Modern Masters Vol. 07: John Byrne

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

S E V E N :

JOHN BYRNE

By Jon B. Cooke and Eric Nolen-Weathington

Modern Masters Volume Seven:

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME SEVEN:

JOHN BYRNE edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Jon B. Cooke designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by John Byrne front cover color by Tom Ziuko interviews conducted by Jon B. Cooke with additional questions by Eric Nolen-Weathington transcribed by Steven Tice with additional transcribing by Eric Nolen-Weathington proofreading by Fred Perry all photos in this book ©2012 Jon B. Cooke

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TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com Third Printing • September 2012 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-893905-56-6 Trademarks & Copyrights

All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2012 John Byrne unless otherwise noted.

Babe, Death’s Head Knight, Gay Guy, Next Men ™ and ©2012 John Byrne.

Batman, Big Barda, Bizarro, Black Canary, Blackhawks, Captain Marvel, Changeling, Clark Kent, Cosmic Boy, Cyborg, Darkseid, Deadman, The Demon, Desaad, Doom Patrol, Dr. Fate, Elastigirl, Firestorm, Flash, Forever People, Freaks, General Zod, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Justice Society of America, Legion of Super-Heroes, Lex Luthor, Lois Lane, Martian Manhunter, Metallo, Metal Men, Orion, New Gods, Phantom Stranger, Rampage, Silver Banshee, Sleez, Solomon Grundy, Supergirl, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2012 DC Comics.

Alpha Flight, Ant-Man, Avengers, Batroc, Bucky, Captain America, Colossus, Cyclops, Doc Sampson, Dragon Man, Dr. Doom, Fantastic Four, Galactus, The Gardener, Gladiator, Hercules, Hulk, Iron Fist, Iron Man, Jean Grey, The Lizard, Magneto, Man-Thing, Mephisto, Mr. Hyde, Namor, Namorita, Odin, Phoenix, Power Man, Red Skull, Ringmaster, Sauron, She-Hulk, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Stilt-man, Storm, Super Skrull, Terrax, The Thing, Thor, Warlock, The Wasp, Wendigo, Wolverine, Wonder Man, X-Men ™ and ©2012 Marvel Characters, Inc. Funky Winkerbean ©2012 Batom, Inc. Red Sonja ™ and ©2012 Red Sonja Corporation.

Muppets ™ and ©2012 Henson.

ROM, Spaceknight ™ and ©2012 Hasbro, Inc. Rog-2000, Superboy ™ and ©2012 respective owners.

Editorial package ©2012 Eric Nolen-Weathington, Jon B. Cooke, and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To Donna and Iain and little Caper Glee.

Acknowledgements John Byrne, for his time and his patience.

Jim Warden, for assistance above and beyond the call of duty. Please look Jim up if you’re interested in obtaining John Byrne artwork.

Ferran Delgado, for his considerable help and for putting me in touch with...

Raimon Fonseca, for filling in the holes providing some nice rareties.

Terry Austin, for his continued help and support.

Tom Ziuko, for digging out some grade-A material.

Special Thanks Tom Batiuk, Andrew D. Cooke, Tony Frye, Nathan Greno, David Hamilton, Scott Green Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Seven:

JOHN BYRNE Table of Contents Introduction by Walter Simonson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: Drawing with a Ballpoint Pen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: The Fantastic Climb up the Marvel Ladder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Part Three: Up, up, and Away from Marvel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Part Four: A Legend is Made . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Part Five: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Part Six: John Byrne Takes On... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

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Batman, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Captain America ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

This image is a commission piece, and was intended to be the cover of an issue of Comic Book Artist magazine featuring John Byrne. Unfortunately, that issue never came to fruition. But the good news is that the wonderful interview CBA’s editor, Jon B. Cooke, conducted with John—in John’s home, no less—for that issue has not been condemned to the Phantom Zone after all, and I am very happy to present it here, albeit in an updated form.

Introduction There was an apparent ease of drawing about his work; lithe and supple figures seemed to flow effortlessly from his pencil. And the characters he drew were attractive and expressive, lovingly costumed and sparkling with animation. John’s comics were instantly identifiable by their consistency of vision. And there was a professionalism that enabled him to produce the work steadily, issue after issue.

And finally, John was a gifted visual storyteller. I still think that the Dark Phoenix Saga in the X-Men was the best run of super-hero comics in the 1970s. And it demonstrated a particular talent of John’s that has served his work well ever since. In a comic with a seemingly endless parade of characters traveling across the page, sporting a variety of costumes, morphing their identities, and switching from good to evil and back again, the reader was never lost. John made it look so easy that I think his ability to keep the storytelling so clear and so dramatic at the same time isn’t always fully appreciated.

I’ve Been Byrned, and with both Feet on the Ground… (apologies to Neil Young) I once remarked that I thought John Byrne was the first modern super-star of mainstream American comics.

There were, of course, many great talents in comics that preceded John but I think he was the first creator to rise to prominence as the market paradigm for comics was shifting. By the end of the 1970s, the direct market, catering specifically to the interests of comics fans, was driving more and more of the industry. The age of Mom and Pop store distribution and spinner racks was winding down. Comic shops were springing up around the country. Conventions were becoming more numerous and getting bigger. Comics aimed specifically at fans were being developed. The web and its early comics forums weren’t far behind. All these things helped focus and feed the appetite of the burgeoning fan audience.

Everything was up for discussion. Artists, writers, titles, the pros and cons of DC and Marvel, the decline (or improvement) of the overall quality in every comic—it was all grist for the mill.

And beginning with his work on the X-Men and then on myriad other titles from the Fantastic Four to Superman, John’s work was one of the primary focuses of those numerous discussions.

His creative endeavors have influenced countless artists, pros and fans alike. Now, in this retrospective collection, you will see not only a selection of work spanning his career, but a number of his rarely seen early sketches as well. They are the tracks in the sand, the telltales of his own origins.

To this day, John remains an active and much discussed professional with an enormous body of work.

And it’s a body of work that practically every comics fan has an opinion about.

Don’t believe me? Just Google “John Byrne”!

John brought a variety of abilities to the table.

Byrne has one of the best grasps of the geometry of three dimensions among comics artists. His rendering of the volume his characters occupy, his fluency at grounding his characters inside his scenes, his placement of multiple figures in the same space, his ability to create a convincing world within which his characters moved— all these things revealed a remarkable gift for the imaginative rendering of three-dimensional space onto a twodimensional sheet of paper. And he did it all fluently from multiple points of view.

Skoal, pal.

Walter Simonson April 15, 2006

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Part 1:

Drawing with a Ballpoint Pen JOHN: Quite a bit, yeah. In fact, I said to Mike Carlin a while back—this was when I was doing the John Cleese Superman project [True Brit], and so I’m calling up all my old memories of England, because the gag is what if Superman landed in England rather than the United States. And I said, “Y’know, people are going to discover my secret, here.” Because I have this reputation for being able to draw the ’30s and the ’40s so very well, and all I’m really doing when I do that is drawing the England that I remember. So now I’m drawing the England that I remember as England. So people will know my dark secret.

JON B. COOKE: Where are you originally from?

JOHN BYRNE: Well, I was born in England and I lived there for about the first eight years of my life. Then we immigrated to Canada, and I lived there until I was about 30. Then I came to the States.

JBC: Do you have any brothers and sisters?

JOHN: No, only child.

JBC: What did your parents do?

JOHN: My father is a town planner—zoning, architecture, that kind of stuff—and my mother is a housewife.

JBC: What year were you born?

JOHN: 1950.

JBC: What got you guys to make the move to Canada?

JBC: So England was still in a post-war kind of semiDepression...?

JOHN: Land of opportunity. They wanted me to have a better chance than they’d had, and they thought they could find it there.

JOHN: Pretty much. I have false memories of World War II because all my relatives talked about it so much when I was a kid. It took me a long time to realize that I had not actually lived through World War II, because I have such.... A few years ago, when people started talking about false memory syndrome, I went, “I know what that is! I know exactly what that is!”

JBC: Was it pretty much a middle-class life style?

JOHN: Mostly, yeah. Maybe nudging toward upper-middle-class. But my father was, by the end of his career, fairly highly-placed in the city government in Calgary. He was the City Clerk, which is a lowlysounding term for what is the highest non-elective office. So he was powerful. I didn’t realize how powerful when I was a kid, but... we lived all right.

JBC: Did Birmingham suffer much damage?

JOHN: Quite a bit, yeah. The street that I lived on in West Bromwich until I was about eight, I would go down the street around the corner to walk to school, and two houses in, there was a vacant lot which was a bomb site. It was a house that had been completely taken out by a German bomb in World War II. It was just around the corner from where my grandparents lived.

JBC: Where you were born?

JOHN: I was only born where I was born. We lived in a town called West Bromwich, which is just north of Birmingham.

JBC: Is that pretty much in the center of the country?

JBC: So the Blitz really went that far in—?

JOHN: Yeah, the Midlands, in fact, it’s called.

JOHN: Yeah. And in fact, when I was about nine years old, we had a funny experience. Late at night a truck drove by and backfired, and I heard this tremendous

JBC: Do you have much memory of it?

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thump in the next room, my parents’ room.

My mother had actually, in her sleep, jumped out of bed and rolled under the bed.

JBC: Something she had done before?

JOHN: Yeah, an instinctive movement, and now we’re talking close to ten, 15 years after the war.

JBC: Was there any rationing in the ’50s?

JOHN: A little bit. I didn’t feel it much.

JBC: Socialism was kind of coming— JOHN: Working its way in, and we were sort of aware of changes. That was probably one of the key reasons that we moved to Canada.

JBC: Was your father a Tory?

JOHN: Weeelll... yeah, I suppose so. He’s sort of apolitical, but he would lean conservative.

JBC: Obviously the climate of Calgary must have been worlds different.

JOHN: Well, yeah. Calgary’s better than Edmonton, which is where we first landed.

I mean, Edmonton is that Canadian winter that people think about, where it starts in September and ends in May. [laughs] And the skies are gray the whole time. And then we moved to Calgary when I was 16.

Calgary is in the foothills of the Rockies, and it gets these warm winds that are called Chinooks, and they come down over the Rockies and the temperature will literally go from 40º below to 40º above overnight. And that will last for a week or so, just like spring, and then the winter comes back. I was there from age 16 to 30.

the same costumes—costumes being the key word—the same architecture. It’s a very different urban environment from what Edmonton was, because Edmonton is much further north, like 120 miles north.

You’re starting to get into the cold parts.

Calgary, yeah, is much more open. They think they’re cowboy.

They’re not, but they think they are. [laughs] JBC: How did you come across the Pond? Did you fly?

JOHN: No. We took the big boat. In fact, we came over, we went back, we came over again.

JBC: Why? JOHN: My mother decided she didn’t like it, possibly because when we came over the first time she had appendicitis and Dad couldn’t find work and I had a bone disease and she sort of said, “I don’t like this!” So we went back. And then we decided that, all things considered, Canada was better. So we returned.

JBC: Isn’t Calgary out west?

JOHN: That’s the good image for it.

They think they’re cowboys.

JBC: But they’re certainly more “American” than the rest of Canada.

JOHN: Yes. Very much. In fact, the first time I visited Dallas, I thought, “Wow! This is Calgary, but bigger!” And then I thought, “Well, of course. It’s the other end of the pipeline, isn’t it?” It’s the same people, it’s

JBC: How long was the return to England?

JOHN: Two years in Canada, two years back in England, and then we returned to Canada when I was eight. So I usually skip the part where we went back and forth and just say I’ve been in Canada since I was eight.

JBC: What was the experience of being on a boat ride for that long? What was, it, five days?

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Previous Page: Panel detail in pencil form from True Brit.

Above: John’s old memories of England provided nice details in these pencils for page 47 of True Brit.

Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Below: Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Steve Ditko, Ross Andru, Frank Bellamy, and Neal Adams are but a few of the legendary comic-book artists whose stellar work crowds the walls of the Byrne sanctuary (not to mention spectacular art by some spectacular comic-strip masters as well, including Charles Schulz and Roy Crane).

The proud owner poses before a mere portion of the breath-taking collection at his former home in Fairfield, Conn.

Next Page: Preliminary sketches and ideas for the Generations miniseries. As with John’s love for comics, it started with Superman and Batman.

Batman, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

JOHN: Five days. It was wonderful. It’s the only way to travel. I was a tiny little kid; it’s a hell of an adventure. I was four or five the first trip and then seven, six-and-a-half or whatever it works out to, and eight. We had to cross without my father, and my mother was hideously seasick the whole trip. I had free run of the boat, and it was wonderful.

All the stewards and whatnot took care of me, and I was eating in the dining room all by myself, because everybody was seasick. It was like an Atlantic crossing worse than anybody—this was on the Queen Elizabeth.

JBC: It was rocky water?

JOHN: Oh, yeah, boy. And I have one vivid memory, which is that I was going to the dining room. I’m four years old and I’m out there wandering around this boat by myself, pretty much, because everybody’s back in their cabins throwing up. I zigged when I should have zagged, and I stepped through these doors and I was out on the deck. I can still see it: the sky was gunmetal, and the sea was actually crashing over the

side of the boat. And I don’t know how my little four-year-old brain worked that fast, but I just stepped straight back in the direction I’d come. I didn’t even turn around, and the door was, of course, closed. But I can still see that.

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We crossed on the Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mary, and a little boat that nobody’s ever heard of called the RMS Ivernia—that was the three trips. It was five days each way.

And then, of course, a long way by train getting out to western Canada. Although that’s one of my favorite little memories, too, is that when I was four years old, we came in through New York. And I have a vivid memory of Grand Central Station from when I was four years old. And I’ve often said Grand Central Station is the only thing that hasn’t gotten smaller. I stand in the middle of Grand Central Station sometimes and I go, “It’s still big! It’s every bit as big as it was when I was four years old!”

JBC: Did you get to know other people?

Were you social at all as a kid?

JOHN: No, I was very much a loner as a child. It was sort of forced upon me. My parents had major wanderlust, so we moved all the time. I don’t think the police were actually chasing us, but we moved all the time, with the result that I went to nine schools in eleven years.

And I did not live in the same house two Christmases in a row until I was 16. So I pretty much had to learn to live inside my head, which I did. I had these comic books which helped me a lot. They were my friends. Which is pretty sick and twisted, I suppose, but....

I’m an only child and did not really have a lot of friends growing up, because I was always the new kid in school.

We always moved in November, for some reason, too. I would start at the beginning of the year in one school, but then two months later I would move. So I was very much introverted, and very, very, very shy. It probably would have helped if I’d had—I’ve often said that if I’d had a brother or a sister, I’d probably only have half the neuroses. Although perhaps I’d have twice as

many, who knows? But, yeah... the number of people I’ve called “real friends” over my life I can still count on one hand.

JBC: Were you unhappy?

JOHN: I don’t think I was smart enough to be unhappy. I know I hated it that we moved, because I was always trying to catch up.

Somehow, they always managed to be ahead of wherever I was in school. I always did very badly in school; I always had bad grades. Years later, my mother read an article that said, gosh, you know, if you move a lot, your children’s grades will suffer. And I just kind of sat there going, “Really? No! Honest?”

quite read yet, but I did recognize the logo. So I thought, “Well, this must be like the TV show.” So I got my mother to buy it, and I could sort of work my way through the stories. And that introduced me to Superman. Then several months later I saw what Dave Gibbons has since identified for me, it must have been this Australian reprint called Supercomics, which had a Superboy story. That was why I got it, because I figured Superboy must be connected to Superman somehow. It had a Johnny Quick story and it had a Batman story, and that was the first Batman story I ever read. Superman introduced me to comics, and Batman made me an addict.

JBC: Did you ever tell your parents how you felt?

JOHN: Oh, yeah. “Do we have to move? I don’t wanna.” They were always taking me away from whichever girl I decided I was in love with, too. [laughs] I think that was why they did it! So I kind of got used to living in my own head and then living through the comics and making my own comics and all that kind of stuff, which I guess most of us emotional cripples do.

JBC: Comics were your friends. When’s your first memory of seeing—?

JBC: And you were reading an Australian reprint?

JOHN: I was reading an Australian reprint. It was 1956 then, so the story was at least four years old. I now have a copy of the original American publication, which I got from Dick Sprang, from his personal collection. I have his copy of that comic, but I still don’t have a copy of Supercomics. [laughs]

JOHN: In 1956. I worked this out with my parents a while ago. I was introduced via the Adventures of Superman TV series with George Reeves, which turned up on the BBC when we were still in England. And then walking down the high street one day in West Bromwich I saw one of these black-and-white hardcover annuals that they used to do in England, and it said “Superman.” I couldn’t

JBC: So Dick drew the first story?

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of artistic field. Dad always imagined me being a hugely successful commercial artist, and it took him a while to wrap his brain around this cartooning thing that I was doing. In fact, he always referred to me as his son the commercial artist until I did Spider-Man. And then he sort of understood. “Oh, yes, my son does SpiderMan!” That was back in the Marvel Team-Up days, of course. So, yeah, they basically just wanted me to take advantage of what the Canadian/North American society had to offer, which obviously I did.

JOHN: Dick drew the first story that I read. It was “The Map of Mystery.” Years ago he did a re-creation of the splash page for me.

JBC: Charles Paris inks?

JOHN: Yeah, probably. And according to one or two people that I’ve asked—there were no credits, but the general consensus is that it was written

by Edmond Hamilton.

Which is also very special to me because he wrote a novel called City at World’’s End, which is my favorite science-fiction novel of all time. So to have him actually turn out to have written the first Batman story I ever read is also kind of cool.

JBC: Did you buy the British weeklies?

JOHN: Not when I was there, although my maternal grandmother used to pick up... what was it called?

JBC: Did you spend a lot of time reading?

JOHN: Yeah, I read a lot of books when I was a kid. I think that was the only reason my parents, as little as they did, tolerated my comics, was because I was also reading just about everything else. Sherlock Holmes, all that stuff.

JBC: Did you just seek them out on your own? Did you go to libraries?

JOHN: Pretty much. I got a library card when I was eight years old and that was the key to the kingdom, basically. And at least in one of the houses we lived in, the library was literally across the street. That was probably the best year of my life. I could just vanish to the library and— JBC: They knew where to find you.

JOHN: They knew where to find me. I would read a book a week.

JBC: Were your parents readers?

JOHN: Oh, yes. My father is a big reader. He’s the one who hooked me on Shakespeare. I grew up with Shakespeare.

JBC: Did they have any aspirations for you?

JOHN: Well, I was always artistic, so they knew I would go into some kind 10

The one that had “Andy Pandy” in it.... I can’t remember what that one was called.

