John Byrne: Search & Destroy

He's turned into Marshall Rogers!

Well I haven't seen a John Byrne comic in years, but I can't believe he's suddenly putting in all that Marshall Rogers-style architectural detail - he hasn't been arsed abt drawing a decent background since the FF, at least!

I sort've like the fact that he does it all - writes, draws, inks, letters - but his absurdly overinflated his ego, his homophobia, his belief that he can always 'improve' on the work of Jack Kirby, his moronic defense of 'the company' against the creator, his lack of 'hinterland' (ie for him comics = superheroes) all mark him out as a big fat DUD.

John Byrne was a creative force at one point in his career. Now he's a debacle. MArvel and DC should stop giving him work and make him self-publish.

Yeah, he seems a curiously DISPLACED figure - too old-fashioned and clunky to appeal to a post-Image readership, too reliant on genre, formula, cliche and other people's characters to ever really create anything 'personally expressive'.

Former Sunderland/Ireland Striker=classic.

Dan, I think / hope Marvel learned their lesson after the _Spider-Man: Year One_ nonsense AND _X-Men: The Hidden Years_ (both of which I never read / avoided like the plague).

_Next Men_ was as close as he ever got / is going to get to 'personal expression'. (Next Men = Byrne Draws Boobies! But it was pretty interesting, too.) (Pretentious old skool quotes on splash page notwithstanding.) It's too bad the wanderlust struck - he stopped working on that to pump out more "homages" to Marvel iconography. (Such work should be left in the hands of Mr. Alan Moore, who has the good sense to rip off DC / DC-owned iconography!)

Please note that I am one of 16 people to have read John L. Byrne's _Fearbook_ IN ADDITION TO his other novel (the one about evangelists and ... stuff). _Whipping Boy_! And, yeah, that was me buying Chris Claremont's _First Flight_. The jig is up.

I'd go out on a limb and say Liefeld's _Doom's IV_ was better than _Danger: Unlimited_, but my cojones aren't that big.

Oh! And by the Marshall Rogers comment, I meant that he went from ultra-hot shit to a lost cause. Though Byrne's decline has been more precipitous - Marshall Rogers just disappeared (between his "hotness" on _Detective Comics_ and his functional blandness on _Silver Surfer_).

back up! back up! "crappy British Transformers comics"?!? WTF? No such thing. The storylines were really tight and the art excellent once Transformers moved away from being just another toy tie in. "Target 2006" is excellent.

I liked his run on West Coast Avengers.

I was just saying on the FF thread that he was astoundingly uneven, and made some terrible mistakes. I think he was a good artist in hisday, like on the X-Men, but got very lazy, and he was never a good writer, an artist with some ideas and no critical or editorial judgement. His time is long passed, but his best work will stay in print for a very long time, which is something I guess. I think he's a talent on the level of contemporaries like Rogers or George Perez, nowhere near, say, Ditko or Miller.