the bad things that entails 😅 Eternal love for him. Cheers 🎉
Great video! I loved it. Keep it up! You did a great job nailing the time when Byrne's art slid. I was an ENORMOUS Byrne fan in the 80s, I bought everything he did. But yes his work became repetitive and by the time he did things like Generations, I couldn't look at it. It was uncomfortable. I compare it to REM's music, which was perfection in the 80s, and then by 2000 kind of unlistenable. Nothing against them, just for me personally a spark left it. Keep the videos coing.
The trade of Dark Phoenix Saga was the first X-Men comic I ever owned. So I was always familiar with Byrne’s art (and Austin’s inks). Ironically it is art I associate with a specific era. Having not seen any of his non-X-Men work. In a similar vein, I preferred other contemporaries such as Alan Davis or Arthur Adams.
Wow, I never knew much about the person behind the art. I will always be a fan of those early books and his contributions to the characters he helped shape, but sad and disappointed in his outlook towards certain subject matter that I don’t align with. Thank you for educating me today.
This is just fantastic. One of my favorite things about comic art is how direct and clear the lineage of influences are. In music, “classic” art, and writing, it can be much more muddled and slow. However, the incredible pace of comics allows you to see just how directly visual influence, storytelling methods, and stylistic tells flows from Kirby->Byrne->Lee.
Bob Wiacek and Keith Williams were also inkers that complemented Byrne's style very well :) I am loving Byrne's X-Men fanfic, it's a throwback to the 1980s X-Men that I loved. Certainly much better than what X-Men had devolved to in the 21st century. That said, I cannot disagree with you in regards to Byrne's more modern works. The fumetti Star Trek comics were atrocious, and I just couldn't get into what little he did in Angel. My personal favorites remain his runs on Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four, Alpha Flight, Superman, and Sensational She-Hulk (whom he returned to in issues 31-46 and 48-50), and Next Men.
This video cut off very abruptly at the end...we were about to hear more about John Byrne's Superman run and I was very interested to see where that was going.
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He never did draw kids well.
My biggest complaint about Byrne in his heyday is that he had a habit of heading a title, making wholesale changes and then leaving before he had tied it all up. My friend and I referred to as “getting Byrned”.
lol
honestly, I think this tendency, "later on", was much worse than his simplification of artwork. Its like...WTF? He must have known he could "get away with murder" & was smarmy enough to do it just for that reason, he could, and still get more work. Dude was a gifted talent & giant asshole. Not a rare pairing.
I wouldn't blame that on Byrne necessarily. I'm betting that was planned by the editors on those books and he was only hired for that brief "re-boot".
lol. I recall Giffen reacting so strongly to Byrne's middling run on Doom Patrol by killing off his original DP character at the start of his own run (Giffen's run seems to have informed the initial personalities of the team in the TV series).
Giffen filleted her to death with a machine gun.
Twas a gruesome statement.
Ask a hack artist small kids babies are kinda hard to draw
One thing we all should take from this story is:
inkers are very important in comics, and never believe your own hype,
Very observant. When he started on X-Men, he was eager and humble. His article on replacing Cockrum displays a sincere humility. His artwork during this time had a 'prove it to the world' energy that is undeniable. He was blowing the fans away and winning. Winning means money, praise, ego, greater responsibilities and hubris ("I don't need Terry. Or Chris. I can do it all!!!") Of, course, concessions in quality occured. We saw it. We could feel it. A very human cycle of thought and experience. I think that's what we witnessed.
Agreed
i Agree 100
Being a “company man” isn’t beneficial for your long-term security.
Yes inkers are important in comics but there are many instances of inkers butchering an artist’s work. John Byrne has heaped praise on inkers who he thought did a good job on his work and has mentioned those where he felt the combination didn’t work. Reading his own thoughts and accounts of his experiences at Marvel and DC, I’ve never formed the opinion that he was driven by hype ( his own or that of anyone else) or that his talent as an artist and writer, negated the need of others in the making of comics. It’s worth mentioning, and this is from the writings JB himself, Terry Austin was offered the opportunity to join him on Fantastic Four but declined.
Byrne himself claims he simply found a way to streamline and refine his process, allowing him to work faster without a noticeable drop in quality. If you're wondering if that holds true, one simply has to google JB's commissions. From 2005 on, he began to recycle and reuse body shapes and just about every character sported the same goofy grin. Even the grim ones like Batman. Then again, his recent X-Men: Elsewhen 'fan fic' series looked as great as his mid 90s output. Proving he can still deliver... if he feels like it.
So no, he just traces for fan stuff
There was a huge drop in quality over the course of his run on Fantastic Four. His 'streamlining' , imo, took every bit of character out of his work. By the time he was at DC in the late 80's, his art was soulless compared to his late 70's and early 80's work. But of course all of this is preference.
It's funny how when creators start talking about "streamlining" the artistic quality always seems to suffer, and they don't to tend to see it, or listen when their audience tells them.
I would say the drop in quality was quite noticeable, as I was a big fan of his art in the early 80s, but as the decade went on, the fidelity really started dropping off
Love the quotes on “fanfic”! Byrne can scribble on a napkin, and I’ll accept it as cannon instead of whatever some teenager Disney just hired officially draws
The Byrne & Austin combination was the best I've ever seen. Wish they had worked together more.
Alan Davis and Mark Farmer are another great team.
Byrne with George Perez inks were also an awesome duo.
Byrne on Ditko is also some sweet stuff.
@@VivisPalagreed and its a lot more Farmer than Davis than people realize
Byrne and Karl Kesel (On Superman) was also a good combination.
His 1990 run of Namor was super underrated, he wrote and pencilled a lot of those books. It's a shame they haven't done much with thr character since.
Namor was awesome
GOOD job on this video,the thing is,George Perez went the exact opposite direction with his artwork,he got so much better during his career. Especially during his Teen Titans run,gradually started getting better with his figures and backgrounds.During his eariler work Perez said he was faking it ( his words not mine )and was known at Marvel as-KING-of the unfinished projects for trying to draw TOO many titles a month.
I personally disagree. George Perez’s art peaked in mid 80s for me. Even when he inked his own art in 90s, it was not as good. And he started to draw more realistic people into his comics than ideal or beautiful people, but that is an artistic choice I disagree with. Then in the 2000s, the portions were off in his sketches; not sure if that has to do with his illness.
@@brianng8350 I disagree with him peaking in the mid 80s,his 2nd run on the Avengers in late 1990s ( thinking 1998/1999 ) his artistic chops were-ROCKING-and had a good writer-Kurt Busiek-too.
His art peaked in the mid-80's to me. I really didn't like his art on his 90's Avengers run, in particular the inking. I think he used a pen instead of a brush? The lines are too thick and uniform in width.
@@gypcasinoable We each have our opinions on Perez,nothing wrong with that.Perez had an inker named-VEY-on his 2nd Avengers and he wasn't satisfied with the guy's work either. LOL. RIP: Mr Perez
@user-be7tc2bd6e All art and preferences/taste are subjective; so, there are no wrong answers. However, the fact you are bringing the writing in the equation and judging it as a package or whole product makes it not purely about his art but childhood nostalgia.