And then when I was about eight years old, after we’d moved, an “aunt,” a friend of my mother’s mother, started sending me Eagle. And I don’t know how she managed to time it, but she started sending it to me exactly at the beginning of the “Dan Dare” story “Terra Nova,” and that of course hooked me on a whole different kind of comic book storytelling.

JBC: Was Frank Bellamy doing it at that time?

JOHN: Bellamy came in just after I started it. I sort of picked up the last of Frank Hampson with the beginning of “Terra Nova,” and then Bellamy came in, and Bellamy was subsequently replaced by Bruce Cornwell and Don Harley, who were from the Hampson studio.

JBC: Had “Heros the Spartan” started?

JOHN: “Heros” started, I think, in the early ’60s. Bellamy had done a couple years of “Dan Dare”—or it seemed like a couple years—and then he started doing “Heros.”

And “Heros” was done as the centerspread.

“Dan Dare” was the front and back cover of Eagle. The covers and the centerspread were in color, everything else was blackand-white. And it wasn’t stapled together, either; it was just like the Sunday funnies, except on really good paper.

Bellamy only did every other “Heros” story. The stories would run for three months or something, and then another artist did a story. And I always assumed it probably took Bellamy that long to do one story. He was doing effectively two pages a week of that full-color.... I always point to his stuff and say, “Look at this. Here’s a battle scene with 500 characters in it, and each one has a face and an expression and individual body language.”

Damaged me deeply, that stuff; it was saying “that’s what you have to aspire to.”

JBC: Did you read non-fiction, or strictly fiction?

JOHN: As a child I always read fiction.

JBC: Because I wondered where the interest came from with the Captain America stuff and the World War II stuff.

JOHN: Well, I did read a couple of Paul Brickhill’s quasi-novels about World War II: Reach for the Sky, which is a biography of Doug Bader, the legless fighter pilot ace of World War II; and The Wooden Horse, which is about the prison escape; and one other.

But mostly it was fiction.

JBC: So your aunt would send you these Eagles in bunches?

JOHN: In bunches. I would get this roll. It looked like a Christmas log, and it would have all these Eagles rolled up in the middle and then brown paper rolled around the outside, string to hold it together. It would be three or four months’ worth, and I would devour them all. Then I would cut out the “Dan Dare”s and staple them together, take out the “Heros” from that story, staple those together, and make my own books out of them. I’ve still got some of those.

JBC: Were comics widely distributed in Canada?

JOHN: This was one of the defining moments of my life. There was a big department store in downtown Edmonton called Eaton’s on a road called Jasper Avenue. And I can still remember walking through the front door and there was this huge department store spread out ahead of you. And to the right was their magazine section, because at that point stores hadn’t figured out that you put the magazines in the middle so that people have to walk through everything else to get to them and they might buy something 11

Previous Page: About the Spidey sketch Terry Austin says, “After a California convention around 1980 or so, John and I, Steve Leialoha, and Tom Orzechowski ended up in a pie shop where we each drew on our placemats. When we stood up to leave, we all grabbed someone else’s placemat. I ended up with John’s.” Also shown is page 31 of Marvel Team-Up #55—inks by Dave Hunt.

Above: Cover art from Captain America #249.

Adam Warlock, Captain America, Dragonman, The Gardener, Spider-Man ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JBC: Obviously, comics were very special to you.

else. So I walked straight in and turned right, and there were all the magazines and all the paperbacks. And there was a wall of comic books twice my height and twice my arms’ width. I’d never seen anything like it, of course. And that was where I bought my first actual Batman comic. It was Batman #127, with Batman fighting Thor on the cover.

“Fighting” in the most loose sense of the word. In those days, of course, it was like Thor making a threatening gesture in Batman’s vague direction.

And then down the road from that there was a big newsstand called Mike’s that had another wall of comics, and that was where I started really buying them. Of course, in those days it was what I refer to as “the thrill of the hunt”; the distribution was so terrible that you just couldn’t walk into any one store and get everything. My parents restricted what I was allowed to buy, anyway, but it was always three or four stores to find even just the Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Justice League, whatever, that I was buying at the time. And then somehow even harder once I shifted over to Marvels. You just couldn’t find Marvels.

JOHN: Oh, yeah. They were my whole life. Which my parents didn’t like very much. [laughs] My mother, I think, had been Werthamized. Somebody had gotten to her and told her that these things were bad and would turn me into a juvenile delinquent.

JBC: Did you just go for the super-hero stuff?

JOHN: Pretty much. I did buy Sgt. Fury when that started coming out.

JBC: But not Sgt. Rock?

JOHN: Not Sgt. Rock, no. I never used to see that, really. I don’t know if it was a deliberate thing, but the American war stuff you just didn’t see much.

I only ever saw a couple of issues of Sgt. Fury. So I think there was some kind of embargo, spoken or otherwise, on these rah-rah American war comics up in Canada.

JBC: Was it the characters that compelled you so much, or was it the stories...?

JOHN: Oh, all of the above.

Gosh. I loved the characters, primarily. And then when the Marvel stuff started to come along, the stories were so deep compared to the DC stuff of the time. My first issue of the Fantastic Four was #5, and on the second page, the Thing and the Torch have a fight. [laughs] And I just kind of sat there and went, “Wow! Superman and Batman never have fights! Holy cow!” So, yeah, it was the characters, it was the stories, it was just the whole milieu, I guess, the whole fantasy milieu was just so compelling.

JBC: Did you go back to England at all, intermittently...?

JOHN: We went back when I was 15 for a vacation.

JBC: Were you still collecting at the time?

JOHN: Yeah. I was probably just on the cusp of stopping. My parents were never thrilled with comics and they were always sort of agitating for me to stop. I finally stopped when I was somewhere around 15 or 16. Fantastic Four #32 was the last comic that I bought as a kid.

JBC: So it was Dick Sprang and Jack Kirby, pretty much, they were your guys?

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JOHN: Pretty much. Being eight years old or whatever the hell I was, I didn’t realize that Bob Kane wasn’t Bob Kane. I’ve always referred to “the Bob Kane effect” in my work. As a kid, I thought that Bob Kane had several different styles and he kept his best style for the annuals— because I didn’t know the annuals were reprints— and of course that was mostly Dick Sprang. To this day I cannot shake this notion that every job I do should have a slightly different visual identity, because “Bob Kane” used to have a slightly different visual identity. And then years later I found out that the best of the Bob Kanes was Dick Sprang. Although apparently Bob Kane said that Neal Adams was one of his ghosts, too, so.... [laughs] JBC: After Fantastic Four #32, was it pretty much adolescence that came in and...?

JOHN: Yeah. My parents, as I say, had been agitating to get me to stop. They didn’t think I should be reading comics. And I was slowly diminishing the number of comics I was reading. I couldn’t quite convince myself that I was too old for comics, and then Fantastic Four #32 had a big thing on the cover that said, “Can you guess the identity of the mystery villain?” And by page four, I had. So I thought, “Maybe I’m too old for this.” And I just went cold turkey. I just [popping noise] stopped reading comics. And I didn’t go back until... well, it seemed like a long time then, but it was only about four years.

JBC: Did you replace them with science fiction?

JOHN: I replaced them largely with science fiction. I stopped reading comics when we were still in Edmonton, so that would have been 1965. And we moved to Calgary in early 1966. And, of course, September of 1966 gave us Star Trek. This is going to sound so pathetic, but there are three things that have shaped my life: comic books, the Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek. Gosh.

I guess you could do worse than getting your moral center from comics, Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek. But, yeah, Star Trek

started.... I’ve always been smug about the fact that we only had two networks in Canada, and they would pick up shows and show them wherever they wanted to. Star Trek debuted on, I think, a Thursday or a Friday in the United States, but we got it on the previous Tuesday.

So I saw it two days earlier. Hah! I remember so vividly, that I had just turned 16, and I’m watching this show on our tiny, little black-and-white TV, and my parents were out working in the garden. I kept running out to them, “You gotta come see this! You gotta come see this show!”

JBC: Did you follow Lost in Space?

JOHN: No, no. Lost in Space had started when I was still in Edmonton, and I was totally in love with the first few episodes, when it was still sort of science fiction. Then it kind of turned into “The Dr. Smith Show.”

JBC: What got you back into comics?

JOHN: Well, that was the amazing thing.

I got back into being interested in comics through my time at the Alberta College of Art. And I started picking up a few things here and there.

And then one day I walked into a second-hand bookstore in Calgary, and some kid had just liquidated his entire collection.

And—I still think this is amazing—I was able to pick up Fantastic Four 13

Previous Page: This piece was done for the U.S. Postal Service as a promo for a series of DC Comics-themed stamps commemorating the 1950s. Check out the hair-dos of the audience members and the 3-D glasses. And, no, the Wally West Flash and Kyle Rayner Green Lantern weren’t around in the ’50s, but that’s licensing for you.

Below: The opening splash page to a Fantastic Four story John wrote and penciled back in 1973 in hopes of getting work from Marvel.

Flash, Green Lantern, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Fantastic Four ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

from #33 to whatever was current then. I think it was #132 or something like that. So I picked them all up and I took them home. And I also took Avengers and Spider-Man and a whole bunch of other stuff, all in one day. I sat down and in one weekend I read all of those Fantastic Fours. I do not recommend doing that to anyone. The world was drawn by Jack Kirby for the next three weeks. [Jon laughs] But that was where I just sort of went, “Galactus? Who the hell is Galactus? Aha!” All that stuff. Because you hit, roughly, #45 I guess it is—the first one with Gorgon—and it’s just like BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM! “Oh, okay!” It’s like Frank Miller said, Marvel did such amazing stuff in their first ten years that they were able to coast for the next 30.

JBC: It is quite an experience, though.... I came into Marvel late, being a DC kid. My older brother was a Marvel guy, but I did sit down and read entire runs. It was just....

JOHN: It just fries major parts of your brain. Especially if it’s Kirby. I’m glad I didn’t read all of Spider-Man in one sitting; I would have turned into an Ayn Rand character or something like that.

JBC: When did you start drawing?

JOHN: Oh, when did I start drawing? The oldest existing John Byrne original is on the wall over there from when I was two. It’s a little chalkboard that’s leaning up against the wall—the little choo-choo train. My grandmother kept that. My paternal grandfather used to hold me in his lap and hold my hand with a piece of chalk in it and draw on that little chalkboard. I’ve always said that’s what jump-started the gene. So I’ve been drawing, literally, as long as I can remember.

JBC: Was your grandfather’s background straight WASP? JOHN: Oh, yeah. Well, you know, Church of England. My father was a Buddhist, actually. He caught that when he was in Burma during the war.

JBC: Is he still alive?

JOHN: Oh, yeah. Both my parents are still alive.

JBC: Where do they live?

JOHN: In Calgary. Retired, now. Struggling—my mom has Alzheimer’s, unfortunately.

JBC: Do you see them often?

JOHN: Once a year or so. Either I go there or they come here.

JBC: Marvel Team-Up notwithstanding, are they proud of you now?

JOHN: Oh, yeah, they are now. It took a while!

JBC: The cover of Time magazine!

14

line or you had to throw away the whole drawing. So now I can pretty much sit down and go zip-zip-zip with a pencil, now that I’ve learned how to do it right.

Paper was expensive, but I used to go through those pads. I mean, she’d buy me four or five, and it was once a month. And I’d need another one by the time the next $1.49 day rolled around.

JBC: What were some of the comics that you did?

JOHN: The cover of Time magazine. Dad came around pretty fast after I got written up in the local paper a couple of times.

Yes, he’s very proud of me now. It just took awhile for him to wrap his brain around the fact that I wanted to do for a living things they’d been told were bad. Because we are talking it was the height of Wertham when they came over.

JBC: But you drew a lot?

JOHN: Oh, I was always drawing. I drew constantly. My mother used to go to this big department store called Woodward’s, and once a month they would have this $1.49 day, and she would buy me these pads of writing paper—big, inchthick pads of just regular typing paper. She’d buy me four or five of those for $1.49 each, and I would just draw in those and fill them.

I never learned how to do it as a kid, so I drew everything straight with a pen. Never did any layouts. I would always start in the upper left-hand corner and finish in the lower right-hand corner and just draw. So what that did for me, of course, is people talk about my speed, saying how fast I am. And I say the main reason for that is the speed of conceptualization is so fast. I don’t have to do a lot of fiddly little layouts and doodles to figure out the page, because I spent all those years as a kid drawing with a ballpoint pen, where every line had to be the right

JOHN: Oh, they were little superhero-y things. The one I most distinctly remember is that about a year before Metamorpho came out, I created a character called Matter Man who was chapter and verse Metamorpho. I had two experiences of that: Metamorpho, and when I was in about fifth grade, I created a Stone Age family that had Stone Age cars and Stone Age TVs, and like six months later The Flintstones came out.

And the combination of The Flinstones and Metamorpho sort of told me that I knew what I was doing. It was like, “Wow, these guys have the ideas that I did, so my ideas must have been pretty good! Cool!”

Previous Page: Pages 2 and 3 of John’s sample FF story.

Left: Everyone has to start somewhere. John’s very first drawing—not bad for a two-year-old!

Above: John makes the cover of Time magazine.

Below: Partially inked sketch of the Thing.

JBC: When you were a kid, did you want to be a comic book artist?

Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Fantastic Four ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Right: The opening page of “Death’s Head Knight,” a story John wrote and illustrated during his first year in college which was published in ACA Comix #1—making it John’s first published comics work.

Below: This sketch resembles the Avengers foe, Arkon, as much as anything else, but it does harken back to his sword-&-sorcery beginnings.

Next Page: Gay Guy was an on-going strip in his college newspaper, The Emery Weal, and marked the first appearance of Snowbird, who John later completely retooled into a superhero for Alpha Flight.

Death’s Head Knight, Gay Guy ™ and ©2006 John Byrne.

JOHN: No. It didn’t occur to me. No credits, of course. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I fully conceptualized that these things did not spring fully-grown from Zeus’ head, that there were actually people who wrote and drew and whatnot. Even though I had made my own comics as a kid, I always thought I’d grow up and be a commercial artist. I figured I would probably do ads for cars and trucks, because that seemed like it would be fun.

We had to do a thing in first year art college, something that we liked. I did a comic book, and a guy who lived in Calgary saw it—the college printed 500 copies of it—and got in touch with me. He knew people who were in the business and said, “Is this something that you want to do?” And that was the exact moment that the penny dropped and I thought, “Yes! This is something that I want to do!”

JBC: You said you were going to be a commercial artist. Did you want to do that?

JOHN: I was an artist. I was too shy to be an actor—that was the other thing.

Of course, we’re all frustrated actors, cartoonists. And the cars and trucks, the commercial art, the advertising art as we used to call it then, that just seemed like it would probably be the most interesting and the most 16

viable way to make a living where I could apply my talent.

JBC: Just a quick aside, you know an awful lot of actors?

JOHN: I’ve had a bunch of friends who were actors. My ex was an actor. And they are all as blown away by what I do for a living as I am by what they do for a living.

“Wow, you do comics, that’s so cool!” And I go, “You’ve done Broadway? I would kill to do Broadway!”

JBC: It’s weird, they have a real appreciation for the art.

JOHN: Yeah. We’re distant cousins. It’s the same thing. And as I’ve often said, the great thing about comics is I write the scripts, I play all the parts, I build all the sets, and I shoot on location wherever I want to. If George Lucas wants to go to an alien planet, he has to go to Tunisia, but I just shoot on location from my drawing board.

JBC: You have some Giles up on the wall.

You said he was an influence on you?

JOHN: Yes, Giles is a tremendous influence on me, not so much in how he draws as in what he draws—the sensibilities of it.

JBC: Who was he?

JOHN: A British editorial cartoonist. He worked for the Daily Express. I’ve studied his work all my life. He started with the Daily Express in the ’40s, I guess. I was first exposed to his work through a collection

JOHN: They scare me.

that my paternal grandfather had when I was a wee lad.

And there I was just blown away by the art, because I couldn’t even read it at that point. And it’s this really... I hate to use an artsy-fartsy term, but a really painterly approach he uses. He uses a thick brush, he uses dry brush, he uses tones. And there’s a whimsy. There’s always something going on off in the corners in a Giles cartoon. You’d look over here and there’s somebody doing something, there’s something going on. And that has very much informed and shaped my approach. There is always stuff going on in the backgrounds in my stuff.

JBC: The loss of control?

JOHN: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I’m a total control freak. I don’t drink, either.

JBC: At all?

JOHN: At all. I’ve been drunk, like, twice in my life.

JBC: Bad experiences?

JOHN: No, just... the first time you get drunk is because you don’t know that you’re going to. I mean, everybody does that. [laughs] And the second time... I’m what I call a Russian drunk, a really gloomy drunk. So the second time I got drunk was when this gal in art college wanted me to get drunk because she thought I’d be so much fun, and I couldn’t convince her otherwise.

JBC: And the scene that he sets is very authentic.

JOHN: Mm-hmm, oh, yeah.

JBC: And you’ve got, obviously, these cartoony characters— JOHN: There’s a kind of a magic realism to it; it’s not real and yet it is. And of course it’s so very English.

JBC: [laughs] And then Ivan came out?

JBC: And these are all one-shot?

JOHN: And then Ivan came out. “What does it matter, we’re all gonna die anyway!” [Jon laughs] So I don’t do drugs and I don’t drink. I mean, I have a gin and tonic once a year kind of thing. I went out to dinner several years ago with some friends, and I said, “Oh, I think I’ll be a grown-up tonight.” And I ordered a gin and tonic instead of a Diet Coke. And the guy I was with, he and his wife, he was so thrilled, because he assumed that I was an alcoholic. He had this feeling that any adult who doesn’t drink must be an alcoholic, right? And I said, “No, I just don’t like it!” [laughs]

JOHN: Yeah, they were dailies. Not really political cartoons. They were political commentary from time to time, but he wasn’t the guy who did a caricature of Hitler with Hitler written on it. His stuff addressed more the everyday zeitgeist—ha, I’ve always wanted to use that word— of being English.

JBC: Working class?

JOHN: Working class. And upper class, he would go after the Queen as well. And the fact that I now have seven Giles originals hanging on my wall is just mindboggling to me.

JBC: It wasn’t around your house at all?

JOHN: No. My father, a little bit. A glass of wine, that kind of thing. My mother has a tremendous allergy to it.

If she even sniffs a cork, she’s under the table. So it just wasn’t there.

JBC: So you were attending art college in the late ’60s.

Were you a conservative kid?

JOHN: Yes. I’ve always said I stayed in my basement during the ’60s. And this is what none of my friends believe: I went to an art college for three years. I never did drugs. I have never done drugs in my entire life. And nobody will believe that I managed to go to an art college for three years and not do drugs. I said, “Nope. Everybody else did, I’ve seen it!” [laughs] That’s one of the reasons I didn’t do it, because I’ve seen it! But yes, I was pretty conservative. There’s a political party—or used to be— up in Canada called the Progressive Conservatives.

