John Byrne: C/D

Tep's talk about Byrne's WCA run being filled w/ stories that are trying to act like continuity wood putty made me realize that A) Byrne had control of the entire Avengers franchise for at least 18 months (writing the parent title, writing & drawing the spin-off) and B) I don't think fandom really cared all that much. IIRC, his run on West Coast Avengers was his first post-DC work for Marvel, & maybe that's where the bloom on his rose began to wilt?

(Holy crap there are two people not 25 feet from each other talking to each other ON SPEAKER PHONE! Hearing their voices echoed on the phone is some kind of weird. Also, take a walk!) (OMG it's a conference call w/ other people!)

CLASSIC:

His FF, or what I remember of it.
His She-Hulk, although it now pales compared to Slott Machine's. But it's among the best humor stuff Marvel has published.
His X-Men stuff in the initial Claremont run, of course.

IN BETWEEN:

X-Men: The Hidden Years, which was the kind of nostalgia trip that prefigured The World's Greatest Comics Magazine, Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and the Loeb stuff at DC. It was uneven, but it was generally good fun.

Superman/Batman: Generations. Like I was saying to Huck, the execution is not so hot, and the art has the weird rushed look of modern Byrne, but the ideas are a lot of fun in a very fannish Earth-2 quasi-Silver Age kind of way. I've read only part of the sequel and none of the third, but would assume they're just glue.

DUD:

Spider-Man: Chapter One

His post-PAD pre-Jones fan-reviled Incredible Hulk

West Coast Avengers, and his "hang on, but it doesn't make sense for the Vision to be the android Human Torch, he's not even mechanical!" unnecessary expose, his "Remember when I made Sue Storm a stronger character? Well, I'm going to do the same thing with the Scarlet Witch by making her go NUTS and have SHORT HAIR! thupbpbptpt" crap, bringing back an android Human Torch no modern reader cared about outside of The Invaders and then not having any idea what to do with the character other than point to him and say "look what I brought back!" ...

I've blocked out so much else ...

I think we also need a WHATEVER classification, under which we shove most of his script-only work (for the X-books post-Claremont, & for the first Hellboy mini), & probably his time scripting Avengers.

I think most of his Superman work probably fits in as a 'tweener: great @ times (the first 6 issues of Superman, I really liked) (& Man of Steel wasn't bad for what it was), meh @ times, & I swear you can pinpoint the moment he got bored / chuffed w/ his cohorts to that issue of Action Comics where he has Big Barda & Supes make a porno.

He's the don!

But frankly, because of his blase, horrible continuity re-jig of the Doom Patrol, I have to claim he's dud for the rest of eternity.

It wasn't terribly gripping or anything, and I assume a lot of the bigger points were Byrne's finishes on editorial breakdowns, as it were, but like you say, it was fine for what it was.

This should go in the Engelhart thread, maybe, but whatever - my biggest problem w/ Millenium wasn't the infiltration concept. It was the way the infiltraitors were revealed, usually in a cheesy plot-twisting "THE CALL IS COMING etc." way. Like, Clark would turn his back, Lana would grab a steak knife, & then approach him like a Michael Myers stand-in.

Not that it happened that way - I think Lana "turned" by going to the Daily Bugle, confronting Clark in the office, & ripping his shirt off to try & reveal his secret. Good thing he didn't wear the S under his T! & then I think it was revealed that almost all of Smallville was under the Manhunter's thrall, & the Spectre had to show up & exorcise the Manhunter essence from the town or some thing. Yeesh.

Mike Baron's nonchalant approach to the problem in Flash was fantastic, though. Wally's dad was the Manhunter. Wally confronted him. Wally's dad was like, "Yeah, you got me, darn it." & then they went to Cuba w/ the Chunk & hung out w/ Fidel Castro. (I might be getting the details & chronology wrong, but that's probably the gist of it.)

[Huk-L Tep-L post]

Gawd. I really, really loved JLI.

BUT BYRNE!

IN-BETWEEN:

- Alpha Flight: I really liked the first 12 issues (OK, maybe just really the 1st one & the two-issue Sasquatch / Super Skrull rumble & Guardian's death), but then things just got ... weird. I swear there's a point in almost every Byrne writer / artist run where his interest obviously flags & his ideas either die on the vine or just turn into mush. Gilded Lily? Talisman (oh no another Women In Peril)? Aurora's yellow outfit? He mucked around with Snowbird, too, didn't he? And oh boy Heather McDonald was run through the ringer - first she sees her husband dies, & then her legs are shredded by some Master-created sea-creature. Wheeeeeee!