The late great Mr Perez has done many groundbreaking/iconic things like Crisis, Judas Contract, Wonder Woman, JLA/avengers book, but I'm going to mention 2 issues he inked himself, which is a rarity - The New Teen Titans #39 and The New Teen Titans vol 2 #1. Just the first page of vol 2 #1 is amazing and gorgeous. Look at those issues and mention any other book that has better George Perez art. And I don't mean the story or the number of characters he drew in a panel, but on purely the art. If you've seen something better from him, I want to know.
Personally, the unpublished pencil line work for JLA/avengers he drew from the 80s is equally better than the actual comics we got 2 decades later. I still love his art, but the 80s lines are so much better.
The inker is a lot of times 50% of the quality of the artwork. Terry Austin, for example, is responsible for how great those X-Men issues looked compared to almost everything else Byrne drew. Another example is how great Carlos Pacheco art looked when he had Jesus Merino inking. When they split, Pacheco's art was never the same. Or look at Jim Lee who, except for a couple of brief experiments, throughout his career was wise to always keep working with Scott Williams. I'm sure he knows how much of his career he owes to Williams, even though most people don't realise that. That's why I believe one of the worst trends Joe Quesada is responsible for during his reign as Marvel EiC, is that he actively tried to minimize the importance of the inker, both in crediting work (he started billing colorists ahead of inkers ffs) but also encouraging the awful trend of publishing uninked artwork which most of the times looks terrible compared to what we had before.
I hope with time, the importance of the inker is restored, because it's such an important aspect of the art of comics.
Agreed! Inkers are a huge difference in how the artwork is gonna look like.
"After the inker's done, the pencils are just erasures", said someone during the silver age.
I agree.
Spot on.
I thought inker was synonymous w colorist. What is the difference?
Couldn’t agree morw
I grew up and first got into comics in the 80s, so based on his work in X-men, Superman, Fantastic Four and She-Hulk it's hard for me to not think of his art style as the "default comic style".
He's said some really dumb things and holds many opinions that I do not, but this is true for a lot of creators whom i used to worship. I think his work speaks for itself though, and in the long run will be much more influential than his various opinions.
@@toby2581 I agree wholeheartedly. But sometimes there are exceptions!
@@toby2581 His opinion was Marvel should hold all rights and not pay back creators. He got in conflict with Frank Miller, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Marv Wolfman, pretty much everybody because he thought that would be a good look for him to Marvel that he was loyal.
And ended up being dropped by Marvel the same way than the others.
@@toby2581
This is what industry professionals said at the time. To make it short they took him for an idi0t supporting the people exploiting creators that included himself:
"Not everyone agreed with Byrne at the time. Frank Miller felt strongly enough to write to Comics Scene to assure people that, “…John Byrne's remarks ‘On Creator's Rights’ do not represent the beliefs of every member of the comics profession. We are not all such happy ‘cogs.’” Mike Barr commented that, “John Byrne is one of the most talented pencillers to enter the field in recent years, and I would very much like to work with him one day. But after reading his column, ‘On Creator's Right,’ I hope John doesn't mind if I negotiate my own contract.” The backlash against Byrne and his comment that he was a proud company man would come back to haunt him for years to come, and gave Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby inspiration for their character, Booster Cogburn, in Destroyer Duck (a company man who couldn’t be killed) and Joe Staton also parodied Byrne in the pages of E-man. "
ohdannyboy.blogspot.com/2012/09/when-i-am-working-for-marvel-i-am-loyal.html
@@toby2581 When it came time to the lawsuit by Marv Wolfman over the rights for Blade once the movie came out, John Byrne was one of the witness.
Reportedly Byrne kept making faces at Wolfman, like a child, every time his name was mentioned. To the point it was asked next day for Byrne to not make faces or not stay in court for lack of behavior.
That is reported on the link i shared.
Byrne is talented but his opinions on creator rights issues are not only backwards but, given the chance, he actively takes side against them.
There is nothing to praise on that given taking the side of Marvel vs Jack Kirby was supporting Marvel not returning 5000 original pieces by Kirby for example.
He is a company bootlicker.
@@toby2581 using 'based' unironically in 2023
Chris you nailed it. John was the first artist that I recognized and sought out his work. Subscribed to Avengers, FF and X-men because of him. Bought anything he drew. Loved Rog 2000 when I eventually found it. His runs were just epic. Austin was the perfect inker for him. As you noted his art changed and became simpler. I always assumed he was just burnt out. That flame had burned so hot for so long that it just ran out of gas. Cant say I blame him. Snowbird issue really pissed me off tho.
I think he over extended himself - more than once, he was drawing multiple titles. As a kid, I hated that Alpha Fight issue…😂😂😂
I remember the infamous Snowbird whiteout issue of Alpha Flight came during "Assistant Editors Month", when the main editors at Marvel were all out of town for some reason, and their assistants had taken over and they were all eager to strike a blow and make their own marks by engaging in various offbeat experiments in the books being edited. It was all very tongue in cheek, and the experiments were all very deliberately one-offs that would not be repeated.
@@user-mg5mv2tn8qit was funny! I loved it.
His X-Men run with Terry Austin was incredible formartive for why I still love comics and went into creative work. You're spot on about his use of negative space, as I still refernce that in my photo/cinematography work when I"m doing storyboads and shot-planniung through production, Appreciate the work!!!
Grell was a lot like Byrne. Given time and interest on his part, a written, penciled, inked book by either was a masterpiece. Once time caught up (or maybe even interest?), the art took a beating. Main character and maybe something small per panel and general rush.
This is astute. I would add Quitely. But not Kirby. Brilliant consistency.
Byrne NEVER knew how to draw children. That was consistent through his career.
One could argue his art dropped when he was doing too many comics at the same time and backgrounds disappeared, 90s I feel his main declining was letting his personal grudges interfere with his writing.
I draw. I'm a hack but babies and kids are harder to draw. You have to know all the proportions of another 3 groups. Infants kids teens. If you're just used to drawing adults, its alot to remember
John could draw the Power Pack kids okay. His rendition of Franklin Richards was atrocious. Franklin looked like a 30 year old in a small boy's frame. Jon Bogdanove's Franklin work in Fantastic Four vs X-Men was spot on. Franklin looked like a four year old. John is a superb artist. One of the best. His pencils of Latveria, for example, in FF issue 258 was jaw dropping. The detail of the city as Doom watches the citizens rebuild and go about their lives always impressed me. I just think he overthought Franklin with the square jawline and thick eyebrows. If he drew Franklin loosely and quickly, Frank would have turned out much better.
A lot of very good artists and painters have trouble with children and babies. When one looks at Medieval and Renaissance painters in museums their baby Jesuses looked like an old man's head stuck on a doll's body. Really creepy.
Just finished your video on the art of John Byrne. I think some artists work can fall at times but Byrne has proven over and over again that he has what it takes when he loves a project. Just look at his recent Elsewhen art. He’s going back to basics with that X-Men tale and knows how to layout scenes better than most modern artists working today.
I wish you had mentioned his time on NAMOR as well as his DC output on his trilogy series GENERATIONS. He has such a love for these characters that he goes back to them again and again.