And I always liked the sound of that name. I liked what that imparted, that sort of “let us go forward carefully” notion. So that’s sort of how I’ve always thought of myself, as a progressive conservative.

JBC: Why didn’t you ever do drugs?

17

Right: Page 3 of “Death’s Head Knight.”

Below: Many a college student in 1970 dropped acid while reading the exploits of Silver Surfer and his battle with Mephisto as drawn by John Buscema. In 1982’s Silver Surfer #1, John provided his own take on the classic confrontation.

Inks by Tom Palmer.

Next Page: A Rog-2000 convention sketch.

Mephisto, Silver Surfer ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Rog-2000 ™ and ©2006 respective owner.

JBC: Did you have wild friends in college?

JOHN: Oh, sure. I mean, all of my friends were potheads. In fact, I think one of the reasons that I’ve probably never even experimented with it was that a very good friend of mine from high school pretty much destroyed himself on drugs—just fried his whole brain.

JBC: On LSD and...?

JOHN: Yeah, everything. Any cocktail

you could put together. And he ended up.... He was a very bright guy. We actually looked a lot alike. He wore very thick glasses. We used to trade glasses and sit at each other’s desks in order to confuse the teacher. [Jon laughs] And the last time I saw him he was working as a night watchman.

This was a really bright guy, a writer, and he just cooked himself. “Y’know, I don’t think I’ll do that.” Of course, I’m an obsessive-compulsive kind of character, too, so I would probably get hooked on it really bad if I did, so I have to watch myself.

JBC: What was the comic that you did in art school?

JOHN: It was a sword-and-sorcery thing, which is interesting, because I’m not much of a fan of sword-and-sorcery. It was called “The Death’s Head Knight.” It was about 20 pages, and was done very much in the mode of “Heros the Spartan,” so each page is a double-page spread. It was wide pages with maybe 16, 17 panels per page. All this black-and-white, intensely-lined stuff. And the thing that’s fascinating about that when I look at it now is that I had not yet really locked into any of my major influences. It’s sort of pure John Byrne, with no Neal Adams, no Jack Kirby, no John Buscema.

There’s a lot of Frank Bellamy in the thinking, but not in the execution. So there’s that little noodley, detailed stuff that you and I talked about that he used to do. But it’s quite fascinating for me to look back at that and go, “God, what if I’d never discovered Neal Adams? What if I’d never discovered John Buscema? Is this what my stuff would still look like? Good lord!”

18

Part 2:

The Fantastic Climb up the Marvel Ladder showed it to various fanzines and they started running it.

And out of that, Nick Cuti at Charlton saw it, saw “Rog 2000,” and asked me if I would like to do “Rog 2000” as a back-up in E-Man. And that was really my first ongoing series. My first sale, my first professional sale—not counting the Monster Times—was to Marvel, but the first stuff that was published on a regular basis was with Charlton.

JBC: What happened once you said, “Okay, I’m going to be a comic artist now”?

JOHN: It took me about three years to become an overnight success. I was pounding the pavement. I actually got a job at an outdoor advertising company in Calgary called Hook Signs as their art department, basically. I was designing all these billboards. And I cringe every time I say “billboard,” because that’s not what they’re called in the business, but that’s what civilians call them.

JBC: You did go down to New York and show your work, right?

JBC: What do they call them?

JOHN: Oh, yeah. I visited all the offices. In ’71 my parents bought me a trip to New York for my 21st birthday. I went to Marvel and I went to DC and I went to Warren. And they all said, “Go away. Come back when you’re good.”

JOHN: They’re called “superboards.” [Jon laughs] That’s right.

Everything is one step down.

A show card is a poster and a poster is a billboard and a billboard is a superboard, and all that was drilled into me.

So every time I say that I used to design billboards, I go [whispers] “No, I didn’t!” Twitch, twitch! And I worked there for about a year.

JBC: Were you good?

JOHN: No. [laughs] I thought I was! [laughs] When I look at people’s work now, when people at conventions show me their work and whatnot, I realized that there are two ways of being bad. There is the “A” way and the “B” way, as I call them.

And I was bad in the “A” way. And everybody I know, Jerry Ordway, George Pérez... I’ve never seen Walt’s stuff from that early, but I bet he was bad in the “A” way.

JBC: Did you do calligraphy?

JOHN: No, I didn’t do that, that was the other department, but I would indicate it. And then I started to get stuff through the fanzines, CPL and all that stuff that Roger Stern and Bob Layton were doing back then.

JBC: How did you hook into that?

JBC: Which is...?

JOHN: This was again this guy in Calgary, John Mansfield, who was Canadian Army. He was able to travel all over the world and he was a big comic fan. And he was the one who introduced my stuff to various people and

JOHN: I can’t really describe it, unfortunately.

JBC: It’s got something, you mean?

19

Below: A 1975 Iron Fist convention sketch.

Next Page Top: A humorous look back at Rog-2000’s family tree.

Next Page Bottom: At one time John thought penciling Iron Man might be the most he could aspire for, and in 1979 he finally made it there— although, two years after becoming a success on X-Men. Page 2 of Iron Man #118. Inks by Bob Layton.

Iron Fist, Iron Man ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Rog-2000 ™ and ©2006 respective owner.

JOHN: You can tell that there’s something there. And then the people who are bad in the “B” way, there’s a softness to it.

It’s like they don’t have bones in their figures and they all sort of look inflated and there’s a weird mushiness to it. And I don’t know anybody who was bad in the “B” way who ever got to be good enough to become a professional.

stand, they don’t get it. I mean, that’s the simplest way to express it. They just don’t get it. And unfortunately I’ve said this in a couple of interviews, so now people will show me their stuff and they’ll say, “Am I bad in the ‘A’ way or the ‘B’ way?” And I go, “Oh, geez, the ‘A’ way, you’re bad in the ‘A’ way. No, you’re bad in the ‘Q’ way, man.

You’ve made up your own....” Geez.

JBC: There’s a foundation in the drawing?

JBC: Did it deter you at all that they said to come back?

JOHN: Something. There’s some understanding, some basic thing that’s missing.

One of the funny things I’ve noticed is that in the “B” way they always seem to have strangely inflated feet, these big puffy feet.

And it always looks like they’re wearing bell-bottoms. It’s very weird. But I remember some very early Jerry Ordway stuff that he showed me one time and I went, “Yeah, this is bad like I used to be bad.” And I look at my old stuff now and I say, “Yeah, I can see that this is bad in this particular way. I understand the structure, I’m just not executing it yet.” And the people who are bad in the other way, they just don’t under-

20

JOHN: No. Well, I did go back to Calgary and get a job at Hook Signs—that was sort of, “Oh, this’ll just be my hobby.”

JBC: But you were going to go back?

JOHN: Well, it was.... There’s a psychology book I have on the shelf, the title of which is If I’m So Successful, Why Do I Feel Like a Fake? And I bought it simply for that title, because that’s sort of my mantra. Because everything that happened at the early part of my career just seemed to happen by dumb luck. The right people saw the right thing at the right time. Like, Nick Cuti saw “Rog 2000” at just the moment Steve Ditko said, “I don’t want to do the back-up in E-Man anymore.” So Nick said, “Do you want to do this?” And then Chris Claremont saw some of my stuff at just the moment that Pat Broderick’s cat had thrown up on the latest issue of Iron Fist or something, and persuaded John Verpoorten to call me.

“See if this guy wants to do....”

It was all these dominoes falling over, which I guess kind of scared me about my career sometimes, because I feel like I’ve had no direct control over anything that’s ever happened in my career.

Like, where the industry is now, I really feel like I have to grab the tiller and do something about my life and my job. But if I do that, I’ll hit the rocks, because I’ve never been able to control the stuff that happens—it just happens. And that’s really what happened at the beginning, just a series of very fortuitous dominoes toppling.

JBC: What Nick was doing was just fun; there was a lot of enthusiasm that was going on. A lot of it was really trashy, but there was just an enthusiasm to it that was just fun. So I think my brother and I saw you right at the start. We still have back issues of Wheelie and Chopper Bunch, and we didn’t buy any of the Hanna-Barbera stuff.

JOHN: Well, that was my first whole book. And I thought, “Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch?” I'd never even seen the show; it wasn’t running in Canada. And I just said, “Okay, if this is going to be it, then I’m going to be the Carl Barks of Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch.” And I put all my energy into that first issue. Then Hanna-Barbera saw it and they said, “This is too scary. Tell him to dumb it down.” So I dumbed it down for the second issue and it just sucked the life right out of me, which is why I only did two issues of the thing. It was so simple, the stuff that I had to do to meet what Hanna-Barbera wanted, that I felt—this is going to sound weird—but I felt wrong taking the money. It was 50 bucks a page for pencils, inks, and lettering, right? But I just felt wrong taking—and that’s what I said to George Wildman when I called him. I said, “Well, I can’t do this.” And he said, “Why?” And I said, “I just feel bad taking the money. Give me something real to do.”

JBC: And that’s when Doomsday came?

JOHN: Doomsday, and later Space: 1999.

JBC: Did you feel this was a project that fit in with your sensiblities?

JOHN: I really liked Doomsday +1. My expectations of where I was going to end up in funnybooks was much lower than where I actually ended up. I used to think that if I was really lucky I would end up as the #1 guy of the second tier. And the way I saw that in my mind was I’d be penciling Iron Man. Somehow I figured that was as high as I would ever get—I would be penciling Iron Man. And in fact when Howard Mackie got me to write a few issues of Iron Man a few years ago, I said, “Well, I finally made it!” It was one of those weird things where, “That’s as high as I’m ever gonna get. So over here at Charlton, they’re letting me do all kinds of stuff.

Wow, that’s really cool! And they’re not really watching me all that closely.” And Joe Gill, who was the writer on Doomsday, I asked him if I could rewrite a couple of little things along the way, because I was lettering it as well.

And he said, “Oh, rewrite whatever you like.” Okay! So from that point on I was rewriting the whole thing. I mean, I wrote most of those issues after the second one.

JBC: Yeah, I was very surprised to realize re-reading them later on, it felt like all you.

JOHN: Yeah, well, it pretty much was after the first issue. And Joe sort of gave me permission. I would take the framework of his story and just try to turn it into a Marvel book, basically.

21

JBC: You’ve said that Kirby and Neal Adams were a big influence on you. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I looked at the stuff and I thought it was fresh and it was.... I saw a little Neal in the ship or the way you would do a machine or something like that, but there was something that was... pleasant about your line. It’s slightly curved.

JOHN: Well, soft, unfortunately. But I think the thing about my stuff, really, is that all I see is influences, but there are so many influences that it’s very hard to just say “Well, this guy’s doing Neal” or “This guy’s doing Jack.”

Every once in a while when I’m drawing I’ll go, “Oh, a Ditko foot.” It’s just there are so many influences.

JBC: Don’t you see a quintessential Byrne?

JOHN: Well, it’s funny, I see it more in the people who are doing me. Like, there’s a guy named Vic Bridges who’s a Byrne clone, and when I look at his stuff I go, “Oh, yeah, that’s what I do. I don’t know what it is, but, yeah, that’s what I do.” And somebody said Dale Keown was a John Byrne clone. And I looked at his work—I think it was on the Hulk—I thought, well, if he’s a Byrne clone, then he’s my Paul Gulacy. Because I always said Paul Gulacy was doing Steranko better than Steranko did. And it was like, Dale Keown, if he’s doing me, he’s doing it a lot better than I was. I see what it is I’m doing, but only when I see it in other people who are doing me.

How complicated is that?

Above: In ROM #74, John got the chance to ink over one of his influences, Steve Ditko.

Right: Pencils for page 2 of Captain America #249.

Next Page Top: Perhaps it was this ManThing sample page that caught Tony Isabella’s eye and convinced him to give John a chance in Marvel’s black-&-white monster mags. Inks Next Page Bottom: John inked this Neal Adams Deadman sketch for CPL Fanzine #8.

Deadman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Captain America, ManThing ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. ROM ™ and ©2006 Hasbro, Inc.

JBC: At that time, there was Mike Nasser and some others—it was a bunch of Neal Adams clones. Certainly, there were a ton of wannabes.

JOHN: Oh, I really wanted to be Neal when I grew up.

JBC: You didn’t want to strike out new ground?

JOHN: I wanted to draw just like Neal, and it always surprises me that people don’t see it. Because I look at my early stuff and I just see all the bad Neal.

JBC: I see it in Captain America.

JOHN: Yeah. Of course, Joe Rubinstein brought a lot of that.

JBC: But, still, I saw an Adams quality to the character.

JOHN: It took me a long time to start consciously not drawing 22

And I’ve always said that Curt’s stuff was too good for comics. His stuff was just so perfect and so real. And what Neal did was take that level of realism and then twist it and make it almost like Kirby doing Curt.

Here’s all the dynamics of Kirby, and yet it’s grounded in this solid reality of a Curt Swan. Or a Joe Kubert, for that matter.

like Neal, to sort of sit down one day and say, “Stop doing that.” And the odd thing about that is that once I stopped trying to do it, I was able to get much of what I was trying to get. In fact, when I was working on Hidden Years just recently with Tom Palmer, he basically told me how Neal held his pencil, and I said, “Oh really?” And I tried that. “Oh, there it is! That was what I was always trying to do!” Because I was always one of these straight up and down guys, and Neal, of course, holds his pencil sideways to the page, which a lot of artists do. And that’s how I draw now. I started doing that, and that’s the line I was looking for.

JBC: How did Charlton lead to your first Marvel gig?

JOHN: The first Marvel gig was actually something that Tony Isabella gave me, which was a six-page or eight-page horror thing that was supposed to be in one of the black-andwhites. He gave me that at a convention in 1974.

And then like an hour later, Nick asked me to do “Rog” for Charlton.

So Marvel edges out; Marvel gave me my first booking, my first pair of shoes.

It was Chris Claremont who was working mostly as a gofer but who had started writing Iron Fist. He’d seen my stuff and he liked it and something happened. We always say that Pat Broderick’s cat threw up on the pages, but Pat wasn’t able to meet a deadline. And Chris asked John Verpoorten to ask me to do it. Verpoorten called me and said, “I’ve got 17 pages. If you can have it to me by this date, you can have the book as a regular assignment.” And it was one of those things where he called me, I dunno, on the first of the month and said “We need it for the 30th,” or something, and I basically said, “Well, what do you want me to do for the rest of the month? Because 17 pages, that’s a week’s work.” But that was how it happened, I got Iron Fist. I got regular work, and at the same time Nick kept giving me as much as they could over at Charlton, because I was suddenly the golden boy over there, because I turned it out fast and it was competent.

JBC: What was the first Neal stuff that you saw?

JOHN: It was probably the Batman stuff in the Brave and the Bold, because I can remember being in a drug store in Calgary, and I was just sort of floating around coming back to comics, and I saw the Hellgrammite issue—which I now recognize was the Hellgrammite issue—I didn’t pick it up then. I just sort of flipped through it and went, “Whoa.”

And, of course, sometime after that—and this probably doesn’t have anything to do with the order in which these things were published—but it was some time after that that I saw “Deadman.” And of course “Deadman” just blew me away.

JBC: Was he as good as it got at the time?

JOHN: Oh, yeah. That’s the funny thing, when I look back at Neal’s stuff then, it’s still very primitive and very crude.

He’s still figuring out how to be Neal Adams. But it’s head and shoulders above everything that was going on around it at the time. Not everything, that’s not fair, but it’s head and shoulders above 99% of the rest of the stuff. It was so dynamic.

Probably one of the best artists that ever worked in comics was Curt Swan.

JBC: Did you feel that Nick appreciated your stuff, was a fan of your stuff?

JOHN: Very much. Yeah. He seemed to really like my stuff; he was very supportive.

23

JBC: And Charlton, were they the first ones to bring you over for a convention?

JOHN: I pretty much brought myself to all the conventions. All the New York cons I’ve ever been to, I’ve paid for myself. Because I used to take a trip to New York once a year. I would take $500 out of my bank account and that was my trip to New York. That would pay for the plane ticket and the hotel. Everything came out of that $500. And that was when I started doing sketches at the cons. I discovered that people would actually pay me.

JBC: Did you aspire to move to the States? Did you know that that was inevitable?

JOHN: Not really, no. I was quite happy sitting up there on the edge of the world.

JBC: You lived a lot in New York when you came and visited, right?

JOHN: New York scared the hell out of me. Oh, God, I used to stay in my hotel room, just look out the window. It wasn’t until... I must have been 30 before I felt like I could actually leave the hotel and walk around and see New York. I used to see New York through the windows of cabs as I was going between my hotel room and the Marvel offices, and that was as much as I ever saw.

JBC: [laughs] The daredevil in you.

JOHN: That’s just me, a big chicken.

JBC: Do you push yourself sometimes to break out of that?

JOHN: Yeah. I’m still working on it. I’m 53 years old and I’m still trying to grow up. [laughs] JBC: Now, were you a little less introverted by then?

JOHN: Working my way out of it. That’s when I started doing that guy, that “John Byrne” guy, who could interact with the fans. And I realized that I could have that other personality—which is still me, it’s kind of like the me I wish I was— who can be gregarious and outgoing and not hiding under the table and saying, “Pass me the book and I’ll sign it for ya.”

JBC: The fans, were they 99% guys?

JOHN: Oh, yes. The thing about the men, too, and this is a sad thing, is that they were still fans. There were precious few rabid collectors, there were no speculators.

They were there because they loved funnybooks, they loved the characters. The conversations you heard in the hallway were always about whether the Hulk could beat the Thing or whether Thor could beat the Hulk and all that kind of stuff. And you didn’t hear anything about whether Neal Adams was a scumbag or whether so-andso was trying to take over the company, all this kind of stuff. It was all about the characters and the stories and the books. The first New York Convention I went to, 24

Neal was running something to try and get money for Siegel and Shuster. And while everybody thought that was a good idea, they all sort of looked at it this way: “Well, that doesn’t belong here. This is a comic book con. This isn’t about that. It’s about comic books.” And I sort of miss that. I wish we could still have more of that.

JBC: What, about it being more about...?

JOHN: More about just comic books, just the sheer joy of comic books.

JBC: But couldn’t you make that link that if you care about somebody’s art, you care about the guy?

JOHN: Well, the funny thing was... again, it’s that whole thing of realizing that it didn’t spring fully-blown from Zeus’ head. And I’ve always been terribly pragmatic about that kind of stuff. This is where my low BS threshold touched on in the sense that I looked at the story of Siegel and Shuster, for example, and I said, well, that’s kind of sad that they created this huge, iconic character and didn’t make a hundred bajillion dollars for it. But that’s also what the situation was; that was the deal. And everybody understood that was the deal. They weren’t cheated. They knew what it was going in. And I found hard to connect— JBC: They were 16 years old!