- his first Incredible Hulk run (as writer / artist), piggybacking his Alpha Flight exit where the creative teams for both books SWAPPED. Hulkbusters? Sure. Doc Samson as hep ponytailed vest-wearing stud? Sure. Parallel storytelling in the last issue of his run where the Hulk kills a Hulkbuster & Bruce & Betty get married while General Ross pops Rick Jones in the stomach? Um, sure? Separate Banner & Hulk into 2 different bodies so they can be recombined by editorial edict (& AL MILGROM) in less than a year? Well, um, you see...

Actually, this Hulk run's probably right on the DUD line, now that I think about it. Credit where credit's due, tho - it took him only 6 months to totally upset Hulk's applecart. (Now that's compressed storytelling!)

Chapter One was conceived as a twelve part limited series that would run through most of 1999, and would retell the first year of Peter Parker's life as Spider-Man - which writer/artist John Byrne considered to be the first 18 issues of the original Amazing Spider-Man run (not an unreasonable assumption)... The idea of updating a few events and "re-ordering" certain others (for example, he made the comment that he wanted to reduce the number of radioactive accidents in the Marvel Universe) so that they made a little more sense in the context of what we now know about Spidey wasn't a bad idea...

Rightly or wrongly, the internet fan community went immediately ballistic at the news, particularly since there were hints that Spidey's origin was going to be revised and tied in with Doctor Octopus'! Even though fans often have a reputation for going whacko at the drop of a hat, this furor has to be taken in context of the events of the times (1) the Spidey titles were going to be rebooted with new #1's, which was hugely unpopular also (and since reversed on Amazing), (2) the rumors were flying, soon verified, that Aunt May was coming back after having been "dead" for four years, which frankly, seemed like a dumb idea, (3) the titles were being wound down with a truly awful storyline ("Gathering of Five" and "Final Chapter") which consistently show up on several worst Spidey stories lists to this day, (4) John Byrne, hugely popular in the past, was in the minds of many fans, in addition to being past his prime, a cranky, bitter, and mean spirited person. The last point is conjecture based on the chatter I saw during those times. It was during this time that the internet term "Byrne stealing" came into being - as Byrne made the comment that folks who read through a comic off the shelf without buying it are committing an act equivalent to stealing. And (5) it was also learned that some of Spidey's old villains were in for a redesign.

Ultimately, the series sold fairly well, but fan reaction was mixed to poor. As the series rolled out, even many who had positive expectations (like myself, I was actually looking forward to this) had their hopes dashed because of the execution. What was wrong with Chapter One is worthy of an article itself (and I wrote one - but it needs updating). As it turned out, the changes that Byrne made actually did nothing to improve or enhance Spidey lore. One of the most glaringly dated aspects of the origin, the bite of the "radioactive" spider was replaced by an even more ridiculous concept of a radioactive explosion that killed virtually everyone who was present, except Peter Parker and Doc Ock, plus a few others that were fodder for a follow-up story later during Amazing Spider-Man.

Doc Ock received a horrible redesign which I shall always refer to as "Pantsless Bionic Ock" because he looked like a cyborg with no pants, and it was revealed that not only were Norman Osborn and the Sandman related (because of that funky hair, no doubt), but Osborn was responsible for siccing the Sandman on Spidey in the first place, for outfitting Electro after his electrical accident, and for employing Quentin Beck aka Mysterio in the special effects department of Osborn Studios.

Even worse, Byrne's revised origins began to show up and be referenced in the regular Spider-Man including an awful villain known as "Captain Power" (Amazing Spider-Man #451 (October 1999)) who turned out to be another survivor of that radioactive explosion that gave birth to both Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus.

Again, the problem wasn't that things were tinkered with, it's that they were tinkered with badly, the changes added nothing good, and improved nothing but were merely changes for their own sake, sometimes making even less sense that the tacky 1960's stories. The stories unsuccessfully tried to impose the more deliberate and methodical method of storytelling on old plotlines that were slam bam thank you ma'am, and the humor that was such a key component of putting Spidey on the map in those early days was completely absent.

Marvel began running away from Chapter One before the series was even completed, as evidenced by what happened when writer Paul Jenkins, in his first assignment on the Spider-titles, asked editor Ralph Macchio what origin story he should reference when he did his Chameleon story beginning in Webspinners #10 - the original Lee-Ditko version or Byrne's Chapter One. He was told to use the original, which was the effective end of any possibility that any of the Byrne revisions would take hold. As far as Marvel, and most fans are concerned, Chapter One does not exist.