You also said you wished Byrne tried other genres but he has with sci-fi (a variety of STAR TREK comics - regular and picture book, DOOM PATROL, & LAB RATS), horror (THE DEMON) and spycraft (COLD WAR). He also tried his hand at creator-owned books but they were essentially X-MEN of a different name.
I think the fact that he’s not working in comics right now is a sad state of affairs based upon his own stubbornness to work with others as well as his strong opinions on all matters that some find offensive or distasteful. I also think comic companies should allow him creative control for his pure vision to hit the comic stands - similar to Dan DiDio giving Neal Adams carte Blanche to write/draw anything he wanted (to less than stellar results for a man not known for his writing).
No one is perfect but no one can do what John Byrne (a writer, artist and inker) did for the comic industry. He revitalized characters while creating new characters for the big two. He also told some great stories that people can read again and again for years to come.
And for that, I deeply thank him.
Still, he needs to check his ego at the door when it comes to writing/drawing comics. Then he might get more paying work. But then again, he is sounds like an egotistical bastard from what I’ve heard from interviews and his own writings.
I loved Generations! He really did a great job with those three series. It's some of his best work for DC.
@@Kevin_Streetprobably his best book page for page - ridiculous it didnt get mentioned
I 100 percent agree with you. John Byrne has always been the artist that represented the greatest comics for me. There is no equal for me. He should be drawing a Marvel or DC book always. I would buy any title he is on without hesitation and support the entire run. Also I agree that he should be given some creative freedom. He has proven he will do something great with it. I watched Snyders Justice League recently and I thought how so much of what I saw was inspired directly by Byrne. I feel like Byrne took so many of Kirbys creations and supercharged them - the scenes with Darkseid notably. I could go on and on about how much I love Bynes comics.
The reason why Byrne doesn't currently draw comics is sadly his eyes are deteriorating after he had some surgery. It's the reason why he stopped his Elsewhen X-Men because it became physically impossible for him to do the work. It is always sad when someone starts losing their sight but with an artist it is extra horrendous.
Yeah...Pretty on point, Chris. When he started to ink himself, the weight-lines of his inks started to get hard, weird and kinda fuzzy over time.
Cheers!
His 4 issue run of OMAC is one of his most incredible piece of work in my opinion.
Yes along with Next Men which was his latter scratchy linear qualities. OMAC was tight though.
Agreed. I realize you had a lot of ground to cover, Chris, but no discussion of Byrne's career should omit his OMAC mini-series.
@@chrisdragnet722if you havent read the later follow up to Next Men from IDW #31-44 - its a writing masterpiece
@@georgehenry1258 Generations 3 was incredible if you havent checked it out - interlocks well with 1 & 2
@@chrisdragnet722His IDW Next Men is the best comic he ever did, but nobody read it.
I never saw too much of his later work. His X-men run will always be legendary
I remember people feeling incredibly ripped off with that Alpha Flight # 6. I think it's undeniable that Byrne's artstyle began to appear "lazy", but since I didn't pick up all the books, I couldn't pinpoint exactly where like your video. No question though, Byrne will always on a list of comic artist greats. Happy Thanksgiving, Chris. All the best and keep 'em coming.
everyone forgets every title that month did something goofy cuz it was "assistant editors month" - plus he was writing, drawing and inking two books - prob needed the break - a 2 day break at most
I was a huge fan as a kid. I agree his art did fall off but most artists do. He came in and his style was wild/exciting and then he refined his style. Hit his peak. With that said not sure if you seen his X-Men fanfic recent art. It's excellent. Only pencils but full pencils.
What is the name of the X-Men fanfic?
Elsewhen.
@@ComicTropesCan you do a video of Jon Davis Hunt's art?
@@erdood3235definitely check it out. It’s a lot of fun to read.
Agreed his Elsewhen work is great, unfortunately the omnibus I've seen are insanely pricey
2 things happened with Byrne at around the same time and together they created what you see as the drop-off but I feel you are coming at it from the wrong angle by not referencing his writing output. The first thing was that, as mentioned in another comment, he streamlined his process to work faster and part of this was his discovery of japanese brush pens - very rare back in the day. There's a letters page in an issue of the FF where he addresses fan's criticism of the art by explaining that he had started using brush pens instead of traditional dip pens/brushes and found he was able to pretty much dispense with a lot of the pencilling thus increasing the workflow but as the brushes dried out and he couldn't get replacements quickly he basically used the old brushes longer than he should have and the fibres begin to break up making the art look very sketchy. So he basically did away with the pen and moved purely to brush art, something which is very clear when you know what to look for. Secondly, IMHO Byrne at this stage progressed from being an artist or a writer/artist to becoming a bona fide storyteller. His priorities changed from creating his best art to creating the best storytelling that he could and sometimes that means the less important background details, figuratively and metaphorically, are overlooked in the rush to advance the story one is telling. Byrne is not alone in this - the same happened to Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, Paul Craig Russell, Walt Simonson and even to Byrne's hero Neal Adams. Byrne did notice this - or was made aware of it at least - and for a time he employed an artist to fill in backgrounds for him because he was concentrating on the figure-work as he considered that to be where the "real" story is. The crucial factor in these changes was, I think, the first issue of his main FF run where he inked himself under the pseudonym Bjorn Heyn. Terry Austin was intended to be the inker on this run but for reasons I can't recall that didn't happen and Byrne inked himself - albeit in a very Austin style manner and as any creative person will tell you the mind is always looking for ways to move forward so, having discovered he could progress from writer to penciller to full artist to "creator" of each issue it became the law of big numbers - the more issues he created the farther away he got from the tightness of that first issue because why waste time creating detailed breakdowns or tight pencils when you are going to ink over them anyway and you can do the creative editing in your head as you go along. Didn't always work, I have to agree on that but when it did...boy did it work! No single reason, then, simply creative progress from his point of view I reckon.
Omg, I´ve always wondered who that mysterious `Bjorn Heyn´ guy was :D - - thank you for clearing that up! I remember the artwork, it looked fantastic.
LOL yeah I recall buying the issue and having the same question - I really did think it was Austin on inks for that issue before the penny dropped. Was lucky enough to get a copy of the IDW artists edition covering these early issues and Byrne really put everything into the detailed inks back then. Whether it was because he learned from Austin's work or whether he simply created really tight pencils thinking - as was the original intention - that Austin would be inking, who can say. My only criticism of that time was Byrne making eveyone soooooo thin, especially Quicksilver who looked very different to the way Byrne drew him in the Avengers and would have benefitted from a few cheeseburgers imho but that said, the fastest mutant (yes, he's still a mutant in my book) alive would naturally have to be built for speed rather than muscle so it did make sense. Still a brilliant run and one that will never be surpassed if the quality of today's material is anything to go by. @@M.E.plusminus
@@billstorie5161 Oh, I loved his slim & even thin figures, which to me especially made sense with Mr. Fantastic.
As a teen I didn´t see it but in retrospect I clearly recognize some obvious changes in his artwork, especially towards the end of that run ...less background and more simplified figure work - which of course still looked so much better than the artwork of nearly every other book around that time.
More than 60 issues of fun and dramatic storytelling + outstanding artwork - you don´t get that nowadays.