JOHN: No, they weren’t. Not by 1938, they weren’t. By 1938 they’d been working in the business for a couple of years.

JBC: But we know that the publishers of the time, Harry Donenfeld and Martin Goodman and— JOHN: They were publishers, they were crooks. It’s interchangeable terms.

JBC: But regular book publishers weren’t crooks. Comic book publishers were crooks.

JOHN: But everybody knew what the deal was. There’s an old saying—this is my British upbringing—if you take the king’s shilling, you do the king’s bidding. And that’s the way I’ve always operated, which is basically as long as you know what the deal is going in, as long as you know

they’re going to drive a spike into your head, you really have no grounds to complain when they drive a spike into your head. If they don’t tell you about the spike and then all of a sudden the spike comes out.... But, Siegel and Shuster... the funny thing was, that first con, where Neal was trying to get a deal for Siegel and Shuster and trying to get them their just desserts, the same people who were going rah-rah for Siegel and Shuster were talking about what a money-grubbing scumbag Bob Kane was. “Bob Kane doesn’t care about comics, all he ever cared about was the money.” And I said, “Talk about a lose-lose 25

Previous Page: Hulk strongest one of all! Page 25 of Hulk #316 (inks by Keith Williams) and page 18 of Marvel Fanfare #29—both from 1986.

Above: Pencils for page 32 of Man of Steel #1, the mini-series that redefined Siegel and Shuster’s iconic creation.

Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Hulk ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Pages 3 and 13 from Man of Steel #3.

Batman and Superman are a study in contrast, not only in terms of the characters themselves, but also of their creators.

Next Page Top: Kirby’s New Gods are revealed in Superman #3.

Next Page Bottom: The opening splash page of Action Comics #591. In 1994, the Siegel and Shuster estates regained the copyright to the Superboy character— though this is currently being contested—while DC retained the Superboy trademark.

Batman, New Gods, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Superboy ™ and ©2006 respective owners.

situation! If you don’t protect yourself, as Siegel and Shuster didn’t, you lose... and if you do protect yourself, as Bob Kane did, you lose! You’re richer, but you lose.”

JBC: But don’t you think the thing about Bob Kane was that basically his pencil hardly touched the page?

JOHN: Exactly.

JBC: He treated his people very poorly.

JOHN: Exactly. He wanted to be one of the scumbags.

JBC: Right, it was his aspiration.

JOHN: “I wanted to be a comic book artist in the worst way.” “And you are.” I always felt that as long as—it’s that old, that strange British Protestant work ethic.

JBC: You’re a creator who has certainly made an enormous impact on the industry.

You even have an industry unto yourself 26

producing books, which is a good question for later. But yet, you have come across— and I think there was even an article called “Company Man,” and you were satirized in Stewart the Rat, or something like that.

JOHN: Sure. I feel myself to be a company man. When the company is worth supporting, I’ll support the company. If the company’s honest with me up front, I support the company. I see no reason not to. And I was always campaigning for creator’s rights. I was always out there saying, yeah, it would be a good idea if things changed. But too many of my contemporaries—I’m not going to name names here—but too many of my contemporaries sort of had the attitude of “Well, I know that this is the way the industry has always been run, but surely that doesn’t apply to me.” And I would say, “Well, yes, it does. It applies to everybody. So we’re going to have to change the rules for everybody, not just say ‘Well, this shouldn’t apply to me because I’m so special.’”

And Siegel and Shuster got a bum deal, but I don’t think there was any point when they were cheated. And you only have to look at things like the fact that Shuster had his own studio and he ran it the same way. Kirby had his own company and he ran it the same way. That way of thinking was so ingrained back then. I remember giving an interview a few years ago, and I talked about the great strides and the great strikes and blows that Will Eisner struck for creator’s rights. And I said, “Isn’t it a shame that Kirby never did that when he had the chance.” When he had his own company, he ran it no return of artwork, no rights, blah blah blah. So Eisner is the guy who’s known for striking out for creator’s rights, and Kirby is the guy who’s known for everything else. And isn’t it a shame that Kirby couldn’t have been known for everything, instead of everything else. And it was the same way with Siegel and Shuster.

That was the way the industry was run back then.

JBC: Yeah, but just for the record, as Joe Simon mentioned, he was the one who clearly ran the business. It was under Jack’s name as well, perhaps— JOHN: Yes, but Jack could have said, “Gee, Joe, do you think we should have credits?” or “Do you think we should return artwork?” That kind of stuff. They just didn’t.

JBC: Never. It never was an issue.

JOHN: Exactly! And the same thing with Siegel and Shuster. It’s one thing I try to point out to the younger fans all the time is, yes, you can go out and buy a page of original art for thousands of dollars now, but back in 1948, they didn’t want their art back. There was no market for it. They’d pile it up. They used to use it to sop the floors. They used to use it as cutting boards.

JBC: One guy didn’t.

JOHN: Well, no, but see, Eisner—again, everything else—Eisner was smart.

JBC: Eisner was also incredibly unique or just a great rarity.

Never mind his talent, but his “eye on the prize” mentality.

There’s him and there’s Joe Kubert and there are a few other people who truly have kept their eyes on the prize.

JOHN: Yeah. These are the guys who knew what it should be. And too many other people just sort of accepted it as what it was. And I’m perfectly willing to accept things as they are if they’re clearly spelled out what they are. And that was always my point, everybody knows 27

Below: Pencils for a Storm plate done for a Spanish X-Men portfolio.

Right and Next Page: A recreation of John’s cover to X-Men #115, and an unfinished and unused piece revisiting that same story.

X-Men and all related characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

what it is going in. And then you work for change from within, work to bring down the government from within. So it’s not a case of insisting that things change for me, it’s a case of saying, well, sorry for Siegel and Shuster, but that was how it was.

JBC: You must get this all the time: “Geez, I wish you were still doing....”

JOHN: Well, most of my fans would be happy as clams if Chris and Terry and I were still doing the X-Men—if it had never stopped.

JBC: How would you characterize your experience working with Chris and Terry?

JOHN: Well, I always say Chris and I were married five years and then he got the kids. [laughs] Of course, they were his kids from a prior marriage.

JBC: But you’re the one who got the house.

JOHN: I did, I did. That was when the X-Men was really starting to get noticed. Roger Stern summed it up very well. He said the appeal of the X-Men came from the fact that the X-Men really were very much like the fans themselves. There were outsiders who only hung out with people like themselves. And I thought, “Wow, yeah”— JBC: Mutants.

JOHN: Yeah, mutants! Because most fans think of themselves as mutants. But most teenagers think of themselves as mutants, and fans used to be teenagers. [laughs] JBC: Used to be children.

JOHN: Used to be children, God help us! But yeah, there was definitely an awareness that the X-Men fans were vibrating on a somewhat different frequency than everybody else.

And of course, it was such a tiny, tiny book back then. Barely topping 100,000 when we had a really good month.

JBC: In the newsstand days.

JOHN: Yeah. And this is in the days when 70,000 was the cancellation point. I’ve actually had quite sharp arguments with fans who think they know more about my earlier career than I do, who insist that the book always sold half a million.

“When you were doing it, it was selling half a million.” I go, 28

artists who, if you give him X amount of time to do X amount of pages, he will get two thirds of the job done. So if you give him a year to do three pages, he’ll do two pages, and if you give him a month to do 90 pages, he’ll do 60. [laughs] JBC: He’s probably not unique in that. There’s a lot of artists like that, right?

JOHN: It’s just the way that seems to work. And Dave just couldn’t quite get there to do a monthly book. And that was one of the reasons he was sort of... “invited to leave” is a subtle way to say it, I suppose.

JBC: Did you see team books as your specialty? I mean, X-Men is a team book and it’s crowded.

You and George Pérez were coming out at the same time, and you actually were two guys who seemed to like the team books.

“Is this why people think my stuff doesn’t sell anymore?”

JOHN: I love team books. I’ve always said that George and I are at about the same level, artistically. We have different strengths, but we obviously both hit the page with the same kind of enthusiasm, the same kind of mentality. George was off doing Avengers and Teen Titans and all that stuff, and of course I did the FF and the Avengers and the XMen all at the same time at one point. Which led to the famous panel, which I caught before I sent it in, but I did a shot of the X-Men flying in the quinjet and I had the Scarlet Witch instead of Storm. [laughter]

JBC: It was bi-monthly when you started!

JBC: Really?

JOHN: When I started, it was bi-monthly. It was about six issues, maybe less, maybe four issues in, that it went monthly. Dave Cockrum just couldn’t do it on a monthly basis.

JOHN: Yeah. “Whoops! I’ll have to erase that!” That was when I used to have my drawing board in one of the bedrooms of my two-bedroom apartment, and I had a closet— one of those louvered-door closets. I would tape the pages to the closet as they were done, so I could look up at them.

The closet would just take a book except for the last page.

And of course the last page didn’t need to be taped up,

JBC: Why not?

JOHN: Jim Shooter once said that Dave is one of those 29

because it was the last page. I had done that issue of the XMen and I was sitting there doing the next-to-last page and I kind of looked up and literally did a double-take. “What the hell is that?” I walked over and looked and there was the Scarlet Witch sitting in the back seat instead of Storm.

But yeah, the X-Men was always one of my favorite books when I was a kid. Actually, whatever book I was reading at that precise instant was my favorite book when I was a kid.

We know how that works. But the X-Men always spoke to me.

sudden—it’s like Springsteen’s appeal. It started like “he's ours,” and when Born in the USA comes out, “Yahh! You don’t get it!”

JOHN: The funny thing is that the X-Men seems to have crossed that line without ever crossing that line, because I would bet money that if you grabbed the average Xfan, who is fully aware that there are 500 X-titles and that they each used to sell a billion a month, they would still tell you it was “a special book that only I am reading.” Because that’s the mentality that that book generates. It’s like, “This is my book over in my corner.”

Again, going back to what Roger said, that’s what the characters are. They are the outsiders, they are off to one side. They aren’t the Fantastic Four; they aren’t the Avengers.

There was some appeal.

I mean, I was the loner guy, obviously, so....

JBC: Really?

JOHN: Yeah.

JBC: I was born in 1959, so we’re a bit separated in age. But it became a dry book after a while.

JOHN: Oh, yeah.

Well, I didn’t last long.

I only lasted for the first six issues. That’s the timing.

JBC: Oh, right, and then you were out of comics.

JBC: What was that big issue with you behind the Dark Phoenix story? Was that emotionally a big issue for you?

JOHN: Then I was out of comics. In fact, I think the last issue I read was the one where they graduated.

I would always yell at Shooter when he’d say, “It’s about a school.” I’d say, “They graduated in, like, issue eight!

C’mon! Give me a break!” I loved that.

At some point I found out about the new X-Men book being in the works, and I sent in a bunch of X-Men drawings to try and get the job, because I didn’t know it was going to be new new X-Men. Then Cockrum ended up doing it, and I was reading it and enjoying it, and Chris was doing some interesting stuff. And I basically made it known that if Dave ever left and I didn’t get the assignment, people would be hurt. There would be blood. The streets would run with blood.

JOHN: Oh, yeah. At the time it was huge.

Number one, it was a big, big story that we’d been building to for the better part of a year.

And then right at the end—even after the end, really, as far as Chris and I were concerned—Shooter had to come in and, as I so discreetly phrase it, piss on it and make it his. There we were, with this thing that had been worked out, plotted out, he knew about it, everything had been detailed. And then all of a sudden it had to be a different story. And, just to really frost me all that much more, what came out of all that was a better story. [laughs] Chris has never been able to accept that, that yes, the death of Phoenix, that whole thing, was better than what we originally had planned. When the emotional thing settled and it finally came out and I read the printed book, I said, “Yeah. This is better.”

JBC: I guess one of the things that made X-Men cool was that it was so un-cool for a while. And then all of a 30

JBC: Did you give Shooter his props for that?

JOHN: I’ve given him, I’ve said this— JBC: Did you say it to him?

JOHN: I don’t remember if I ever said it to him; I think I was still driving nails into my little Jim Shooter doll at that point.

But yeah, as much as I hated it, and as much as I hated the fact that it was forced upon us—and, let me add parenthetically, as much as I still hate the effect it has had on the X-Men and the industry as a whole; I wrote a column about that for Slush, about how this one stupid story wrecked the whole industry for the next hundred years—it was a better story. The story, which is what it was all about, was better than what we already had planned. It was stronger, it was more powerful.

But it’s a classic example I always point to of how the best of comic book storytelling really is the stuff that isn’t worked out in great detail until the last moment, it’s the stuff that just happens. You read that stuff of Stan and Jack and you can just see them steamrolling along. And you know that when they introduced the Inhumans, they didn’t have the Galactus story plotted. It just took off. The Silver Surfer proves that. He wasn’t in the plot, Jack just drew him into the story. And Stan maintained that thread so well that anybody who walks into it can know what’s going on.

When you read the third part of the Galactus trilogy, you didn’t have to have read Fantastic Four #36 in order to understand it. That’s something we’ve lost.

JBC: “Days of Future Past,” was that particularly... there just seemed to be an energy that was going on.

JOHN: Oh, yeah. That was—[laughs] I learned a very important lesson from “Days of Future Past,” and that was, any time a story pops into your head fully-formed, think long and hard about where it came from. Because “Days of Future Past” was mine. Chris didn’t want to do Sentinel stories. I loved the Sentinels. And Chris said, “Oh, I don’t want to do Sentinels. They’re wimpy.” And I said, “No, they’re not. You write ’em wimpy! Let me do it. I’ll plot a Sentinels story—” JBC: They sailed into the sun! [laughs] 31

Previous Page: Pencils for a plate recreating Phoenix’s death scene done for a Spanish X-Men portfolio.

Left: Color sketch of Phoenix done for Terry Austin at the 1981 San Diego Comic-Con—the only convention John, Chris, and Terry appeared together as a team.

Below: Cover to X-Men #137. Inks by Terry Austin.

Cyclops, Phoenix ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: Well, that was his idea, supposedly. When he and Dave did the Sentinels, they had them get trashed pretty fast. I said, “Let me come up with a Sentinels story.” So I came up with a Sentinels story where the Sentinels had taken over the world and killed everybody. That’s about as tough as you get, right? Kitty travels through time and all this stuff. And we worked it all out.

Chris contributed most of the second part—the Senator Kelly stuff and the Washington stuff and all that.

JBC: Isn’t it an imaginary story?

JOHN: No, it was a— JBC: Oh, an alternate reality.

JOHN: Well, the job of the X-Men was to make it not happen. About four years later, I was living in Chicago, and I’m watching Doctor Who on PBS. And on comes the serial “The Day of the Daleks.” “Wow, ‘The Day of the Daleks,’ yeah, I saw this when I was living in London, Ontario. This is a good one.”

And I watched it and it was chapter and verse “Days of Future Past.” And I went, “Ooooh, crap.” [laughs] JBC: Nobody called you on it?

JOHN: No. In fact, Jean-Marc L’Officier wrote me a letter one time on the Fantastic Four accusing me of ripping off a Doctor Who episode because it had a title that sounded like a Doctor Who title. And I thought, “You know, this guy has completely missed ‘Days of Future Past,’ which was chapter and verse ‘Day of the Daleks,’ but this story, which has absolutely nothing to do with Doctor Who, he thinks is a Doctor Who story.

realized we were taking it all away from him, and he actually sort of said, “Hey, y’know, these are mine, too!”

“Oh, yeah, sorry.”

JBC: Obviously, he’s a good writer, he’s certainly a presence. He also has an ego of some stature. Was there chafing?

JBC: Did you have incentive to work with Chris?

JOHN: Not at first.

JOHN: Yes, very much at the beginning. I still remember that first issue where I was dropped into the middle of this mega-story that had 8,000 characters in it, and the splash page was set up in such a way that all of the X-Men were facing away from me. There was no other way to draw it. And I thought, “Gee, what does this tell me, the characters won’t even look at me.” [Jon laughs] And slowly but surely, I started to get more and more input into the plotting. And then Roger Stern became the editor and he and I figured out this really sneaky way to work Chris. [laughs] So poor Chris had actually

JBC: I didn’t perceive a great ego in you at the time....

JOHN: I don’t think I have a great ego. I think I— JBC: You have a great defense system.

JOHN: I have a great defense system.

JBC: Which perhaps is misinterpreted as ego.

JOHN: Yeah, but my ego is a tiny little shriveled up thing cowering in the corner. Because I can’t believe— 32

if I didn’t like Chris’ interpretation of those characters, then I didn’t like the characters, because that was who they were, that was who the fans were liking.

And when I hit that wall, I sort of went, “Wow. I can’t do this anymore. I don’t like these characters anymore.”

JBC: What was not to like about them, for instance?

JBC: Lie down on the couch— [laughs] JOHN: Yeah, my mother hated my father and—no. You should probably tell people that there actually is a psychiatrist’s couch in the room! [laughter] This is one of those things, every once in a while online I get people shooting at me because of my towering ego, and I say, “Please give me examples of my towering ego.” And they say, “Well, that’s an example right there!” And I said, “So pleading innocent is confessing to the crime? Okay, fine.”

But, yeah, Chris, I think, has a much— Chris either has a bigger ego than mine or he’s more neurotic than me, but it works out just the same. So we got along at first. And I’ve always described our relationship as being kind of Gilbert and Sullivan, and we ended up splitting up because we argued over the color of the carpet in the theater.

JOHN: It’s so long, I can’t even summon up a specific, we just— JBC: Do you think it was a valid interpretation?

JOHN: I call it the death of a thousand cuts. It was like little tiny bits and pieces. I used to say I had what I called my ARGH factor, which is “how far can I read into the current issue before I hit something that Chris has done that makes me go ‘Argh!’”

JBC: Were you often bringing up that issue?

JOHN: Sometimes. Originally, no. But then I would get to the point where I’d go, “Oh, argh.” “Oh, argh.” “Oh, argh.” Louder

JBC: It would have happened anyway?

JOHN: It would have happened anyway.

And the ultimate breakdown, really, was that we could never entirely agree on who those characters were, just personality-wise. And one day it suddenly dawned on me that as much as I thought Cyclops was this guy and Storm was this gal and Wolverine was this guy, Chris was writing it his way, which I didn’t agree with, and that was what was seeing print, was the way that Chris was writing it, because he had the last hand. So 33

Left: Before beginning the penciling, John broke down the plot into visual beats.

Below: In a photograph snapped by the interviewer in spring 2003, artist/writer John L. Byrne reveals all while reclining on his analyst’s couch in the reading room of the former Byrne home in Fairfield, Connecticut.

