John Byrne's Anal Moment

A hack? As much as I love some of his old stuff, I have a vivid memory of reading the first or second issue of Spider-Man: Chapter One, and not believing just how bad it was.

As for when he 'lost it' creatively - I'm not sure. I always thought he was a solid, engaging writer but at some point he stopped being that, either during or after Next Men. The Byrne comics I read as a nipper - FF, Alpha Flight - were good, and his Superman is better than it's made out to be.

It depended on the character I suppose - there were books that benefitted from his Route One approach to plotting and writing and there were books that needed a bit more artsiness (like Wonder Woman).

And, fudge it - HELLO GRAEME!!!!!

Anyway - HELLO GRAEME!!!!

Was Jesse Baker the one-time Newsarama review guy that's also related to Dee Snider?

Apparently this was one of John Byrne's first professional comics, done for a college newspaper:

http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/g/gayguy1.htm

More info here.

Okay, it was done in the early 70s, and later on Byrne proved to be a rather gay-friendly (for his time) writer, but still...

Hmm, sorry about the missing pic, here's a link to it: http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/g/gayguy1.htm

My moment? When I saw him doing sketches at a table at SDCC in the late 80s/early 90s. He'd finish the sketch, hold it up and auction it for the gathered group of fans. Only time I've ever *any* artist do that.

Byrne made some notoriously homophobic comments in an old Comics Journal interview

Really? Based on his comments on Northstar that I've read he didn't seem like a homophobe. What did he say in that interview?

This was years ago, but it something along the lines of he could tolerate gays so long as they "didn't scare the horses" (that phrase has always stuck in my mind.)

Here's a comment from Byrne's FAQ about the creation of Northstar:

Was it your intent when you created NorthStar that he would be a gay man?

JB: When I created Alpha Flight they were basically half a dozen characters who could survive a prolonged battle with the X-Men. They had very little depth -- tho I am a compulsive creator of backstory, so I knew something about their histories even then -- and were not really created with any thought toward them eventually getting their own title.
Unfortunately (?) they proved enormously popular, and so Marvel began pushing me to do an ALPHA FLIGHT book. Eventually I relented, and agreed to do the series -- which meant I had one problem instantly: I had to find ways to make those characters more three dimensional.

One of the things that popped immediately into my head was to make one of them Gay. I had recently read an article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN on what was then (the early 80s) fairly radical new thinking on just what processes caused a person to be homosexual, and the evidence was pointing increasingly to it being genetic and not environmental factors. So, I thought, it seemed like it was time for a Gay superhero, and since I was being "forced" to make ALPHA FLIGHT a real series, I might as well make one of them Gay.

From there, it was a process of elimination. I didn't want the homosexual character to be one of the girls, since that was something people tended to associate (rightly or wrongly) with Claremont books. Mac Hudson and Heather were happily married and I did not want to mess with that. Michael was widowed with a daughter, and that way lay what I considered too much of a cliche, if he turned out to be Gay. Besides, as a Native Canadian he was already the resident "minority". The new guy, Puck, had his own set of problems. Sasquatach would be just too damn scary!! So I settled on Jean-Paul, and the moment I did I realized it was already there. Somewhere in the back of my mind I must have been considering making him Gay before I "decided" to so so.

Of course, the temper of the times, the Powers That Were and, naturally, the Comics Code would not let me come right out and state that Jean-Paul was homosexual, but I managed to "get the word out" even with those barriers.

Of course it might be that Byrne is trying to polish his armor after the fact (that comment was posted in 2004), but if we accept what he says as truth, it doesn't sound like was a homophobe in the 1980s.

IIRC Byrne did drop some subtle hints on Northstar's sexuality in his run; for example, in one issue someone calls him and we see him answering the phone by his pool wearing trunks, while some half-naked muscular man is swimming in the pool. But Northstar wasn't a stereotypical flaming queer, though of course that might've been because Byrne knew making him too obviously gay wouldn't have passed Marvel's censors.

It's kind of difficult to put into words why I don't like Bob Laytons's inking. This is going to sound really silly, but I actually feel physically ill when I look at Bob's stuff. I really do. It's like everything is greasy and slimy. You know those things you can buy that hang from your rear view mirror that are made out of rubber and you touch them and they feel greasy. That's how Bob's stuff looks to me. And all his men are queer. They have these bouffant hairdos and heavy eye make-up and an upper lip with a little shadow in the corner which to me says lipstick. Even the Hulk. I will never forgive him for what he did to the Hulk's face in the annual that we did together. A lot of the other stuff I liked, but the Hulk's face, the Angel's face, the Angel, God!I remember my father looking at the stats of the finished inks and there's a shot of the Angel standing there with his hands on his hips saying hello to somebody and my father said, "Well this guy's queer." No, he didn't look queer in the pencils Dad. (Comics Journal #57, interview)

You can totally parse that paragraph on Northstar as "I got contractually forced into doing something I didn't want to do, so I made one of them gay for shock value and to piss Marvel off".

I grew up reading comics in the 80s, so John Byrne was pretty much the popular kingpin of comics when I was in high school. Byrne was the only big name comic guy I saw at a convention back in the 80s that kind of carried an air of 'yes I am a star'. God people fawned on him, which is more on the comic fans than him. It was kind of weird. Even then, I never got how some of these guys could get so angry and freaked out over working on super hero comics. I could see getting mad on getting ripped off or not paid, but some of the anger on story angles was kind of weird.

I left comics for the most part from about 1990 and didn't really come back until 5 or 6 years ago. When I came back John Byrne, Frank Miller and Dave Sim - who were all stalwarts of my time reading comics were all considered kind of nuts and or lost it creatively all for different reasons.

I was just thinking between Byrne and Sim, you get the impression that the comics pro scene in Canada in the 70s was just full of horrible people.

Sim was a fanzine kid in the 70s, not a pro, and by no-one's account horrible

my bad

i honestly thought byrne was gay
i also was hoping John Byrne's Anal Moment was the new Dark Horse comic he's releasing