Makes me feel a bit sad for the younger generations who grow up with trashy, lifeless, badly written + drawn propaganda comics (thank heaven for pirate sites and their myriad of back issues).
I think John Byrne was the first comic artist I learned to recognize his name and art when I was little. Back then my favorite superhero was Superman and his Man of Steel series (here it was published in a tpb with the full run, I remember reading it back and forth for that whole summer) and it was definitely a pivotal moment for me as a fan but also an artist. His art felt so dynamic and powerful , great work with perspective and detailed backgrounds , and great character acting and expressions.
But yes, I remember being hyped when he came back to do Spider-man in late 90s and being more disappointed than anything. It felt rushed and lifeless, a pale shadow of what it used to be.
I didn't know a lot of these comments , and truly fills like he's not a pleasant person to put it nicely. As much as I want to try to separate him as a person to the artist, at one point I think himself gave up on being a good artist in favour to believe his own hype, something that I also feel happened to another gifted creator like Alan Moore.
He created artwork that I love and was really magical and special in my childhood and for that I am forever grateful. But that's one living artist I wouldn't want to meet in person, he just sounds like a douche.
It was very recently that I’ve been exposed to John Byrne’s douchey side through some comic book podcasts. He sounds very much like a guy who pats himself on the back, and become self-important. Barry Windsor Smith also comes to mind.
I think for me it was Sal Buscema, but only because people bragged about him so much. He did a pretty good job with the Hulk but he was no John Byrne.
John Byrne was probably the second artist where I remembered his name. Kinda hard not to notice the talent.
I ran hot and cold on Sal Buscema. He had a good, clean style, simple without being simplistic, and when he was on his game he was excellent. But he definitely wasn't always on his game, and there were definitely times when his artwork could fall back into a whole lot of the same old same-old.
The same held true for a writer who was big at Marvel around the same time as when Buscema was at his peak, Bill Mantlo. He could tell some very good stories when he felt like putting in the effort, but wow, he also did huge amounts of really, really lazy writing. The reason I bring up Mantlo is because he and Sal Buscema worked together fairly often, and when they did, the quality of the stories was just all over the place.
Man of Steel is way overrated. Byrne permanently ruined Superman.
@@tomcruisenukedmyaccount5388 How is Superman permanently ruined?
Man I love his artwork on the X-Men, it really was such a classic era I can’t help but have a lot of affection for!
I wish Joe Sinnott inked the entirety of Byrne's Fantastic Four run. The FF issues they did together in the late 70s always looked better to me than when Byrne inked it himself.
At some point on his FF run he went from using brushes and ink nib pens to felt tips when inking his own work and it muddied some of the detailed stuff he did
I think when he jumped to DC to reboot Superman he switched back
I think Byrne did plenty of experimentation to challenge himself and keep up his interest in a project. His Alpha Flight had a style distinct from his X-Men which was distinct from his FF which from his Namor. And look at his OMAC mini-series from the early '90s. Brilliant in both writing and art! (We need a reprint, DC!) I will grant you that detailed backgrounds are better than bare ones, but sometimes the ideas just don't come. As for line weight, I understand its importance, but it's less important than other aspects of comics art.
I really liked his X-Men run, and liked mostly his FF run (before the streamlining). I even liked his visuals for post-Crisis Superman. But he himself has been off-putting enough since the mid-80s that it made me less and less able to get into the stories his art is attached to, unfortunately. It's one of the reasons I became less into finding out about artists' personalities and, to a degree, personal lives.
There's so much art that just looks wrong once the colors go from flat fills to the cheap gradients of the mid 90s. A look that still plagues (IMHO) comics to this day. There are so many art styles that are paired with the wrong coloring.
I really felt this with Neal Adams' late-career art. Details and rendering in the pencils and ink were as excellent as ever but their overly-clean digital gradient coloring didn't look right.
Thanks for saying this, I have found it hard to read any comic released from the mid-'90s to the present precisely for this reason. I don't get why they had to ruin colors in comics.
Yeah. It's a big problem for me. Most of what I read today is the Marvel Epic Collections and Omnibuses. Usually bronze age and early modern stuff. It's much easier for me to suspend disbelief when the colors are more flat. Aesthetically it's so much more satisfying. Marvel and DC seem to have completely abandoned that style. Huge bummer. @@miguelbayonrivera2467
@@miguelbayonrivera2467 I feel the same way. I always felt ink was the essence of comic book and cartoon art. The Comic-con International award is called the "inkpot" for a reason. Modern coloring too often overwhelms the line art. And a lot of modern artists stop at contour lines leaving the rendering, shading, etc. to the colorist, which I find less interesting.
Computerizing colors/inks/whatever, looks like hot garbage.
John Byrne as great as he is,always suffered from "every face looks the same" .....including kids
I've seen some of his recent work (last 10 or so years) & I personally don't like it as much
Byrne’s run on X-Men and FF is what brought me to comics and are still my favorites to this day. Not a fan of his political views though and that includes his views as a “company man.”
On a side note I was surprised that Chris didn’t mention his run on Namor. It was quite big back in the days.
This is a really great episode! I've always loved Byrne's artwork. I think you're right on with all of your assessments of his work, here.
I noticed the same thing in his artwork, starting with his FF run: thin lines with little variation in thickness. But the biggest change for me was how much leaner all his figures became, especially the men. I also think that Terry Austin was a huge reason for the X-Men run being some of the best art Marvel ever published
The first time i saw Byrne's art was his work in X-Men. I already knew the Claremont/Cockrum team, but Byrne made me really pay attention to the comic. His art jumped off the page on that book, his Kirby/Adams influence was evident. Then i read his initial FF run and i was like "He thinned everybody", but i liked the change, especially with the detail to the backgrounds. That page where Doctor Doom has everybody of the FF on that simulation is sick. For me, Byrne's art of this period has a manga feeling to it. (George Pérez art had that vibe too). The characters drawn with a simple but solid anatomy and the background unbelievably detailed, making the characters pop off on the art, just like Ōtomo Katsuhiro 80's work or Ishinomori Shotarō late 60's/early 70's work.
I always thought Perez's work was quite similar to Byrne. Both were very clean.
Always love his art... but I remember getting turned off from his writing and storytelling with his response to people being upset with his Vision storyline. His response was basically "he's a toaster people are mad that I "killed" a toaster?" ....It was such a WTF take from a creator. It would be like if when writing X-men he'd brutally killed Nightcrawler and responded with "He's not even human...he's a monster. Why should you care."
I really enjoyed Byrne's art in Fantastic Four. It's probably where I first took note of it when I was handed a paperback in the late 90s.
But as I've gotten older and seen more of his stuff I started to feel like there might have been a point where it dipped a little bit.
That's why I'm very happy to see this episode. I've been waiting for it for a few years now.
Thanks for keeping me informed, I'll keep reading comics.
Such a tough career to cover. My absolute favorite artist/writer for 20 years.