X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: The straw that broke the camel’s back— page 1 of X-Men #140.

Next Page: John’s cover image for Wolverine #17.

Colossus, Wolverine ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

and louder. And then there was a particular issue where I went “argh” on the splash page. I opened it and I went, “Argh!” And I thought, “Okay, I think I’m done.” And that was a Sunday afternoon. I called Louise then-Jones—who was the editor— on a Sunday and I told her, “I can’t do this anymore. I’ll do one more issue beyond....”

We were obviously four or so issues beyond that issue that I was reading.

JBC: How many more issues did you do?

JOHN: The last one that I did was the one with Kitty. I was supposed to do the one after that, but I just—I couldn’t. The one that made me go “argh” on the splash page was the issue where Colossus is pulling a stump out with chains. And he’s pulling the stump out of the ground and there’s speed lines on the stump, and the

way Chris wrote it was something like, “By Lenin’s Ghost, my metal heart will burst or this stump will come out!” And I’m going, “Look at the picture, man!” That was the argument that Chris and I always had was that Chris didn’t write the picture. And so I eventually reached the point where I said, “Maybe I should be writing the picture.”

JBC: Do you feel that you helped develop Wolverine into the icon he is today?

JOHN: Oh, yeah. Yes. Mea culpa. When I got on the book... Dave had no real time for Wolverine. Dave’s focus was Nightcrawler, and Chris actually wanted to write Wolverine out. One of the first things he said to me was, “Well, Dave and I can’t think of anything to do with Wolverine, so we’ve decided we’re going to write him out.” And I said, “No, you’re not.” I wrapped myself in the Canadian flag and I said, “You’re not going to write out the only Canadian!” So I put my energy into Wolverine as Dave put his energy into Nightcrawler. And what hath God wrought, it’s all my fault. I’m sorry! I’m sorry!

JBC: Do you still like the character?

JOHN: Ah, no. [laughs] I mean, I like what he used to be. I liked what he used to be when he was a homicidal maniac who would go off if anybody looked at him wrong, but never did.

JBC: And what did he turn into?

JOHN: Well, now he’s this, like, ninja; it’s all this crap that has nothing to do with what he was when it first started. I mean, I used to say that the ideal Wolverine scene, the defining Wolverine scene that we would never do, was Wolverine sitting in the mansion there having breakfast, and Kitty comes in and says, “Hey, good morning, Wolverine,” in exactly the wrong tone of voice. And the next panel, Cyclops is walking in and Wolverine’s eating breakfast and Kitty’s lying on the floor, disemboweled. Because that’s what Wolverine was.

And Chris took that—he had the berserker rage and all this stuff. But then things started to get into the ninja stuff and all this crap that he’s got now, and it’s just like, well, I don’t recognize this guy anymore.

34

ured out how to work Chris so that we could always get exactly the stuff that we wanted and then Roger would police it when the scripts came in. And it was just phenomenal. There was a synergy. Just amazing stuff. And I look back at it now and it’s really badly written and really badly drawn. [laughs] But at the time it really shined. I guess it was just....

JBC: So the cigar-smoking....

JOHN: Yeah. He was a tough guy and he was crazy. I mean, the reason he was in the X-Men was so that they could keep an eye on him. And, of course, everybody’s turned into Wolverine now. That’s the other thing that’s happened.

JBC: What did you think of the X-Men films, about Hugh Jackman’s version?

JBC: There’s still something there.

Also, it came out during... not a very good period for comics. There was Michael Golden, there was you, there was... there’s hardly any names that you can really come out with.

JOHN: Well. I think Hugh Jackman is a very good actor. I think he has an unfortunate name, it sounds like a rude joke if you don’t say it exactly right.

“Hugh,” pause “Jackman,” not a “Huge Ackman.” I think he’s a really good actor—I’ve seen him in other stuff I liked—but I thought he was way too pretty for Wolverine. And no matter how much they tried to sort of say, “Oh, he’s probably older than Xavier” and all this, he just comes across as a pretty boy with an attitude. It just didn’t work for me. But the whole movie didn’t work for me, so that’s no big surprise for me. The only thing that worked for me in that whole movie was Halle Berry as Storm.

JOHN: Was Bernie doing Swamp Thing around that time? No, that was earlier, that was much earlier.

JBC: They’d left.

Pretty much all the talent from the early ’70s had left, so you guys came in the mid-part of the decade....

Marshall Rogers was the other one.

JOHN: Marshall, yeah.

And George! George started then.

JBC: George, that’s right.

JBC: How would you characterize your experience on X-Men? One of the best times of your life?

JOHN: Fred Hembeck said one time that when I came on Marvel Team-Up, it was just the greatest thing that had happened to Spider-Man since Ditko. I think Sal Buscema is a wonderful artist, but just about anything that was different would have stood out, and would probably have looked better. I mean, Sal did a great, journeyman, bangthere-it-is professional job. And it was much the same with the X-Men. What was that line [Jim] Starlin had in

JOHN: Oh, yeah. I mean, it was frustrating... it was kind of like that Chris and I bouncing off each other. Pardon my modesty, but one of the reasons the book was as great as it was, was that we were just outdoing each other all the time. “I’m going to do this!” “Oh, yeah? I’m going to do this!” And just bam, bam, bam, bam, and bigger and bigger. And Roger was in there, as I say, when he and I fig35

“Warlock” about diamonds in the garbage? Diamonds mixed in the garbage. And there was so much crap at Marvel back then. The X-Men, just from the sheer energy of it, just shined.

JBC: I guess it was the enthusiasm of you two really coming out.

JOHN: Well, we were both a couple of really sick guys, too, at the time.

JBC: What did you think of Terry’s inks?

Above: Cyclops and a sultry Dark Phoenix. Inks

by Terry Austin.

Right: For the cover of Fantastic Four #250, John included all the major characters of his young career, including Superm—er, Gladiator.

Inks by Terry Austin.

Next Page: John recreated the famous “Wolverine in the sewer” panel for a Spanish XMen portfolio.

Captain America, Cyclops, Dark Phoenix, Fantastic Four, Gladiator, Spider-Man, Wolverine, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: Well, the funny thing is, Terry and I, artistically, are totally different. My stuff is very organic and Terry’s is very mechanical. And I would never in a million years have picked Terry. I mean, I wanted Sam Grainger to continue on X-Men, because he was inking Cockrum. In part, I wanted to make it as easy a transition as possible for the fans. And they said, “No we’re going to give you Terry.” And I go, “Oh, this isn’t gonna work.” There is not a single page of the X-Men that Terry inked that looks the way it looked in my head, but it sure looks sweet, doesn’t it? I don’t know how it worked, but it really worked. And yet we were on opposite ends of the spectrum as far as our styles.

JBC: That’s some incredible energy, really—and even Tom’s lettering with Chris’ writing, it all came together— JOHN: And Glynis’ coloring. I mean, Glynis’ coloring 36

was extraordinary. Glynis won me over with a single panel. I’d always liked Glynis’ stuff, but the one that really made me go “wow” was where the Beast and Phoenix have escaped from where the X-Men fell into the Savage Land and they’re up on the ice cap—it was the last page, I think—and the Beast is holding Jean. So it was his face, her hair, her face, and I think his hand. As I was penciling it, I was thinking, “Y’know, I’m going to get a coloring job on this and there’s going to be 15 shades of blue and 25 shades of red.” And Glynis colored it blue, red, flesh, boom. Just boom, boom, boom. And it was just perfect. That’s exactly right. That shot would have been ruined by modeling. And I think she’d maybe not colored me much before that, but I just said, “Yes! This is what I want.”

JBC: Was your star rising while you were doing X-Men? Did your page rate rise?

[laughter] That was funny. So, yeah, Chris is verbose, that’s his style. And sometimes it works. Chris is the only writer I’ve ever worked with that managed to make me cry reading a page that I had drawn.

JOHN: Yeah, somewhat. Eventually, my star rose. The initial reaction was, “Oh God, get rid of this guy, bring Cockrum back.” And that lasted for the first four or five issues, really. And then what really seemed to win the fans, the fans really came over with the circus issue that ended with the splash of Magneto going “Hello dere.”

And from that moment on, people went, “Okay, this guy doesn’t suck. I think this guy will be okay.” And then, of course, we went off and did all the crazy stuff.

Wolverine in the sewer, which I will spend the rest of my life living down, because it’s “the greatest panel in the history of comics, ever” to hear some people talk.

JBC: Really?

JOHN: That was a page in Iron Fist. When I got to that page and read what he had written, I actually teared up.

It was beautiful. So give the guy his props. Chris Claremont is the best damned Chris Claremont out there. No doubt about it.

JBC: My brother was always an XMen fan, and if he was into something, I would have to be into something else. He was into Kamandi, I was into the Demon. He was into SpiderMan, I was into Fantastic Four. So I wasn’t into X-Men. But I distinctly recall the “Wolverine in the sewer” shot.

JOHN: Yeah. That was really the shot.

JBC: You could tell Terry labored over that one so long.

JOHN: I labored on it, too! [laughs] JBC: There was just this layer upon layer and it all worked, the characterization, too.

JOHN: Supposedly—I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard that somebody’s doing one of those little model things they do of that shot. One of those little dioramas. When I first heard about it, all I thought was, “But it only works from one angle!” [laughs] If you turn it, it won’t work! “You can look at this model, but only from over here.”

JBC: Was Tom [Orzechowski] used as the letterer because he could letter really small?

JOHN: Well... Tom lettered “StarLord”—I think that was the first time we worked together—and there was a line in “Star-Lord” where one of the characters says, "Star-Lord, you talk too much.” And in the margin, Tom had lettered “Letterers’ Lament.”

37

JBC: Did he have a way with female characters that was particularly intelligent?

Above: Cap versus Iron Fist—in the Avengers mansion!

Right: Early She-Hulk costume design from John’s sketchbook.

Next Page Top: Early study of “Vindicator” in the guise of his alter ego.

Next Page Bottom: Cover art to Alpha Flight #1.

All characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: No, I don’t think so. He was always known for that, but.... Jo Duffy wrote a letter back when she was just a fan that said, “Chris writes great women.” And we’ve always blamed her ever since. “That’s where it started.” And the thing about Chris was that he does write women as distinct characters. That they are different from men. I’ve always said that I write people, Chris writes men and women. And apparently that works for the people who like that. I used to get really tired of Storm saying “Oh, Goddess!” and things like that and all these sort of specific feminist riffs. But what can I say? We worked together for five years, four years.

JBC: Did you guys develop Colleen Wing and Misty Knight?

JOHN: Misty and Colleen both predated me in Iron Fist.

Misty actually came from another book—Chris had just liked her. Because that’s a Chris habit, too: you’ll see a character someone else has done and, “pop!”; I did that with She-Hulk, after all. So we brought in Misty and Colleen, and they were mostly Chris’ characters.

Because for much of Iron Fist—for about 99%, really—I was really just the art robot. I didn’t contribute 38

much to the plots, and I would get Chris’ 22-page plots for 17-page stories that used to come in the mail. “God, help!” And it wasn’t really until six or seven issues into X-Men that I started saying, “Well, what if we do this?” or “What if we do that?” And then by the end... there was one of the Alpha Flight issues that I insisted that I be listed as the plotter, because there was nothing Chris left. It was entirely mine.

JBC: Did it feel good to be doing a Canadian super-hero team?

JOHN: Well, yeah. It was one of those.... It was actually Dave’s idea, when he was doing the book. He figured that the Canadian government spent all this money developing Wolverine, and they probably weren’t too thrilled that he’d gone off and joined this ostensibly international but really American group. So they’d probably send somebody after him. And that was where the first Guardian— or Vindicator, as Chris called him. I went around saying, “Vindicator?

Because Canada has to vindicate what?” [laughter] “Vindicator’s a good name for a German super-hero, okay?”

So that story started with Dave, and then it developed into Alpha Flight.

And Alpha Flight were mostly characters I’d come up with in my fan days. In fact, one of the first jobs I didn’t get was that Captain America was going to visit Canada, and Steve Englehart, who was writing Captain America at the time, thought it would be a good idea to get a Canadian artist to illustrate it.

They got in touch with me through this John Mansfield guy and asked me if I would like to do an issue of Captain America, would I send in some samples? So I drew some really bad samples and what Steve said was, “We’ve decided not to do that story.”

Which I thought was a nice way to crush me. But it was going to be Captain America fighting a Canadian superhero, so I drew Guardian, who was my Canadian guy that I had— JBC: Cap was the American flag....

JOHN: You got it. I had come up with him when I was going to have my 39

own Canadian comic book company that I had all worked out since I was 22. So that was where Guardian came from.

Alpha Flight grew out of that. I think Shaman—who was originally called Chinook—was the only one I had created right there on the page in X-Men. The others all pre-existed.

JBC: Did you collaborate with Roger over on Captain America because you guys were close and... maybe it turned a little bit volatile toward the end with Chris?

JOHN: Well, Chris and I were always bouncing off each other, and Roger and I were always in the same groove. So it produced a very different dynamic. Although people will often cite my nine issues of Captain America rather than the X-Men as the pinnacle of my work.

Roger and I think very much the same way. I didn’t contribute much in the plotting on Cap. That was very much Roger, with his great understanding of the Marvel Universe. I have this reputation of knowing a lot about the Marvel Universe, but really I just have Roger Stern’s phone number— Roger Stern and Peter Sanderson.

And at DC, Paul Kupperberg. But Roger and I really both agreed totally on who Captain America was, so there was no friction at all, there, except the good friction that makes machines run.

JBC: Why such a relatively short stint?

JOHN: Oh. [sighs] Shooter woke up one morning and decided that we should only do one-part stories. And the thing about Shooter, in those days, all of his ideas were retroactive. He would come in on a Monday morning and say, “Why aren’t you doing this? I just had this idea, why isn’t it already in place?” So Roger and I had already started part one of a threepart story—Cap and Red Skull. And Jim Salicrup calls me up—he was the editor— and says, “This has to be a one-part story.”

And then Roger’s calling me and saying, “They say it’s gotta be a one-part story.” It’s

a three-part story, we plotted it. All of a sudden, Shooter wants nothing but onepart stories. And that was something that went away, that was his thing of the moment. Roger just said, “No, I refuse to compromise my artistic integrity. This is a three-part story. We will be happy to do one-part stories from then on, but this is a three-part story.” “No, this has to be a onepart.” So Roger quit. He stamped his foot and he quit. So Salicrup called me and said, “Okay, Roger has quit. How would you like 41

Previous Page: Transformation! Alpha Flight #11, page 20.

Above: Captain America #239 cover art—inks by Terry Austin.

Captain America, Sasquatch ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Two-page sequence from Fantastic Four #236, during the early part of John’s second stint on the title.

Next Page: John took the FF everywhere during his tenure—from mystical Asgard to a mundane race track.

Fantastic Four #262, page 19; and Fantastic Four #263, page 9.

All characters ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

to write this book?” And I said, “Number one, I’m a Canadian and I don’t think I should be writing Captain America. And number two, if Roger has quit for ethical reasons, I think I should support him.” So I quit, too.

JBC: Was the transition over at Fantastic Four happening at the time or was that...? I know you did a short stint— JOHN: Yeah, Fantastic Four happened as I was leaving X-Men. And I don’t remember where Captain America layers into that.

JBC: But that was going to be your next port of call, so to speak.

JOHN: Yeah. Originally just to write. I was going to write the Fantastic Four for Bill Sienkiewicz, and then Bill decided to go and do Moon Knight with Doug Moench.

42

Which I think was ultimately a better fit for everybody.

JBC: That would have been your first solo writing gig?

JOHN: Yeah.

JBC: So Fantastic Four became your first— JOHN: —became my first real, full-time, me doing everything. Even inking, as it turned out. Terry was originally supposed to ink it.

JBC: Did you choose Jerry to be your inker later on?

JOHN: Yes. I love Jerry’s stuff. I think Jerry’s a superb inker.

JBC: You were doing sideways comics, you were doing—

and Tom DeFalco, who was the editor by then, says, “Did you tell me you were going to do this?” “No.” That was the day of musical editors, as I’ve always called it, where every time that I found an editor that I got along with, he was taken away and replaced by another editor. Then I’d get along with that editor, and he’d be taken away and replaced by another editor.

Finally we landed on an editor I didn’t get along with, and it stayed there. And that was Bob Budiansky. And there’s nothing wrong with Bob Budiansky, he and I just didn’t have a chemistry. It’s just, nope, we’re not in the same universe. And as soon as it landed there, I went to Shooter and I said, “I can’t work with this guy.” And that was where it stayed. And that’s my paranoia. I look back and I think that was Shooter trying to force me off the book. He didn’t realize how devoted I was to it. That wasn’t going to get me off the book.

JOHN: In Fantastic Four I did one that was sideways, I did one that was two stories running simultaneously, one running across the top and one running across the bottom.

JBC: Did you do one with all splashes?

JOHN: That was in the Hulk. That was what led to my leaving the Hulk.

JBC: There were a couple of things. But were they just self-indulgent or...?

JOHN: Pretty much. Yeah. It was like, “What can we do with this?” The sideways issue actually had a story.

Necessity, I felt. It was this giant computer on this alien world, and I remember thinking, “Boy, this needs to be cinemascope. How can I do cinemascope?” And I first thought, “I’ll do all double-page spreads.” But then I thought, “Well, then I’ve got half as many pages, basically, to tell the story in.” And then I thought, “But if I print it sideways, I can do my cinemascope.” And so I did. And I didn’t tell them, either. I sent it in all done

JBC: Did you have a good time with the Fantastic Four?

JOHN: Great. Probably my best time. And the main reason I left the book was because it was not as much 43

Below: Cover art for a Fantastic Four trade paperback collection.

Fantastic Four, Galactus ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

fun as it had been. I probably could have found my way back, but I realized that in the time—however long it was, whether it was six months or whether it was six years—it would take to find my way back,

I wouldn’t be serving the characters as they deserved.

And, y’know, Shooter was busting [then-current editor, Mike] Carlin’s chops; he was always giving Carlin a hard time.

Because one of the things Shooter did, Shooter would go after the books that were doing well. Fantastic Four was one of the best sellers at that time. And so I finally just sad, “I’m going to make your life easier, Mike. I’m going to make my life easier, and I’m just going to leave. And it happens to be in the middle of a story, unfortunately. But you’ve got the plot for the next issue, you know where it’s going.” So I did. And then Shooter fired Carlin.

Carlin told me that Shooter told him it was because he had driven Byrne away.

Okay, fine. [laughs]

Part 3:

Up, up, and Away from Marvel Left: Pencils for the final page of the Man of Steel mini-series.

JBC: How did the Superman deal come about?

Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

JOHN: Basically from me shooting off my mouth for ten years. After the first Superman movie with Christopher Reeve, I just went around saying, “See? They knew how to do it right. DC doesn’t know how to do it right.”

JBC: But you had already done Legends of the Batman at that point, right?

JOHN: Yeah, but on that I was only the art robot. And I only penciled the first issue.

JBC: Just quickly, how did you....

JOHN: How did I get that? I was at a convention in Chicago, I heard they were doing it, and I went to Jack Harris, who was the editor, and I said, “I hear you’re doing a Batman thing. I’ve got a hole in my schedule. I’d like to do that.” And they said, “Great.” Unfortunately, it was a three-month hole in my schedule, and it ended up taking Len something like nine months to write it, so I was only able to do the first issue.

With Superman, I kept saying they don’t know how to do it, they don’t know how to do it. I was under exclusive contract to Marvel and I went off contract.... I don’t know why. I think I maybe sensed that I was going to have to jump.

And almost the instant I decided to go off contract, the phone rang. It 45

Right: Early Superman sketches from John’s sketchbook.

Below: Once the kryptonite conundrum was solved by Jenette Kahn, John proceeded to kill off Krypton in a more traditional manner than he had originally intended. Pencils for page 7 of Man of Steel #1.

Next Page Top: John further explored the history of Krypton in the 1987 mini-series, The World of Krypton.

Next Page Bottom: A ghost from the past. A panel from page 17 of Man of Steel #6.

Jor-El, Lara, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

was Dick Giordano, and he said, “Okay, wise guy. Put your money where your mouth is. We are, in fact, going to reboot Superman. Tell us what you want to do.” So I put together what I called my “List of Unreasonable Demands,” which was like 20 things, as I recall. I turned it in, and they liked 19 of them. So, [laughs] 19 of them were not unreasonable, as it turns out.

The one thing they didn’t like—and I ultimately agree—I said if we’re starting from scratch, if we’re starting from the bottom line, here’s our problem. It was a problem all along, really, if you thought about it, but... Superman is the sole survivor of the doomed planet Krypton. That was one of my main things: he’s the only one. How do we know Kryptonite can kill him? I mean, that’s kind of a test to destruction, isn’t it? If we’ve got this green, glowing rock here, this will kill Superman. But we don’t know that anymore, do we, if this is a brand new scenario?

So we need a way to show that Kryptonite will kill Superman, without killing Superman. So what I had come up with was, it is not the baby Kal-El who is launched away, it is the pregnant Lara. She arrives on Earth pregnant.

She gives birth to Superman on Earth. She’s found by the Kents, she’s taken in by the Kents. She gives birth. And then she finds that piece of Kryptonite that came along, and she dies. And that’s how we know.

JBC: That’s mean! [laughs] JOHN: Yeah! Then Jenette [Kahn] said—and I thought this was good; she was smart to say this—she thought that took it a little too far away from what we knew. And then she demonstrated a surprising knowledge of the characters that I didn’t realize that she had. She said, “If the explosion was caused by all these pressures inside Krypton, and if it was those pressures that fused the native elements of Krypton into Kryptonite—which is the story—perhaps it was already happening before the planet blew up. Perhaps there was already Kryptonite in the core, and that radiation was already killing people on Krypton before Superman is launched away. And I said, “That’s brilliant!”

And in my opening, that’s what Jor-El discovers is that the mysterious plague that’s killing everybody is Kryptonite radiation from the pressures in the core.

46

JBC: That’s not bad.

JBC: Did the Superman deal launch you into a different stratosphere, financially?

JOHN: No, no, not at all.

JOHN: Yeah. But it means I can still live in this house even though the royalties are usually non-existent these days.

JBC: Were you already there?

JBC: You obviously grew up on Superman.

JOHN: I had a book called Superman: Serial to Cereal, and they covered every single manifestation of Superman. It had a very spooky picture in it, too: a Kelloggs Cornflakes or something ad from the ’40s that had a painting of Superman with some kids, and it looked exactly like Christopher Reeve. Exactly.

JOHN: I did make a nice piece of change of the first Man of Steel, because it was the first comic in like a hundred years to have sold a million. Not since the ’40s had we seen those kinds of numbers. But, no, I got my regular page rate. And in fact I wasn’t inking the book.

A funny little sidebar story: The fans, even back then without the Internet, were saying, “Well, Byrne’s leaving to do the Superman bit for the money.” So I said in an interview somewhere, “Actually, I expect to make less doing Superman, because I won’t be inking it.” I had no idea what the royalties would be like, but I knew that DC books generally sold a lot less than Marvel books. Superman at that time was selling half of what the Fantastic Four sold.

I was Ralph Macchio’s office one day, and he said, “You know, John Buscema was in here the other day.” I said, “Oh, yeah?” And Ralph said, “He said, ‘I heard Byrne’s gonna do Superman and he’s gonna make less money.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And Buscema said, ‘Schmuck.’” [laughs] And I thought, “Well, at least he knows my name.” [laughter]

JBC: Did you ever meet Reeve?

JOHN: Twice. That was fun, too. Well, I met him at DC and we talked about the fourth movie. And then for the 50th anniversary, there was this big show at the Smithsonian. I went down for that

JBC: So there’s royalties on the books that...?

JOHN: Well, most of my money has always come from the actual doing of the job, because of the amount of pages that I do. I mean, my page rate got to a certain level. There was a while there, around ’92-’93, where the royalties, because of the direct sales and the speculation and everything else, they really took off. But for the bulk of my career, about a third of my income has come from royalties. Which is why— 47

because they invited me. He came over and introduced himself to me. “Hi, I’m Christopher Reeve, we met up at the DC offices.” “Really? Let me just think....” [laughter] And I chatted with Margot for a while because we were bonding on being Canadians.

And... three years ago? I went to the Sundance Film Festival with a couple of friends.

JBC: Just for the heck out it?

JOHN: Just for the heck of it. These friends go every year and I decided to go with them. And we were walking out, having seen this movie with Margot Kidder in it, and Margot Kidder walked past me going down the aisle. We went on a couple of paces and I turned to my friends and I said, “See that? These Hollywood people, they just walk right past me like we’ve never even met.” [laughs] Of course, how long ago was it, 15 years? It was fun.

JBC: So basically you did two titles, you did Action Comics, which was a team-up book, and you had the Superman title....

JOHN: And I ended up writing Adventures of Superman when Marv... departed.

JBC: Were you ostensibly the Superman editor at that time?

This Page: John’s Lois Lane was both glamorous and one tough cookie—much as Margot Kidder portrayed her to be in the Superman movies. Pencils from Man of Steel #4 and an early design drawing of Lois.

Next Page: A brilliant page from Superman #1.

You can almost feel Superman’s pain through John’s pencils.

JOHN: Well, not really, no. Ostensibly, that was Andy Helfer. And that turned out to be another situation where I didn’t get along with the editor. Helfer is at that end of the spectrum where everything has to be changed. Mike Gold made a comment one time, he said Helfer would change the spelling of his own name in the credits if he could think of a way to do it. I used to

Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Metallo, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

48

JBC: So there was negative fan press?

say that I was going to have to move to California in order to work with Andy, because Andy was clearly on California time. I’d start work at seven, and he would wander into the office at about noon. I’m finished, and he’s just getting in. So that didn’t work. And then, Carlin having just been fired from Marvel, they brought Carlin in as the assistant editor. I guess that’s a weird indication of the level of power that I had—which I’m uncomfortably aware of—that when I said I had a problem with the editor, the editor got the heave-ho. That’s kinda scary.

JOHN: Negative fan press, yup. The fans went crazy.

The fans went ballistic. And DC backed off. And I realized I was in trouble when Dick Giordano said to me, “Well, you have to realize that there are now two Supermen, the one you’re doing and the one we license.” And I sort of went, “Oookay.

What the hell does that mean?”

They gave Marv a totally free hand, too, and I remember a writer from The Boston Globe was doing a story and he asked me, “Well, they’re doing two different Supermen now, right? The one you’re doing in your two books, and the one that’s in the third book?” And I said, “Well, no, actually, it’s supposed to be the same guy.” Marv only lasted about a year.

But, yeah, I was constantly being sniped at by the fans, and DC was not defending me. They’d say they were supporting everything I was doing, everything was approved, everything was green-lighted. Not a single thing was done that didn’t pass through tight editorial scrutiny

JBC: What was your stance, overall, on Superman? Did you get to do all you wanted?

JOHN: I got to do most of what I wanted, but it was mostly a negative experience, largely because DC flipped out at the first whisper of negative press. Which, of course, started six months before the book came out, and nobody had seen a line of it. But it got out that I was going to do it.

That we were going, “They changed Superman!”

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clearly of the impression that I had walked in one day and said, “Give me Superman.” This even came around about a year ago; it still comes around. “John Byrne destroyed Curt Swan’s career.”

They say, “DC came to John Byrne and said, ‘You can have anything you want,’ and Byrne said, ‘I’ll take Superman.’”

Which, of course, is not what happened.

They came and said, “Would you like to do Superman?” I asked them, “What about Curt?” And they said Curt would be taken care of, and I took their word for it.

JBC: Do you look it as a measure of jealousy? Why such a reaction?

JOHN: Why does everybody hate me? [laughs] that comes with Superman. After about a year-and-a-half, 21 issues, I’d had enough.

And I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was Time, a Time/Warner publication. They did a 50th anniversary story—that was the issue I did the cover for—and the article referred to the reboot as something like “superfluous” or “unnecessary” or something like this.

And I said, “Gee, guys, thank you for your support.”

JBC: Well... I don’t think most people care about you, so to speak—

JBC: Like the writer and the editor of Time magazine would have any— JOHN: Well... I took it as, again, the death of a thousand cuts, and that was the last cut. It’s this weird thing, where fans were 51

Previous Page Top: Perhaps the biggest controversy of John’s time on the Superman books was when he had Superman execute the Kryptonian Phantom Zone escapees.

Previous Page Bottom: There can be only one! At least that was supposed to be the theory behind Crisis....

This Page: Another controversy sprung up as a result of Action Comics #592-593, where it was heavily implied that Big Barda was forced to appear in X-rated videos.

All characters ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

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JOHN: Yeah, that’s probably true.

JBC: Because, the guys at the comics shop that you go into on Wednesday night, the guys who linger around, I mean they’re obviously expressing their opinions, and there’s a great deal of... anger, I don’t know what you’d call it....

JOHN: I don’t know. I have said many times, I wish somebody could point to me the terrible things that I have actually done that have gotten me this reputation of being an ogre and being hard to work with and all these other things. I’ve tossed it out a couple of times online, saying, “Look, here’s the Byrne challenge. You have to give me firsthand, personal experiences of this bad, nasty guy that you’re talking about.” And, yeah, they’re not there. They’re not there. Everybody says, “Well, my cousin on my mother’s side has a neighbor whose dog once saw you....” I say, “Well, no, that doesn’t count.” All of the stories turn out to be false.

JBC: But do you think it has anything to do with jealousy?

JOHN: I don’t think it was jealousy so much as—and I could be totally wrong on this. But, number one, the only thing Americans love more than a ragsto-riches story is a riches-torags story.

They love to see the titans fall. And that’s part of it, I think, because I became such an icon.

Number two, my particular fans, like any fans, tend to be a little bit rabid and a little bit over the top. I mean, one guy online the other day was talking about how I’m better than Will Eisner, and I just wanted to slap him. [laughs] And I think a lot of what my fans have said about me, some of the other fans kind of attribute to me. As if, if Joe fan says John Byrne is the best artist who ever walked the face of the Earth, then that’s somehow John Byrne who’s saying that. That’s where the ego thing comes from.

And then, of course, I was handed a lot of these iconic characters to tidy up: Superman, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four. Presumably because the companies thought that I would do a good job.

And that takes us to another thing that I have noticed in fans—and this is probably across the board, not just for me— which is this three-tiered thinking that goes sort of like, Step One: “I don’t like this.”

And that’s okay, you’re entitled 53

Previous Page: Action Comics #584, page 7 pencils.

Above: Promotional art for the Legends miniseries, which established the ties of the post-Crisis super-hero community and set the stage for the new Justice League.

Left: Promotional art for a story arc which introduced the post-Crisis Supergirl.

All characters ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

This Page: Although John did some preliminary sketches for a Demon series while he was working on Superman, the closest he ever got was a guestappearance in Action Comics #588.

Next Page: Page 25 of Action Comics #600, John’s last issue on the title until 2005. Inks by George Pérez.

Darkseid, Demon, Desaad, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

to not like something. Step Two is “I don’t like this, therefore it’s bad.”

Well, that’s kind of subjective, okay, fine. And then the third step, and this one I don’t understand: “I don’t like this.

Therefore it’s bad.

Therefore it’s bad deliberately. Whoever—the writer, the artist, whatever—are deliberately doing a bad job just to piss me off as a fan.” And that one I’ve never understood. And I’ve said it online, I’ve said it at conventions, “Can you honestly believe that a company would publish something deliberately bad?” I mean, a lot of bad stuff gets published, yeah, but does somebody sit down at a drawing board or a typewriter and say, “Today I will suck”? I can’t believe that. I can’t believe that the worst artist in the world sits down deliberately to do bad stuff. It just doesn’t make sense.

I know one example that sort of goes that way, that sort of surprised me. When I started doing Superman, I was “Mr. Three-Books-a-Month” guy and I only had two: Superman and Action. So I said, “I need another book. I’d like to do the Demon.” And Dick said, “Well, we’ve got a Demon series in the works. But it’s bad and we’ll kill it if you want.” [Jon laughs] And I said, “No, no, don’t kill somebody else’s job for me.” And then it came out. They published it after Dick had said it was bad. I thought, well, see, that’s stupid.

But that’s a rare example. For the most part, I genuinely think, I hope, dear God.... For example, everybody knows that I think Rob Liefeld is one of the worst artists ever to crawl out from under a rock, but I believe, I hope, I pray, that Rob sits down at the drawing board genuinely believing he’s doing good work, and trying to do good work, and not trying to suck as much as I think he does. Because otherwise, why? Why would anybody do it? And that’s where you get into all these fans who are mind-readers.

“Oh, Byrne doesn’t care anymore.” And “Byrne is doing this because he hates the characters.”

I did an FF story where Franklin and Alicia got captured by Annihilus, were bashed around by Annihilus. And this guy very sincerely came up to me at a convention and said, “Why do you do these characters if you hate them so much?” [Jon laughs] “You’ve never heard the song ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love,’ huh? Y’know, if I only did nice stuff with these characters, you wouldn’t want to read it, wouldja?”

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55

Part 4:

A Legend is Made then. He asked me to do a new She-Hulk book, but he asked me to come up with something that hadn’t been done with the character before—something new and different. I thought about it for a while, and then I thought, “Well, how about she knows that she’s in a comic book.

We’ll break the fourth wall.” And Mark loved it. Mark was one of those guys who, number one, loved to take risks, and, number two, was a very funny guy himself, so he could immediately see the potential. So it was really not a hard sell at all.

JBC: From Superman, did you just go right back to Marvel?

JOHN: Um... yeah, I think I did.

JBC: The next thing you did was West Coast Avengers, right?

JOHN: Yes, West Coast Avengers, but I actually pitched Hidden Years before that.

JBC: You pitched an X-Men book in the ’80s?

ENW: Most writers I’ve talked to find humor harder to write than a straight-ahead action/drama.

Did you find that to be the case as well?

JOHN: Yeah, I pitched Hidden Years. I didn’t have that title then. And it was actually killed because of X-Factor. Because they said it would be the same team as X-Factor and it would be confusing. Tom DeFalco had this great line, “Another book called X-Men would be too confusing.” I wish I had that in writing.

JOHN: I didn’t really think of it as a humor book.

That was part of the trick, I think. I didn’t set out to be funny ha-ha; I set out to be weird and strange and wonky, and to try to keep it light-hearted. And that, of course, manifested itself as my own twisted sense of humor. So, no, I didn’t find it particularly hard to write, and now people will tell me that’s why it wasn’t particularly funny. [laughter]

ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON: Over the past 30 years or so, with a few rare exceptions, humor books don’t tend to do very well. How were you able to sell Marvel on the idea of Sensational She-Hulk?

ENW: How well do you think it fit in with the overall Marvel scheme of things at the time?

JOHN: Well, it fit in fairly well, I think, except for those few occasions when other writers would use the character and they’d try to carry the “breaking the fourth wall” thing into other books. And we’d just have to say, “Well, no, don’t do that, because that destroys the only thing this

JOHN: It started with Mark Gruenwald—he was second-incommand back 56

book has that makes it different.” She doesn’t break the fourth wall when she’s in the Fantastic Four; she doesn’t break when she’s in the Avengers.

But for the most part I think it fit in quite well.

In fact, the only time I had Marvel fans rolling in the aisles convulsed with apathy was when I had Santa Claus appear. They always hate it when I have Santa Claus appear, which is why I do it as often as I can. [laughter] ENW: It’s not like Santa Claus doesn’t appear in other books, though.

JOHN: I've always found it really amusing. They’re okay with Satan, but they can’t deal with Santa Claus being real. [laughter] JBC: I want to talk to you about Legend, how that came about.

JOHN: It came about because of Image having started this imprint, which seemed like a good idea. Frank called me up and said, “A bunch of us are doing this and we thought we’d feel bad if we didn’t invite you to be

part of it.” Originally it was called Dinosaur, and there were a whole bunch of people, including Chris. And then one day Frank sort of said “It should be just artists who write.” Our phrase became “death to those who cannot draw.”

Somewhere along the way, Frank and I almost simultaneously said, “We’re going to shoot ourselves in the foot if we call ourselves Dinosaur.”

[Jon laughs] And then we said, “Let’s call it Legend! Because that’s what these things are, they’re legends!” And that of course became “a bunch of selfdeclared legends are forming an imprint,” and the imprint died in about six minutes.

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Previous Page: Unused and unfinished pencils intended for X-Men: The Hidden Years.

Left: The Ringmaster conveniently (for the reader) quizzes She-Hulk on her origin in She-Hulk #1.

Above: She-Hulk breaks the fourth wall—along with the panel borders!

Pencils for page 7 of She-Hulk #4.

Blonde Phantom, She-Hulk, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JBC: You weren’t there that long?

Right: Opening splash page of Next Men #3.

Included in the margin are John’s notes to Legend’s group editor, Barbara Kesel.

Below: Next Men #14, page 10.

Next Page: Bethany, aka Hardbody, in a commission drawing and in the pages of Next Men #7.

Next Men ™ and ©2006 John Byrne.

JOHN: I was there longer than anybody, actually. But that was the problem. I got pissed off when I noticed that I was the only monthly presence. “Where are the rest of you guys?”