Divergence! Mark Millar is using / stealing / "borrowing" that "Osborn as overlord" idea / nonsense as the fulcrum in his MK Spider-Man arc, except he's blown it out panoramically so that almost ALL villain / hero conflicts (or, at least, almost all Spidey-related conflicts) are expertly organized sorties masterminded by some grand master of mayhem (AKA him).

If I have this wrong, set me straight, but I believe that's the emanciated, malnourished, scurvy-ridden skinny.

And, wow, does that sound awful. It's awful in terms of slighting the franchise's legacy, it's awful in terms of addressing what was wrong w/ the franchise @ the time, it's awful in terms of comic-booky feasability (a radioactive explosion is more "realistic" than a radioactive spider-bite) (yep), it's awful in terms of shameless creative bankruptcy, and it's awful in terms of the usual Byrneian "I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA" chutzpah that marks almost every one of his Big Two ventures nowadays. Bless Joe Q for giving him the brush-off and irking him to the point that he won't work for Marvel for the indefinite future.

On the Classic side, unrelated to any of the above: on She-Hulk, Byrne promised not to make any new villains, because he was tired of everyone making a villain for one or two issues and never following up on them, so that there were thousands of benthead inventors or angry mutants wandering around out there. I don't know if he stuck to it for the whole run or not, but it was a pretty good ambition -- especially in a humor comic, where "but all these guys are lame!" wouldn't be reason not to use them.

xpost; Millar definitely thinks it's in continuity, but well, there you go -- last time I googled the matter on racmu, Spidey-editor Axel Alonso was apparently dodging the question in interviews (which is not a terrible thing to do)

Lordy, if I delved into rac, I'd never come out.

Classic -

FF - as discussed on the FF thread. I think its his best work.
Apart from maybe :

Next Men - does not get enough love. Maybe because he always had Dave Sim-esque rants at the back with the letters pages and because it went to shit at the end, but the first couple of story arcs are great.

OMAC - I love Byrne's Omac. Great art, tight scripting. Both qualities which seemed to desert him a few years later.

Namor - I always liked Namor, too. even when he got bored and desperate and threw in the Punisher and Iron Fist as guest-stars. Issue 12 had an Invaders reunion. Cool.

But really the stuff of his I love the most is from before he started writing. Some classic Marvel Team-Ups with Claremont - I particularly remember Captain Britain and Spidey in Murderworld. Iron Fist. His short run on Captain America with Roger Stern.

Dud - I never really felt Byrne fitted at DC. Ever. Alright, OMAC is DC, but its not DCU. His Superman stuff just never felt right to me. Ditto Legends.

Alpha Flight was him on autopilot. She-Hulk was him wanking (but could be entertaining). WCA was him slumming.

the later Legend stuff - Babe and Danger Unlimited - are awful..

I was very fond of the big stack of his reborn superhero comics I borrowed off a friend once. And obviously, the Byrne-Claremont run on the X-Men is one of the pinnacles of comic history.

Also re-read some old Alpha Flights. Nostalgia talking I know but these were much better, I like how AF hardly ever work together as an actual superteam and when they do it tends to go horribly wrong. Good characters, solid plotting and art - unlike Dave I think the more wacko stuff (Pink Pearl, Gilded Lily etc.) works fine and don't get the feeling that Byrne was getting too bored, those issues add to the general relaxed feel of the book, though once he'd worked through the various arcs he'd set up I don't think he (or the characters) had anywhere to go.

Given that his particular 'interests' haven't changed much, the big difference between old JB and new JB as writers is the quality of the subplots and subplotting. In Alpha Flight, fresh from the X-Men run, he had the juggling subplots stuff down to a T, and all the subplots were intriguing - you could second-guess a few but not all, they made sense, etc. In his more recent stuff there seem to be fewer subplots and none of them are interesting or even effectively soapy. This for me is why the stuff of his I've read from the last 10 years or so feels so exhausted.

I liked his work on X-Men, and bringing back Ma and Pa Kent was probably his best touch on Superman, but haven't been impressed with anything he's done for the past ten years or so. And the Sandman/Osbourne thing was just stupid…

Right?

maybe its that he never got over not being the biggest, best-payed artist in the industry anymore…he's incredibly hostile towards most folks who got into the biz after…that said, he's sometimes perceptive and does seem to be very intelligent.