Thank you thank you thank you for paying tribute in a respectful video dedicated solely to John Byrne! John Byrne was THEEE man and he has always been FUCKING AMAZINGLY AWESOME as an ARTIST! He was not only the Hallmark artist of DC and Marvel between the 70s and early 90s, but I don't even think there could have been an artist BIGGER than him at any point during his run. Still to this day he is probably the CORNERSTONE ARTIST of ALL comic book artists today. I did not draw in his style, I preferred a Jim lee, Mark silvestri, Alan davis, but WITHOUT a DOUBT I knew he was the PINNACLE of high quality art, with Rapid Release and consistent in his delivery! John Byrne is not simply a catalyst great visual artists, but he is also a magnanimous writer and inspirer to those who would ever dream to read a comic book draw a comic book or imagine the world inside comic book art! Thank you again this was phenomenal!
Great topic. I do remember his return to Marvel in the 90s (Xmen Hidden Years and the Spiderman one) both looking flat, dull and soulless in comparison to his vibrant and fun X-Men and FF.
I think technically, to some sense, he isn't wrong about comic creators creating products first, stories second, when they work contractually for a company, but it's just not the point.
Creators deserve credit and ownership over their personal creations, direct or indirect, which are then sold as a product on behalf of a company. It's the same thing for musicians. If you sign a contract with a record label, you deserve all rights, credits, and ownership of said music you produce for them but that contract you signed also obligates you to produce said music as a product for the company's benefit.
To not see what most other artists were fighting for at the time and why it was important, and then to publicly speak out against them (especially historically critical moments like Siegel and Schuster) is absolutely baffling. At the very least I'd have thought he'd simply not comment. Perhaps his perception of the comics industry is a partial contributor to the devaluing of his own work. He allowed himself to become rapidly burnt out producing 'products,' rather than pushing to create precisely what it was he enjoyed creating; the art of it all. That could explain his need to continue X-Men fanfiction.
It was around the time that he added Alpha Flight to his portfolio of titles that the art started to suffer---at one time Byrne was Writing drawing inking the FF Drawing Alpha Flight & writing The Thing---that's a heck of a lot to keep up with & it began to show
The inker on FF #232 was named "Bjorn Heyn," which is an anagram of John Byrne. The Snowblind story was the realization of a long-running joke and took place during the "Assistant Editor's Month" company-wide event. Byrne only provided the words to the first Hellboy arc, working from Mignola's completed art, he didn't co-plot.
A few corrections & context:
11:00 - While Byrne did pencil several issues of the Fantastic Four in 1979, those issues were written by Marv Wolfman. He didn't take over writing and drawing the FF until 1981 with issue #232 (after he'd left the X-Men, as you say).
11:50 - While yes, Byrne had four Marvel comics on the stands at the same time with July 1980 cover dates, that doesn't necessarily mean that he penciled all four of them in the same month.
Amazing Spider-Man #206 was a rush job done when Roger Stern realized that someone had miscounted the issues and no one had assigned a Spider-Man #206 after Marv Wolfman's run ended and before Denny O'Neil's run began with #208. In addition, O'Neil's first issue had J. Jonah Jameson his normal self while Wolfman's run had him on the run & not in his right mind. So Stern wrote a story explaining JJJ's personality change & Byrne penciled the 17-page story in a rush to make the printing date.
With the two-parter that ran in FF#220-221, that was a story that was originally done for a special comic to be issued through Coca-Cola. When that fell through, the story was repurposed into two regular issues of the FF. So the most that Byrne probably did there was a new splash page or some material recapping what happened in FF #221. So that was definitely a case of repurposing old material that had been sitting around for a few months.
13:12 - FF #266 with the Kerry Gammill pencils was a fill-in issue that they were burning off, most likely because Byrne had just recently changed the FF's uniforms in FF #256 and the costumes were now outdated. (BTW, you'll notice that the story teams the Thing with the Invisible Girl. That's probably because it was intended to be used as either an issue of the FF or Marvel-Two-in-One, the Thing's team-up book, whichever one needed a fill-in first. Marvel did a lot of that sort of thing in those days.)
13:21 - I don't know if complaining about sparse backgrounds is really a valid complaint when the examples you show are Doc Ock's room at a psychiatric facility and Johnny Storm's unfurnished apartment. Neither one of those settings are going to have a lot in the way of decoration.
16:20 - Byrne explains his reasons for leaving most of these books on the FAQ on his Forum at Byrne Robotics. And honestly, most of them sound like valid reasons for leaving to me. Usually it amounted to him being told mid-story that he couldn't finish off his story the way he'd planned. That was the case with Indiana Jones, the Hulk, She-Hulk, and the West Coast Avengers. I'd probably do the same thing if I were in his shoes. (And BTW, Byrne actually did more issues of Wonder Woman than he did of the X-Men, so you have to count that as long run, too.)
20:47 - Most of the Kitty/Peter "romance" in the X-Men happened after Byrne left after Uncanny X-Men #143. Kitty was introduced in issue #129 and didn't become a regular character in the book until the very end of #138, just five issues before Byrne left. The only real romance between the two was in the Days of Future Past story of #141-142, where both characters were adults and the age difference no longer mattered. Other than that, it was pretty clearly just a teenage crush that Colossus didn't reciprocate or act upon. It was just a 13-year-old girl having a crush on an older boy of 19 or so, something that happens every day. Anything that happened after that you have to lay at Chris Claremont's feat.
Also keep in mind that Terry Austin is an inker who tends to add a LOT of background detail when he's inking a job. (posters on walls, graffiti, extra buildings in the BG, etc.) So naturally that stuff wouldn't be there when Byrne is being inked by someone else.
But yeah, Byrne's kids have always been weak. I attribute this largely to him not having young kids of his own. (Kieron Dwyer was somewhere around 12 or 13 when Byrne married his mother in the 80s.) Byrne's young kids look like little people more often than not.
You forgot to mention, Byrne also wrote and drew Alpha Flight while doing FF. A friend of mine noticed the change in his art also. We used ask each other, who'll have the good art next month.
Don't forget John Byrne was working on Iron Man before his run on West Coast Avengers/Avengers: West Coast, and continued to do so for a while.
It was getting a bit wonky, towards the end, with other artists and writers (of wildly inconsistent quality) coming onboard while he was abandoning Iron Man, though he'd done covers for that title during that time.
One of them was a body-swap story involving an unstable mutant with radio transmission powers who ended up switching the minds between Tony Stark and the then current Crimson Dynamo.
When it comes to John Byrne, I've only ever been familiar with his two Hulk runs. Both of which were just okay in my opinion. I know he's had legendary runs on Man of Steel, Fantastic Four and She-Hulk, so I will have to check those out.
Uh, X-men? Also, his run on Namor is fun. OMAC. Many, many others.
l always chalked up the decline in his artwork the result of having too many projects in mind (and actuality) and age.
It is a grind and maybe people don’t take that into account.
He put everything he had into his early stuff and it’s rightly for the ages.
Would l prefer he draw as he once did?
Of course but he is human.
I can’t legitimately crap on a guy who emptied the tank every month for years and gave us all inspiration, enjoyment and a foundation that people world over have earned a living off for decades.
Where would popular culture be without that groundbreaking run on X-Men?
I first came across John Byrne in the pages of Doomsday +1. And I was blown away! It was dynamic and different and a pleasure to look at. I was so excited when he took over from Dave Cockrum on Uncanny X-Men.