Frank was doing stuff every once in a while, but then a bunch of people were coming in who hadn’t done anything yet. Like, Walt Simonson had just joined, but he hadn’t done anything yet.

There was talk about doing a card set, and that we should have Walter in the card set, and I said, “Well, no, remember we said we wouldn’t solicit anything that hadn’t appeared yet? So Walt’s book should come out before he’s part of the Legend card set.” And it just went back and forth and up and down and then finally the industry crashed. And I said, “Okay, I need a real job.”

JBC: What was the thinking behind Next Men? JOHN: I wanted to do an independent thing. I think Dark Horse was doing three. I wanted to be safe; I wanted it to sort of smell like a super-hero book even though it wasn’t going to be a super-hero book—it was going to be science fiction. So I gave them super-powers and I gave them a name that sort of sounded like “X-Men” as sort of a signal to everybody. It did very well. Actually, it was funny, because the first issue was the best-selling direct sales market book ever to that point. And this is where I go wrong, this is where I make mistakes. The first issue’s initial orders were 109,000. And there were some orders here and some orders there, and by the time all was said and done, I think it got up to about 150, 175.

JBC: Wow! JOHN: Yeah. And that was huge back then. The best anything had done was, like, 30,000. Dark Horse wanted to promote that. I said, “No, don’t promote that. Because then the speculators will think it’s a big seller, and they won’t buy it.”

Because I was stupid, and I thought speculators actually thought like people who were logical. [Jon laughs] 58

A few months later Rob Liefeld came out with Youngblood, and it had exactly the same arc. And I know it had exactly the same arc because he did promote it.

And the speculators went nuts. “This is a great story, we’ve got to get it!” And I thought, “They don’t understand how it works.” But, yeah, Youngblood did exactly the same first three numbers, and then of course went on to, like, a million—

and they said that comics showed a better turn on the investment than gold. Because at that point Action Comics #1 had just sold at auction for $20,000, and it was supposed to sell originally for ten cents. I read that article and I said, “The guy who sold it for $20,000, what did he pay for it?” Because I’m thinking he didn’t pay just the dime. He probably paid $18,000 for it. They totally missed the point. And I still hear that to this day: “Comics are a better investment than gold.”

No. Not unless you have a time machine.

JBC: I know they were talking about the first issue of Spawn selling so many, “Wow, it’s going to be worth something!” [laughter] JOHN: If all of you have 40 copies in your mother’s basement, then why is Action Comics #1 worth so much? Well, because there’s six of them. It’s historically significant, which Spawn will never be. But more importantly, there’s six of them. And we know where they are.

The worst thing that ever happened was when the Wall Street Journal in 1978 or so did an article

ENW: I know of at least two people who bought Next Men primarily for the letters pages.

JOHN: [laughs] The world’s longest letters page; it kept growing and growing.

ENW: Did you get the idea to do that from Dave Sim’s Cerebus letters pages, or did it just evolve organically?

JOHN: It just happened. I never followed Cerebus, so I wasn’t aware that he was doing it until people started telling me that that was what I was doing. No, the letters columns just got longer and longer and longer.

Which was something I could do in a book that had no advertising, except house ads. I was able to just drop the house ads.

ENW: How much time did you find yourself spending just on the letters columns?

JOHN: I used to take about a day, a day-and-a-half.

I’d sit down and just cull through—it was a mechanical process, of course, back in those days of “real” mail and no Internet, where you had to wade through letters that you actually cannot read because they’re so badly written—the handwriting that is.

That was especially a problem on She-Hulk when people were always sending me letters with green ink on yellow paper, because they thought that was clever—and none of those ever got published. [laughter] I couldn’t read them. And the same would happen with Next Men; people would send me mechanically badly written letters. So I’d have to wade through those to see if there was anything worth picking out, but mostly I’d go straight to the letters that were typed.

59

ENW: Was it strictly financial reasons that made you end the series?

JOHN: No, actually. Originally I just wanted some time off. Since it was my book I wasn't going to hand it off to Roger Stern. I remember Roger telling me somebody had asked him if he was going to take over Next Men because he always followed me. [laughter] And he said, “No, no. That’s John’s book.” So I originally was just going to put it to sleep for about six months, and unfortunately I picked the moment when the industry collapsed. Then I realized that when I brought it back it was most likely going to just vanish without a ripple if I didn’t wait for the industry to get healthy again. And I’m not entirely sure it’s healthy enough yet. I’ve still got 20 issues worth of story to tell. I wish something would happen. I wish I’d win the lottery so I could go ahead and do it. [laughter]

not didn’t really seem to pick up on it. I think they saw it, perhaps, as different enough—at least I certainly didn’t see any major comparisons.

ENW: If it had continued would you have gone even further from the basic Fantastic Four concept?

JOHN: I’m not really sure. I had a long timeline worked out for that series. It started in, like, 1918 and worked its way up into the future in which it took place, and most of it was really just science-fictiony adventures, which I suppose is, after all, the terrain of the FF. As the characters evolved I’m sure they would have found their own identities.

ENW: You also created some other titles for the Legend banner: Danger Unlimited, Babe, and Torch of Liberty, which was just a one-shot. Were you trying to establish a cohesive group of books, or did you just have a bunch of ideas that you wanted to get out there?

JOHN: I had different ideas, and I wanted to play with as much as I could. Art Adams and I were talking about at least part of Legend being a shared universe. That was what Danger Unlimited and Babe were all about; they were in the same universe as Monkeyman & O'Brien and Hellboy. But, of course, things didn’t really quite jell at Legend. I think Jo Duffy had the best line: “It didn’t take long for Legend to become myth.” [laughter]

ENW: Did you have other ideas for the Torch of Liberty as well, beyond the one-shot?

JOHN: Those were originally going to appear as backups in the next Babe series. And then, of course, Babe went the way of all things.

ENW Do you see any similarities between the Torch of Liberty and the Ultimates version of Captain America?

ENW: Do you think any of the criticism—whether it was fair or not—comparing Danger Unlimited to Fantastic Four hurt the book at all?

JOHN: I haven’t seen the Ultimates version, so I don’t know. I’m really ignorant about what’s going on in funny books these days, because they depress me so much. I don’t look. [laughter]

JOHN: I didn’t actually get a lot of criticism. I mean, I was out there saying, “Since nobody else is doing the Fantastic Four, I thought I would,” but the critics and what60

ENW: Babe was a concept you had well before Legend started.

JOHN: Yeah, Babe was an idea that had been kicking around in my head for a long time. It originally began as a series I was talking with Ralph Macchio up at Marvel about doing. It was called Sextet back then, because there were going to be six women, though it ended up being five. But it was an idea that went back a long way. “What if you have five or six different women who fuse together to make one, and each one takes a turn being in charge. I think it would have been a lot of fun if it had had a chance to really go somewhere.

ENW: Considering the success that Mike Mignola has had with Hellboy and Frank Miller has had with Sin City, do you have any regrets about putting your own books aside?

JOHN: Not really, no. Those were very

different books and those are very different guys, of course. They went after that success. Well, Frank, he just had to sit back and let it happen, but I’ve never been oriented that way in terms of “Oh, I want to get a Danger Unlimited movie,” or whatever. For me the comics are what it’s all about. If somebody came to me and said, “We’ll give you a million dollars if you’ll let us do a Danger Unlimited movie I’d probably say yes, but people did come to me and say “We’d like to make Next Men movies,” and basically they were just looking for generic superheroes they could plug into their own storylines. And my response was always, “Well, no, Next Men is a novel. If you want to make a Next Men movie, you have to make the story I wrote,” so that didn’t happen. I need my own Robert Rodriguez, I guess. [laughter] ENW: You worked a bit on the business side of Legend, too, didn’t you?

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Previous Page: Babe preliminary artwork.

Below: Pages 17 and 18 of Babe #2.

Babe ™ and ©2006 John Byrne.

Below: Thor (perhaps the one Kirby hero John hasn’t done on a regular basis) in action. Page 20 of Avengers #166.

Next Page: A doublepage spread in pencil form—from Orion #13.

Captain Marvel, New Gods ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Count Nefaria, Thor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: Just a little bit, not much. Frank and I were the joint owners of the trademark, but we tried to avoid the business part as much as possible. We didn’t really think of it as self-publishing, obviously, since Legend was an imprint—as Image had started out. We were, in fact, inspired

by Image—by that rather brilliant idea of being an imprint in another company where that company takes all the risks.

ENW: Did the business end ever carry over into the creative side, or were you able to keep the two separate?

JOHN: I think it was mostly separate, yeah.

JBC: Captain America, Fantastic Four, and then Jack Kirby’s Fourth World.... Do you feel a kinship to Jack Kirby?

JOHN: I get in trouble when I say this, but I’ve always said I feel a very “proprietorial” attitude towards his work. Like I should be protecting it, like it somehow belongs to me. Because any of us fans feel that about the stuff that we love; we feel like it belongs to us. But I take that to the next step with it being a professional. It’s like, “Yeah, this guy. Boy, this is my imaginary father when I was a kid, this is the guy.”

JBC: It always seems like you... I don’t think you did Thor....

JOHN: No, I’ve never done Thor on a regular basis, just in the Avengers.

JBC: But you’ve pretty much taken his major ’60s conceptions and worked with them. Do you think that “proprietaryness” might make you too cautious with it.

JOHN: Sometimes.

JBC: Because I see it as a great play on Stan and Jack’s work; your Fantastic Four run was an awful lot of fun. But then can you take it to another....

JOHN: I don’t think I took it to another level. I don’t think you can, the Fantastic Four, quite frankly. Oddly enough, I felt a little more open, a little freer, when I was doing the New Gods, the Fourth World. There was so much material and so much untapped material there that I felt that I could explore.

I mean, I did the origin of Darkseid!

And oddly enough, I thought I was going to get crucified for it, and I didn’t get a single complaint about that.

And I thought perhaps other people saw the same thing buried in there somewhere. I remember the first time that I read the New Gods and Heggra, Darkseid’s mother, is introduced. And I sort of thought, “Darkseid had a mother?

Darkseid was born?” And I couldn’t wrap my brain around “Li’l Darkseid.”

62

JBC: He is mystery.

Li’l Darkseid running around being a little stone baby! No. So he must have been something else. And that was how the whole origin of Darkseid, and that was where I think on Fourth World I was able to take it to some different levels. But, I mean, they took it to such a level on the Fantastic Four, Stan and Jack. I didn’t feel like I had to take it anywhere else; I felt like I just had to drive down the same road. Hopefully not backing up too much.

JOHN: He is mystery. He is just the coolest damn character, like, ever!

JBC: Did you get wrapped up in the Fourth World when it came out?

JOHN: I did, not actually when it came out; I missed it when it came out, but I did pick it up just toward the end. I think I started buying Mister Miracle after the other stuff had been cancelled. So I had to pick up the other stuff from the second-hand bookstore that used to be around back then. And I put it all together. It was years before I could find the first issue of New Gods. I remember going, “Well, based on the second issue, what do they need in a first issue?” I mean the second issue was ‘There came a time,’” all this stuff, and I said, “What was in the first issue?” And it was just this amazing stuff.

JBC: The New Gods tapestry is almost a generic thing, anyway, so you can really focus on— JOHN: And Kirby just threw away so much stuff, just one line, one line, one line. When I was rereading this stuff in order to do Fourth World and I stumbled across something that informed my entire run, where Metron has a throwaway line and he says, “I am neither Apokolips nor New Genesis, I am something else.” And I go, “Where’s the rest of that?! Jack! What is that!?” And I’ve played off that a couple of times. In fact, the New Gods appeared in the latest Generations series and Metron’s going around saying, “Yes, I am neither of Apokolips nor New Genesis.”

JBC: That comic right there—Jimmy Olsen #133, that’s it— JOHN: It’s phenomenal stuff. The Jimmy Olsen stuff, 63

especially, I would always point to as saying, “Look at the way he threw stuff away in one panel that we’ve spent twelve issues on now.” The Mountain of Judgment, holy crap!

What is that?

Just amazing stuff.

JBC: Have you ever thought about... I guess he is the most prolific comic book artist.

Above: Pencils for page 10 of Action Comics #829—John’s most recent foray into the Fourth World.

Right: Pencils for the Julius Schwartz tribute, DC Comics Presents: Hawkman #1. The story was based on the cover to 1965’s Hawkman #6— pure Silver Age material.

Next Page: A Generations pin-up.

All characters ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

JOHN: Gotta be. I think it was what, 50,000 pages or something? One of my lines was, a few years ago I did the math and I realized that I’ve produced, conservatively, the estimate was I’ve produced about 15,000 published pages. And my line is always, “Which is about what Jack Kirby did in his first week.” This was after 20 years in the business, I’d done that.

Kirby is another one who ruined me, in much the way “Bob Kane” did, in the sense that he did so much, and I sort of thought, “Well, if you’re any good at it, that’s the benchmark. You’ve got to be able to produce quality work in huge volumes the way he did.” And it was only years later that I realized, for example, that Mister Miracle, New Gods, and Forever People were not monthly books. [laughter] He wasn’t doing three books a month, he was doing a book-and-a-half a month. “Ohhh, okay.” And I also, of course, years later found out that he had no life while he was doing all this stuff. He was living in his studio.

ENW: How did the first Generations 64

mini-series get started?

JOHN: It happened because a JSA/Invaders story I wanted to do didn’t happen. When I did Batman/Captain America, which was very well received, I said, “Well, now I want to do the sequel,” which was the JSA/Invaders. And nobody was interested in doing it at that time. Marvel and DC weren’t talking to each other at that point, or something like that.

So I said, “How can I do essentially that without having Marvel characters in it?” And I came up with the whole notion of Generations.

ENW: What do you think was the key ingredient of the book that made it so popular and led to the sequels?

JOHN: Number one, and I hate to say this because I’m always complaining about the aging fanbase, but I think the aging fanbase is exactly what turned out to be the target audience for Generations. It’s all those people like me who grew up reading the Silver Age stuff and remembered it. And I think, in a large way, that’s one of the reasons that the third Generations series was less successful than the first two.

ENW: You passed those characters by.

JOHN: It went past the Silver Age, yeah. It went into terra incognita very quickly, and so there weren’t all those touchstones for people to say, “Oh, I remember that! He’s playing off of this.”

And that’s what was the fun part for me, to say, “Hey, remember that goofy story back in 1966? I can do a twist on that.” So if there’s ever a Generations IV, we go back to formula. [laughter] ENW: So you would go back to the beginning and fill in some gaps.

JOHN: Yeah. I still would want to basically jump around all those decades, all those years I haven’t touched.

ENW: The Doom Patrol has gone through many incarnations over the years, some more successful than others. Why did you want to take it back more to its roots?

Above: The end of the Doom Patrol—yet again.

The final page of Doom Patrol #18—the last issue of the series.

Right: Rita Farr, aka Elasti-girl. John’s pin-up for a Who’s Who in the DC Universe entry.

Next Page: John still knows how to draw Superman. Pencils from his recent run on Action Comics.

Doom Patrol, Elasti-girl, Livewire, Lois Lane, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

JOHN: That’s the Doom Patrol for me. I was there in, what was it, 1963? I remember seeing the Doom Patrol when they first came out, and that was the real Doom Patrol for me. When I sat down and looked at all the stuff that had happened to it since, and I was talking to Mike Carlin and said, “God, you know, to relaunch this book I’m going to have to spend six issues just getting it to where I want it to be.” He was the one who said, “You want to go Man of Steel on this?” And I kind of went, “Yeah, okay.” [laughter] That made it real easy.

ENW: Do you think it was given enough time to find its audience?

JOHN: With the marketplace that we have today, I don’t know whether it is a question of time. Books get shot down. One of the first things I learned when I went online about ten years ago was running into all these people who said they wanted to buy Danger Unlimited, but their retailers wouldn’t order it because “Byrne stuff

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doesn’t sell.” They’re standing there with money in their hands, and their retailer is telling them “Byrne stuff doesn’t sell.” I thought, “We’re doomed.” There are so many books— not just mine, either—that get killed by the marketplace, rather than by anything actually being wrong with the book.

ENW: Did you have any trepidations about going back to a Superman book?

JOHN: Not as much as I would have expected. When Dan DiDio called me up, “You want to do this?”, there was a moment of hesitation. Then I thought, “Gosh, the character is so far removed from where I left him, and I’m not going to have to come up with stories. I’m not going to be the one to have to fit this into the DC Universe, so there’s nothing I really need to know except how to draw Superman.” So ultimately it wasn’t as scary as it was the first time. [laughter] ENW: Did you have any difficulties being “just the penciler”?

JOHN: No, no. I’ve done that a couple of times now. I did it on True Brit and a couple of other projects, and I’ve found that it works a different set of artistic muscles, so it’s really quite fun.

Especially when every once in a while the writer asks for something that’s impossible to draw. [laughter] You have to go, “Okay, how do I solve this?”

ENW: You mentioned earlier your interest in the Demon and that you wanted to try your hand at a Demon series.

JOHN: Oh, yeah, for a long, long time.

ENW: What’s the appeal of the character for you?

JOHN: As I try to emphasize in the series, and as I’ve tried to emphasize over the years, the main point that so many writers seemed to miss, I just thought that Kirby had come up with something so amazing in that basic concept of a demon who’s possessed by a man. It’s not that Etrigan lives inside some poor schmuck named Jason Blood, it’s that Jason Blood was created to be a vessel for Etrigan and Etrigan is imprisoned inside Jason Blood. That’s about as close to unique as you get in comic books these days. That’s something that’s not been done before. Of course, the moment Kirby let go of it other writers rushed in and turned into just Jason Blood is possessed by Etrigan. I used to say that you can’t throw a stick in the DC Universe without hitting somebody who’s possessed by a demon. Let’s just strip away all the interesting stuff, shall we?

That was the main appeal, just that it was so wonky. And, of course, I have a fondness for the magical, mystical stuff— though I hadn’t done it much—especially when it’s big and loud like Etrigan, as opposed to subtle like Dr. Strange.

ENW: Was there any talk of it being a Vertigo title, since you play up the horror element in the book?

JOHN: No, the main point was bringing it back into the DC Universe. And, of course, Dan DiDio kept saying, 67

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“Make it darker.” And I kept saying, “You don’t know who you’re talking to, dude.” [laughter] “You don’t want me to go dark.

You don’t know what lives inside this furry head.” [laughter] ENW: So now that it’s the only book on your plate for the moment, does it feel kind of weird? Everyone is so used to seeing two or three John Byrne books on the racks every month.

JOHN: My normal load has been three books a month, and it is very strange. I keep calling them up. It’s a weird thing, I’ll call them up and say, “Hey, how about if I do this?” And they’ll say, “That’s already in development by somebody else.” “Oh, okay, how about if I do this?” “Already in development.” After a while you start to just sort of twitch. And I call up and say, “Okay, I know this is already in development, but I have to ask just in case it isn’t.” We’ll find something.