And you are not wrong about the changes in his style. His early work was always dynamic, and always highly detailed and easy on the eyes. Later on he may have "refined" the process to get in more work over time, however there was a noticeable drop in the quality. Well, that, and as has been shown, sometimes an inker can change or bring down the quality of the art.
The page cited at 15:00 as an example of Byrne’s art getting simpler later in his FF run is actually from pretty early in his run, from WAY earlier than the other issues mentioned. It’s from issue 244.
Your assessment of John Byrnes is on the mark. I noticed this trend as well. The hidden years had establishing scenes, but interiors were sometimes none existent. It was like his style shorthand was in full effect. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with pacing yourself. It's hard to recognize when you may be burnt out from lack. Of interest vs. getting a steady paycheck?
the Hidden Years art suffered cuz Palmer sucks as an inker
Byrne was one of those creators who needed someone looking over his shoulder to make sure he's doing his best. By the time he hit late FF he wasn't being watched anymore. By the time of his Trek comics it was obvious how much this hurt him.
As a man, well, he was a great artist.
hard disagree
@@robi6317I agree with the hard disagree. I swear the JB haters are the only ones left in the hobby. He sold A TON of books and had A TON of fans before real comic fans were purged with that horrible Watchmen thing and the Marvel sellout that caused the speculator market. Comics were fun before that.
I always found it interesting, and a bit weird, that he had the FF's unis change from blue with black trim to black with white trim. Just seems like an odd choice, particularly that the uniforms were actually altered (and such a fine detail that the blue became black and the black became white, causing the black drop shadow on the 4 on the chest emblem to disappear into the white background while the blue 4 became black). Of course, other artists seemed to ignore that, and just made them dark blue (though given the coloring limitations of the time, it's probably similar to how Ditko originally intended Spider-Man's costume to be red and black, and the blue "highlights" eventually overtook the suit to become the one we're familiar with today).
I grew up reading comics with John Byrne's and George Perez's artwork in them in the mid-70's and continue to do so even today. I own several sketches from both of these men that they did for the teenage me at Chicago Comic Cons in the early 80's. These two guys will always be my personal favorites. In one format or another, I own almost everything Byrne has ever done and most of Perez's work as well. These guys will forever be my favorites and re-reading their books always fills me with nostalgia and joy. I'm very glad they were the comic artists I grew up with.
@jeffh8094 what did Perez draw for you?
Scarlett Witch, and Byrne drew The Hulk. I've had both of those drawings for over 40 years.@@gentlemanlygeeky4088
Remember drawing is not like riding a bike
I went on a hiatus and here I am doing basic anatomy training again
It is as frustrating and pencil throwing as it sounds to "forget" how to draw
I wasn't the best artist before but I started getting confortable sketching skulls and monsters I forgot how to draw people and now I'm re-learning
Yup. I have an old school bud who had "IT" back when he graduated, but just never was able to both keep up doing art, as well as seriously pursuing a career in comics. Next to impossible to regain the edge one had 50 years ago. As well, the industry doesn't give a rip on taking a chance on a never was.
Speaking as someone that is approaching 60 years of age, I wonder if when John Byrne's artwork became more simple looking he was going through something in his personal life that affected his artwork.
Nah. Frank Miller definitely went this route because he wanted to - and ultimately became a caricature of himself - but I'd argue that Byrne essentially still draws everything the same way and just decided to cut down on the level of details to streamline and speed up the entire process. If you don't believe me, take a look at that X-Men fan fiction he has been working on for the last few years with fully finished pencils where there is no pesky deadline getting in the way.
I completely agree that there is a huge difference in the Byrne FF prior to 265 as opposed to after. I hadn't realized the art style became so simplified right there to but his early she-hulk completely changed a lot on the book - plus the resurrection of Doom didn't pay off as much as it should have.
I don't think your point is all that novel but I don't think anyone else drew the line in the sand so clearly. Is there a director's cut of this video where you discuss how Claremont's X-men run completely changes when Jean Grey is resurrected by Byrne or will that be the follow up to this video?
Byrne is one of my favorites. Neal Adams, Jim Lee + Scott Williams, are my all time favorites.
Me too, but I would have to add John and Sal Buscema to that list. Oh yeah, and Mike Ploog...
I have an old F4 special drawn by Byrne, and what really cought my attention was the introduction of the editor decribing his as the best hugs in the business. Quite a unique point to bring forth but fitting the issue since it involved Sue and Franklin ( I think it was a crossover during the onslaught saga )
Well, you're correct about Byrne's art. He said he was "streamlining" his art. I would call it "simplifying" his art because he and other artists realized that they were going to be paid the same page rate whether they spent 3 days doing a single page or doing 3 pages a day. A good frame of reference is the '80s when artists like Barry Windsor-Smith and Neil Adams couldn't keep up with their monthly deadlines because they were spending a lot of time on their art. Marvel was having to pay their printer penalty fees when it missed printing deadlines, or else throw in reprints while it waited for pages. Meeting deadlines was more important than great art.
I always bought comics based on the art. But when Byrne started simplifying his art, that's when I stopped buying Byrne's stuff.
Where I have noticed a big drop off in quality is in face work. Every character these days kind of looks the same, with the same stylized small chinned, wide mouth face, and usually drawn from a 3/4 turn angle to boot (just look at the uniform expressions at 17:37 on that WW cover....). His earlier high quality work tends to have a lot of great detailed backgrounds, a la George Perez (the other superstar of the same era), with distinctive faces. His art is still stronger in terms of storytelling than 90% of artists working today. It's just not as consistently "wow" worthy. George Perez, on the other hand, maintained and even improved quality to some degree even into his older age and with escalating health issues (just look at his "Legion of Three Worlds" stuff - wow!).
Another contrasting duo I would point to is Todd McFarlane (whose are has declined in very similar "corner cutting" ways to John Byrne's) and Alan Davis (whose art hasn't declined as far as I can tell).
I'm not an '80s kid, but I read a few of his FF and X-Men stories back in the '90s. _Phoenix: The Untold Story_ was one of the very first comics I read as a child, and I was automatically smitten with the gorgeous art in that one book, though I was too young at the time to take an interest in learning the names of any comic creators. Fast forward to 2005, when I began reading the trades collecting his Superman run, and I automatically recognized him as the same artist who'd worked on those '80s comics. However, I didn't realize he was also the artist who'd worked on _Spider-Man: Chapter One_ and ASM in the late '90s. The art in those titles was so middling, they made no impression on me whatsoever; I never would've expected they'd been made by a top comic artist, let alone one of the first to impress me.
This longtime fan loves his chapter one art. His skinny spider man was always real to me. As opposed to buff spider man
@Duragizer8775 Spider-Man: Chapter One was Byrne's falling-off point for me. He became reliant on his own style, which felt like he was just phoning it in, and the "re-imagining" of Spidey's origin was completely unnecessary.
Also: Byrne didn't draw Fantastic Four from 1979 through 1986. It's true that he did a handful of fill-in issues in that period, including the conclusion of Marv Wolfman's Sphinx saga. But in 1980-1981 the creative team on FF was Doug Moench and a young Bill Sienkiewicz. Byrne's actual run wouldn't start until July of 1981 with #232.
The video mentioned that Byrne quit Sensational She-Hulk after only eight issues. This was due to a conflict with the editor. But he later returned to the book when it had a different editor and stuck with it for 31 straight issues, for a total of 39.
Oops, I meant that he came back with issue #31 and worked on a total of 27 issues.
I have been waititng on you to talk about Bryne for a long time now! Thank you sooo much! He is my FAVORITE artist and his X-men run is the reason I started reading comics!
Have you done an episode on Alan Davis? He is an artist I’ve always loved that had a very similar style to Byrne.
Byrne was my favorite artist in the 80's to this day his art is some of my favorite. I definitely felt disappointed in his art especially in the 90's. But after getting older myself i can see how to every artist experiences a drop in quality maybe due to burnouts, or boredom or just getting older.
A remember coming across those Wonder Woman comics a few years ago and I couldn't comprehend how they were made by the same genius who did his famous X-Men run.
I agree. The Wonder Woman Byrne issues were awful. I can't remember if it was poor writing and/or poor art that put me off ‐ tho, it might have been both.
When I heard he was doing Wonder Woman I was so excited, imagine my disappointment in seeing the finished product. I hated the hair, the costume the bracelets. I remember how gorgeous he drew Phoenix and Storm, their eyes were luminous, and thought W.W. would get the same treatment, but no, her faced either looked hard or haggard. I tried to get into but just couldn't, and only got worse further down the line.
There are some issues of various comics in my collection that I have picked up and without seeing who did the art, I'd go "Who did the pencils on this issue, looks kinda good?" I'll then get surprised to see John Byrne did the art. I will admit his greatest work was in the late 1970s and most of the 80s. I know he has gotten knocked for making his female characters look similar with just different haircuts. Great video, Byrne is one of my favorite artists but if I had to choose between him and Perez, I'm always going with George! :)
Wish I never saw that Star Trek photo comic.....
But his older work will forever blow minds and inspire and teach artists worldwide.
METALLICA
I remember when I first picked up the Hulk in the 90's, Dale Keowen was the artist on it. I didn't know artists at the time, was just getting started, but I'd seen Superman at the local Stop N Go and other stores and seen the covers. I quickly thought it was the same artist, in my opinion, especially in the faces, Keowen is/was inspired by Byrne.
I agree that Dale Keown's art style was cribbed off John Byrne, but, Keown did more cross hatching than Byrne's simple, but effective pencils.
@@jumu446 very true, and if you look at either artist's work now, it's very much their own, but you still see Byrne in Keowen's faces, at least I still do.
Well researched. Well analyzed. Well presented.
This is why I subscribe to this channel.
Keep up the good work, my friend!
I'm so glad you mentioned those Star Trek photo comics he did. Those things are insanely bad. Really, you could do a whole big thing on all the weirdness of Byrne's career. Like the debacle with the woman Kitty Pryde was named after, or his thoughts on younger women.
I did not know that Star Trek had a photo comic and that will be the next thing I look for at the comicon.
I kinda hate to ask but, what were his thoughts on younger women?
What is the Kitty Pryde name debacle?
@@brianng8350 He named her after a real woman he had a crush on. She was none to pleased and changed her name
@@ZeroBusterXX Oh wow, stalker much? Hahaha... Love his art, but not so much as a person and his opinions... hahaha...
I-LOVE-John-Byrne, and was ready to fight you, video-unseen until i realized you pointed out some things in my teenage viewing that had me confused - like that issue of Alpha Flight with Snowbird, and that FF issue where Reed shrinks Doc Ock.
I think my first issue was a giant-sized Fantastic Four where the Puppet Master had all of the team's consciousness in miniature clay bodies. And i was ONLY just yesterday telling my friend about the Dr. Doom issue (where Doom's hand is ripping the cover) about how Doom embued Tyros with the power cosmic.
John Byrne and Chris Claremont are the absolute *pinnacle* of my adolescence.
Thank you for this.
I always thought the same thing. His art in the 1970s up until around the issue of FF you mentioned were incredible. But I also noticed a slight drop after that. It was still really good, just not up to his earlier work. I never cared for him inking his own pencils. Great video....
The FF issues where the drop off happened were when John brought in the She-Hulk. My theory: Byrne was so enamored with the character he wanted to make her look as realistic as possible as opposed to the more simple cartoony style he drew people's faces. Drawing her more realistic meant drawing every character the same way which took more time and thats why the backgrounds were simplified.
I always felt like Byrne saw She Hulk as his big shot. Despite having an FF run considered second only to Kirby, and and X-men run considered far superior to Kirby's, She Hulk kinda became a signature character for him. Despite not creating her, I think he saw the potential in -and wanted to be associated with-- Stan Lee's last marvel creation. And he did -if it hadn't been for him bringing her into the FF or creating her solo series, she may have just been a footnote.
There's no denying Byrne was enamored with She-Hulk, but I don't think he ever drew her looking more realistic than any other character he'd previously drawn. I think the real reason for the change in art around that time is because he was taking on more work than at any other time in his career (besides writing, pencilling and inking two titles a month, he was also doing 5 or 6 covers at the same time), and he needed a quicker way of drawing to meet his deadlines.
@@carlgibson285 Just look at the way he previously drew female characters like Jean, Invisible Girl, Scarlet Witch. Almost Disney-esque.
@@Mokkari77 but Byrne's She-Hulk looks just the same as those other characters you mentioned. Byrne's female faces have always looked identical, and it's only the hairstyles that make the characters look distinctive. I'm not sure what you're seeing when you look at his She-Hulk but I can't see anything different about the way he draws her.
@@carlgibson285 My assessment was that Byrne did try to differentiate some female characters more than others. Storm vs Jean Grey during his X-men run, for instance, or Sue during his FF run. It seemed to me that he even tried to distinguish She-Hulk from Wonder Woman, with the latter being leaner & grittier after having basically made She-Hulk visually based on an idealized Wonder Woman.
Great video on an interesting and highly influential creator. Another artist who creates interesting work and then, unfortunately, starts sharing their thoughts and then..... But I agree that his early work is amazing and I was always happy to see it on the grocery store rack (bottom shelves on the right, it was the 70s and 80s). The fact that a top talent felt the need to shove his nose a little deeper into the corporate overlords (You HAVE the job John) at the detriment of the MAN who is HIS KING and biggest source of inspiration is pretty sad. But again, great video!!
Fell in love during AWC/WCA. Great arc for Scarlet Witch.
I guess it could still be connected but the Kitty/Colossus breakup occurred during Cockrum's run. Never though much about the age difference when I was a reading as a teen. I always hated that she went to Excalibur not long after. Solution: Rogue. No romance possible. It's strange to think I got into X-Men post-Byrne. My first Marvel was Byrne's destruction of Skrull homeworld which was pretty great.
"Key" books for me in the early 80's, when collecting, were any Byrne artwork books. Highlight of my collecting days was when I was able to attend a Creation Events convention where he was a guest. He was the biggest thing in comics for sure but conventions were small and mellow and you could hang out in front of his desk getting signatures and watching him draw as long as you wanted. He was really nice to all of us fans/collectors.
Excellent overview. And I agree with his overall professional arc. One note on the children illustrations: John Byrne was never particularly skilled at rendering children. Or animals. They all tend to use the same anatomy, just morphed into child proportions or animal shapes. It's very formulaic. But in general, his was the art I tried most to emulate when I was learning to draw.
I noticed the change in style during his FF run. I agree that the early Byrne FF art, where he did his own inking, was phenomenal. When Jerry Ordway came on as inker during the Time Travel story just never gelled.
Jerry Ordway came after the time travel saga. And it actually got better
@@dannyc8876 I seem to remember Jerry showing up around when Nick Fury was going to assassinate Hitler
Yes, during 1981 when he began drawing and inking the FF. After the first few issues (from 232 on) where he did full pencils (expecting Terry Austin to ink) the art was a combination of Kirby/Ditko style. After that Byrne just penciled outlines and rendered the rest in ink is where the art quality suffered.
Hey Chris, love your show! Always entertaining and educational. This episode alone I feel you are missing something. Next Men, in my humble opinion, was peak Byrne. It was an absolute masterpiece. When I go back and look at his X-men and FF runs, the art is an example of an early manifestation of his talent that, to me, evolved later. Although his detailed backgrounds (there are plenty in Next Men) are eye candy, and demonstrate elbow grease, the simplification and abstraction of his art was a kind of progress.
Cheers
I agree about Next Men - the art was stellar!
We have to recognize the effects of age on artist - eyesight deterioration, hand arthritis, back pain etc all force an artist to change his/her style…
I really love your videos on artists, I appreciate the more experienced eye while still being very accessible
That Romulan mini series Byrne did for IDW was pretty good.
Excellent video I like Byrne's marvel work especially his x men and FF runs his Superman run is considered a classic as well as she hulk but I believe is art fell off after spider man chapter 1 and x men the hidden years
Thank you for this trip down my comic memory lane. John Byrne was hugely influential on my love of comics in the 70s and 80's. He's a comics legend in my eyes.
as controversial (😅) as he and his later art might be, some of his superman art leaves me jaw-dropped to this day. genuinely incredible
That famous pic used in this video of Superman launching into the sky smiling with his arms down is the picture that pops into my head whenever I hear the word Superman. It's indelible to me.
0:10 I used to study the thumbnail picture. I have a big book of Claremont’s X-men
I always loved the way he could group characters
LOL I love that you still called him Paste Pot Pete. Yeah baby! "Trapster," my Aunt Petunia!
I was hoping to hear a little more about Next Men. I recall thinking his art on that book was nowhere near as detailed as what I had seen on Alpha Flight or Man of Steel, but I liked the concept behind the story.
I thought the art and inks were decent. 2112 is a really cool story. But I HATE the Next Men story arch. Depressing as hell.
I was well aware of Byrne before his X-Men days 'cause of Marvel Team-Up, Iron Fist, Starlord, Avengers and his earlier FF stint. Of course, his X-Men stuff was his peak! Loved his FF run almost as much as Lee/Kirby!
Much of his DC work, especially after Legends, and Superman fell flat. (And I sampled all his Marvel/DC work up to The Demon and Doom Patrol!)
But his storytelling (art-wise) is always dynamic.
One of the few 'worthy' comicbook geek friends I had as a child was a John Byrne cultist....but I preferred George Perez and we'd constantly debate the issue until Perez OWNED the 80's with some JLA, Titans, Crisis, History of the DC Universe and Wonder Woman.
Claremont, Byrne and Austin were the team. The dark Phoenix saga is the first comics I ever owned. The cover were Cyclops is walking away from the x men burned in my mind.
Thanks for this video! There's so much to talk about with John Byrne, you could probably make two or three videos.
The thing about Byrne's work is that the vast majority of it is done with characters created by other people. I've tried to figure out what interests Byrne creatively by looking at his original work, but it's difficult.
I thought Next Men was great at first, but the stories often seemed to deliberately swerve away from saying anything significant. There's an arc of Next Men called Faith (the one that introduced Hellboy) that has one of the characters imagining the story of Jesus, but with the characters re-imagined as people he knows. It comes so close to saying something deep, but just doesn't. I remember reading that one over and over, trying to figure out what the point was. I mean he definitely seems to be going somewhere with it, but swerves before the story can get there.
Maybe one needs to read his novels to come to a fuller understanding of what he wants to say. I don't know, I've only read Whipping Boy and didn't care for it. But there's also Fear Book and Wonder Woman: Gods And Monsters.
Great topic, probably one of my favourites if we are talking about comics.
I was obsessed, as many people, with his earlies runs on FF, X-Men, Alpha Flight, Cap, Superman,... and I am a huge fan of Next Men and 2112. Imo that was his Swan Song. Excellent art, peak story telling.
He disconcerted me a lot in the late 80s. As you said, maybe the last third part of his run with FF was the beginning of his fall.
WCA ŵas a very exciting era for me. My favourite artist and my favourite group together at last. The result was confusing (the plot!) and the composition of the pages were more vague than in the past times.
A genius imo, with all the bad things that entails 😅 Eternal love for him.
Cheers 🎉
Oh, in Spain he was known as John Polémicas* Byrne (*Controversies)
Great video! I loved it. Keep it up! You did a great job nailing the time when Byrne's art slid. I was an ENORMOUS Byrne fan in the 80s, I bought everything he did. But yes his work became repetitive and by the time he did things like Generations, I couldn't look at it. It was uncomfortable. I compare it to REM's music, which was perfection in the 80s, and then by 2000 kind of unlistenable. Nothing against them, just for me personally a spark left it. Keep the videos coing.
His comics were always the ones I read first after a trip to the comic store. Thank you John - no matter what your art style is.
The trade of Dark Phoenix Saga was the first X-Men comic I ever owned. So I was always familiar with Byrne’s art (and Austin’s inks). Ironically it is art I associate with a specific era. Having not seen any of his non-X-Men work. In a similar vein, I preferred other contemporaries such as Alan Davis or Arthur Adams.
Wow, I never knew much about the person behind the art. I will always be a fan of those early books and his contributions to the characters he helped shape, but sad and disappointed in his outlook towards certain subject matter that I don’t align with. Thank you for educating me today.
This is just fantastic. One of my favorite things about comic art is how direct and clear the lineage of influences are. In music, “classic” art, and writing, it can be much more muddled and slow.
However, the incredible pace of comics allows you to see just how directly visual influence, storytelling methods, and stylistic tells flows from Kirby->Byrne->Lee.
Bob Wiacek and Keith Williams were also inkers that complemented Byrne's style very well :)
I am loving Byrne's X-Men fanfic, it's a throwback to the 1980s X-Men that I loved. Certainly much better than what X-Men had devolved to in the 21st century.
That said, I cannot disagree with you in regards to Byrne's more modern works. The fumetti Star Trek comics were atrocious, and I just couldn't get into what little he did in Angel.
My personal favorites remain his runs on Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four, Alpha Flight, Superman, and Sensational She-Hulk (whom he returned to in issues 31-46 and 48-50), and Next Men.
This video cut off very abruptly at the end...we were about to hear more about John Byrne's Superman run and I was very interested to see where that was going.
Stay for the post-black-credits scene ;)