I was talking to Joey Cavalieri the other day and he said, “We oughta find you another book.” And I said, “Yeah. Whatta ya got?”

Power Girl. I don’t know, I don’t know. They always offer me the strange books that are off to one side and I find those so hard to resist.

ENW: Well I’m sure you get a little more creative freedom with those books.

JOHN: It’s more freedom and it’s also fun.

The weird characters are less clearly defined, even if they’ve been around forever. There’s just a little bit of extra magic, I think, somehow to the guys that don’t have a lot of extra baggage behind them.

ENW: When I was a kid I found myself more attracted to the Metamorphos, and the Creepers, and the characters like that.

JOHN: Yeah, I’d love to do Metamorpho, I’d love to do Challengers, I’d love to do Metal Men. Every few hundred years, or so, I go in and say, “How about Kamandi?” We wouldn’t be able to give Kamandi away probably, but that would be fun.

ENW: With DC doing this “One Year Later” thing, and a lot of books are starting fresh, it seems like the perfect opportunity to get another book. If you could pick your ideal character to start over with, do you have one in mind that you would really like to do?

JOHN: I don’t know. I was talking with Dan DiDio the other day about Power Girl. They don’t know exactly where she’s going to land after Identity Crisis and “One Year Later” and everything else. But I also found myself thinking that perhaps I should steer away from the second- and third-tier characters for a while. Perhaps I need to go find myself a Batman book or a Superman book or something that’s right smack-dab in the middle of the DC Universe instead of playing around with stuff like Doom Patrol and Demon and 69

Previous Page: In 2004 John penciled an entire issue as his pitch for a Demon series—originally entitled Bloodworks— which evolved into Blood of the Demon. Some pages from the pitch were used in Blood of the Demon #1, but many—such as this two-page flashback sequence—were redrawn.

Below: John drew this illustration in the ’80s as part of a pitch for a Metal Men series.

The Demon, Jason Blood, Metal Men ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Part 5:

Storytelling and the Creative Process ENW: Do you plan it out in your head beforehand, or do you just sit down and draw?

JBC: How long did you work at that sign company again?

JOHN: About a year.

JOHN: The way I try to describe it to people, when I was a kid teaching myself to draw, and I didn’t know about drawing it in pencil first so you could erase, I used to draw everything straight with pen. Which meant that every line had to be the right line the first time. I developed that habit of drawing very, very tightly, very, very carefully.

And the way I describe it is I’d get a snapshot in my mind of the image, and I’d sort of project that onto the page and trace it.

And that’s what I still do, even with a pencil. This has served me well over the years.

When I first started out, when I was still in my fan days—because I stopped doing thumbnails even before I turned pro—the thumbnails were kind of binding, because having put that onto paper, that was what I was required to draw. Whereas with the snapshot in my mind, I can mess with it a bit. I can move things around; I can change things. So it keeps it much more spontaneous; it keeps the energy level higher. And that’s the main thing I’ve always been concerned about is keeping the energy level high.

JBC: Did you get a good, solid feel for professionalism, for being on time, getting the job done?

JOHN: I think so. Most of that I think actually comes from self-application, because I was working at Charlton at the same time I was working at Hook Signs. And when I quit Hook Signs, my first reaction was, “Great! I can sleep until noon and I can do what I want!” And it only took a couple of three o’clock in the morning hitting the deadlines for me to kind of go, “You know, this is a job isn’t it? I should treat this like a job.” And I have ever since. It’s get up in the morning, get to the drawing board....”

JBC: When do you stop?

Is it a nine-to-five thing?

JOHN: It’s seven-to-four, actually, with maybe a half an hour off for lunch.

JBC: And do you stay up late watching movies or something?

JOHN: No, I go to bed at nine o’clock.

JBC: Really?

JOHN: And I get up at, like, five.

JBC: You have a dog?

ENW: Is there any extra thinking involved when you’re working with another writer?

Do you read the entire script before sitting down at the board, or do you take it a page at a time?

JOHN: I have a dog. And a cat, somewhere. I let the dog out and I stagger around like a zombie for a while.

JBC: How many pages can you do in a day?

JOHN: Generally speaking I will flip through the script— or the plot, if it’s broken down page by page—just to see if there’s anything there that’s going to surprise me. But then I’ll just start drawing on page one. There’s a funny quirk that I have, if I have a picture or a panel or a page in my

JOHN: It varies. Two to three pages a day.

ENW: You don’t do thumbnails at all, right?

JOHN: Oh, no. I haven’t for 30 years.

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head, it will fester if I don’t get to it. So I really don’t like to know for sure what’s on page 18 when I’m starting on page one, because by the time I get to page 18 it will have turned into something disgusting in my head and I won’t be able to draw it. I prefer to just start on page one, though sometimes on my own stuff I frequently draw the pages out of order. I’ll sometimes do that with a full script, too—just open it to a random page and draw, and just keep doing that until the pages are done.

ENW: How do you work when you’re inking yourself? Do you ink a page as soon as you finish the penciling, or do you work in batches?

JOHN: I usually finish a page in pencil and then ink it. There are several layers to it, because I’ll do the pen work, then I’ll do the brush work, and then I’ll fill in the blacks.

JBC: Do you have any current favorite artists?

JOHN: Who counts as current? I love... I call them the Dodson twins [Terry and Rachel], although I know they are husband and wife. Nobody else is doing Adam Hughes right now, so they might as well. So them— JBC: Did you see CBA #21 [featuring Adam Hughes]?

JOHN: Yes, I thought it was a terrific issue. In fact, it was that issue that finally pushed me over the edge to say, “I’ve got to fatten my line.” I’ve been thinking about fattening my line, and looking at the way Adam does it. I thought, “Why not?”

JBC: Do you use the computer as an artistic tool?

JOHN: I’ve been using the computer to do a lot of 3-D modeling, and I’ve found a way— JBC: Does it look like Byrne drew it?

JOHN: Oh, sure. I found a way to do models that look like line drawings, so I’ve been doing 71

Previous Page: Selfillustration from 1985.

Left: John’s page breakdowns for X-Men #137.

Below: Partially finished Justice League piece that was never used—but it does provide some insight into John’s inking process.

Batman, Flash, Hawkman, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Right: John at his drawing board.

Below: John used a computer graphics program to create the magic effects in the top panel of the page—from his most recent run on Action Comics.

Next Page Bottom: John’s first design drawing of Superman villainess, Rampage.

Next Page Top: A Lovecraftian creature gives Etrigan all he can handle. Blood of the Demon #2 cover art.

The Demon, Rampage, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

stuff like that.

I’ve done the Batmobile, the JLA Watchtower, tabletop emblems—to keep them in perspective.

JBC: Can you do me a Whiz Wagon?

JOHN: [laughs] Actually, I tried to build the SuperCycle from the Forever People. Kirby stuff doesn’t translate into 3-D. “But that wheel is going— oh my God.” So... yeah, I actually built all the Batmobiles. The 1940s Batmobile, a giant robot, the Blackhawk planes. In my spare time I build these 3-D models.

JBC: Really?

JOHN: Yeah, in my “spare time,” quote-unquote.

JBC: The lettering you use, is it your font?

JOHN: It’s actually based on Jack Morelli. He asked me to make a font for him. He said, “What would you charge me to make a font for me?” And I said, “I get to use it.”

JBC: Okay, so you run the models out as bitmaps?

JOHN: I run them out and then I go in and I add characters and shading.

ENW: When you’re writing for someone else, are you more descriptive or do you prefer to write plot-first?

JOHN: The last time I wrote full-script was when I was doing Spider-Woman. Usually I would work Marvel method and I would write plots and then do the dialogue later. On Spider-Woman what I did was I wrote full scripts, but I didn’t break it down by page, I only broke it down by panel so that the artist could pace it. “If you want to put 16 panels on one page, go right ahead and do so. Just make sure there’s room enough for the dialogue.” And that seemed to work fairly well.

ENW: Where do you get the most satisfaction— the writing side or the drawing side?

JOHN: It’s so different. I find that I get a lot of satisfaction when I write for somebody else to draw. Like when I was doing Iron Man and those 72

astonishing pages were coming back from John Romita, Jr., and it was just like, “Oh, yeah, this is why I do this for a living. It’s because I get to look at this stuff, because this stuff is so good!”

It’s about the same, I guess. I get a lot of joy out of drawing the pictures, and I get a lot of joy out of writing the words, but it’s two different kinds of joy.

ENW: So would you prefer to keep it a mixed bag, and do a little drawing here, a little writing there, and little of both at times, as well?

JOHN: Yeah, and that’s why it’s interesting, again, to be just the art robot on stuff. As I said earlier, it works a different set of muscles.

ENW: Alan Davis told me that after doing something like JLA: The Nail, that he feels the need to just be a penciler for a few months so he can recharge the batteries.

JOHN: The term I use every once in a while, I’ll say I need a radish. Apparently, gourmets, to cleanse their palates between courses, will take a bite of a slice of radish.

And that’s what I need—“This is my radish.”

ENW: You’ve also written a few novels. Are you able to apply things you’ve learned from writing comics to the novels and vice versa?

JOHN: Oh, very much so. My first novel, Fear Book, was nominated for a Stoker Award by the American Horror Writers as Best First Novel. And at one point I thought, “You know, it really isn’t fair that I should be nominated for Best First Novel, because I’ve spent the last ten years writing what are essentially novels. This really isn’t my first novel, this is just the first one without pictures.”

I was able to bring a lot of what I’d learned from writing comics. In fact, my wife at the time, when she read the first draft of Fear Book, she pointed out that I should probably take out all the double exclamation points. [laughter] “Oh, yeah, they don’t do that in novels.”

ENW: So what things do you find translate between the two?

JOHN: Good question. I find that I tend to address different stuff in the novels. For example, the Wonder Woman novel that I wrote I would never have done as a comic book, because I think it would have been kind of dull in comic form.

ENW: It would have had too many talking heads?

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Below: Early Wonder Woman sketch.

Right: Samples for a proposed Muppets newspaper strip. Inks by Terry Austin.

Next Page Bottom: John’s pencils alongside Tom Batiuk’s inks for a Funky Winkerbean daily.

Wonder Woman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Muppets ™ and ©2006 Henson. Funky Winkerbean ©2006 Batom, Inc.

JOHN: There were a lot of people standing around talking to each other about portentious things, and very few scenes of people actually hitting each other. But nevertheless, you bring the kind of magic of the comics to it. You try to take it to that plane—call it magic realism, I guess, where stuff happens that doesn’t happen in the real world, but you treat it very matter-of-factly.

And I think that’s the key to writing good fantasy. The way I phrase it is that you never wink at the audience.

And it’s the same when you’re writing a fantasy novel, like my two horror novels or Wonder Woman, you never wink at the audience. You never say, “Well, this is silly, isn’t it, but let’s proceed as if it isn’t.” You say, “This is it. This is how it works.”

ENW: When you’re writing your novels, do you just write when the urge strikes you?

JOHN: Yeah, pretty much.

ENW: So you don’t have a regimented schedule, where you write X amount of pages every day?

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JOHN: No, no. My first novel happened because I bought my first computer and in the instructions it said a disk will hold 250 pages. So I said, “Okay, I’ll write 250 pages,” and the first draft was exactly 250 pages. [laughter] That was just an exercise, basically, and then I turned it into something real.

ENW: How did you get involved with the Funky Winkerbean newspaper strip?

JOHN: Tom Batiuk and I have known each other forever and ever. He’s a semiregular at Mid-Ohio Con, and years and years ago I drew Funky and one of the other characters on the splash page of the one and only Web of Spider-Man that Roger Stern and I did together. I drew a couple of Doonesbury characters and a couple of Funky Winkerbean characters in the splash. Gary Trudeau never got in touch with me, but Tom Batiuk did. [laughter] We became friends and then he had this one particular story that he wanted to have a certain kind of look. He was looking to take the strip to another place in terms of its look, and he decided that inking me for ten weeks might be the way to get it there.

ENW: Well he’s definitely changed his style. You can really see the difference. And it’s obvious that he likes comics, too, because he takes his characters to the San Diego Comic-Con every year.

JOHN: Oh, yeah. Tom’s a big fan.

ENW: Had you ever experimented with the newspaper strip format before?

JOHN: I’d played around with things.

The big problem is they don’t seem to be interested in adventure strips much anymore, and that’s what I’d really like to do.

I’ve got a couple of ideas for what I think

JOHN: Testifying at the trial.

ENW: Yeah, defending the rights of the comic shop owner.

Did you provide the dialogue for that?

JOHN: No, that was all Tom. It’s funny, he gave me a ponytail in that, which I have not had for about ten years. And he’s seen me in the last ten years. [laughter] He knows I don’t have a ponytail anymore. [laughter]

would be good adventure strips. But, as I say, they want humor; they want the joke-of-the-day, and that’s not really quite the way my brain works. I look at the strips still, and they’re all still out there, but I can’t quite put something together to my own satisfaction yet.

JBC: Do you still have your original comic collection?

JOHN: Some of them. I got them hardbound. I was trying to find somewhere down here who does it. I went into a binder’s and I said, “Do you do perfect-binding?”

And they said, “Well, it’s pretty good.” [laughter] Okay, obviously you don’t.

ENW: Did Tom give you a script to work from?

JOHN: Yeah, he gave me a script, all broken down.

ENW: You had drawn some of the characters before, but did you have to do any preliminary work just to get a better feel of working in a different style?

JBC: Are you an obsessive collector?

JOHN: Well, Tom didn’t want me to ape his style too much. So I basically just drew in a somewhat lighter version of what was already my humor style—a somewhat lighter version of my “Rog 2000” style. And then Tom, in the process of inking it, turned it fully into Tom. And in fact it was funny, he said at one point that when he got the first batch of stuff and he sat down to ink it, his first instinct was to make it more like the way he draws, and then he thought, “Well, no, the whole point of this is to make it less like the way I draw.”

So he ended up inking pretty much exactly what I drew.

JOHN: No, not anymore.

JBC: Do you still love them?

JOHN: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It’s more like super-powered nostalgia. Like I said, I read the Archives. I’m simultaneously loving and depressed by the fact that the

ENW: You had a cameo in the strip just a few months ago.

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Below: Man of Steel #5 cover art.

Next Page: A 1975 convention sketch drawn for a young Andrew Cooke for services rendered.

Bizarro, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Ant Man ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Archives have caught up to me and they’re now publishing the stuff that I used to read as a kid.

JBC: Do you read any contemporary comics?

JOHN: No. Not in the sense of following them. I look at the stuff from time

to time. Like I said, DC sends me the bundles.

JBC: What about original art? I’ve got one page of Kirby, and that’s the only original art I have. That, and Bruce Timm gave me a piece. It’s so expensive. I’m not getting into collecting original art.

JOHN: Well, luckily I bought most of this stuff very early on in my career, so it didn’t cost me what it would cost me now.

JBC: Do you have insurance on your collection?

JOHN: Well... there’s two schools of thought on that. One is yes, I can insure it for what it cost me. The other is, it’s irreplaceable. So if the house burned down.... I could get $50,000 for what’s on one of my walls, but I’d never get those pictures back.

JBC: Do you have any aspirations to do anything else? I mean, you’ve done some science fiction by now....

JOHN: Oh yeah. I’d love to do everything. I did an issue of Generations that was a Western, basically.

Superman finds himself in Smallville in 1867. And I’d always wanted to draw a Western, even though I can’t draw horses to save my life. I’d love to do a detective thing; I’d love to do some hard science fiction stuff.

There’s all kinds of stuff that I’d like to do. But super-heroes are my first love, super-heroes are what hooked me on comics, really—Superman and Batman.

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Part 6:

John Byrne Takes On...

JOHN: I’ve often said that when a British baby boy is born, they take this expanding steel rod and they shove it up his rear end and it just gets longer as he grows up.

And I’ve struggled to get rid of that. I’m not sure I’ve been entirely successful.

JOHN: Yeah, there are so many idiots online that my threshold is, like, zero. And of course, you can’t read tone of voice into that stuff. And I will slice people up online and then kind of go, “Hmmm, maybe I read that wrong.” [laughs] But by then it’s too late. But, no, for the most part, as the people who have figured me out have said, I just don’t suffer fools gladly.

JBC: You find it hard to loosen up, so to speak?

JBC: But you’ve got to get into it, right?

JOHN: Somewhat. I’m not nearly as stuffy as I used to be.

JOHN: A little bit. I enjoy the interface with intelligent people and those who are there for the correct reason, which is to talk about funnybooks. I don’t like the people who try to bring my personal life into it, I don’t like the people who imagine themselves to be telepathic. “Oh, you’re doing this because blah.” No, I’m not! And the people who... as I’ve said on a couple of occasions, I’ve never heard a rumor about myself that was true. Not even the good ones.

And these people who come in armed to the nines because they “already know what an ogre John Byrne is,” well, yeah, they’re probably going to meet an ogre. I play the cards I’m dealt.

JBC: There’s a British reserve. Did your parents have that?

JBC: Did you have any children?

JOHN: No. Not of my own, no. My ex had two step-kids. Kieron Dwyer used to be my stepson. I think that’s how it works. He used to be my stepson; I don’t think he is anymore. [laughs] JBC: I first met you when I was probably 13 years old, and this was just in your first brush with the Charlton stuff. You were just incredibly enthusiastic. My little brother, he must have been eleven years old, and he talked with you. You asked him to get you some coffee or something and you’d draw a few sketches for him, something like that.

JBC: I have to admit, I’d got into... we were talking about Kirby and I was relatively fanatical about it at the time, “Oh, Kirby is God!”—

JOHN: I don’t know how the reputation of “John Byrne, the ogre” has grown up over the years— JBC: You know, that actually surprised me. But I did have some encounters with you online which were very sharp and—

JOHN: Well, he is. But it’s a pantheon. [laughter] JBC: Stan certainly played a role.

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JOHN: Yeah, yeah.

JBC: I’ve gotten much more pragmatic and I think more realistic about it. I went to the message boards for a while, but I’ve never gone to that message board again, because of that ambiguous tone—it turns into a monstrous explosion. And people are such asses.

JOHN: You betcha. It’s the anonymity. They’re all behind their little secret identities, because “FuzzyBunny” can say something that Joe Smith would never dare.

JBC: You’re obviously not anonymous, though. Is the Internet an attraction for you?

JOHN: It’s human contact in one way, of which of course I don’t get much. It’s a way of reading the audience, and we need that. I don’t do as many conventions as I used to, so this has replaced the convention as a way of getting vibes from the audience.

And you kind of have to filter through a lot—it’s kind of like panning for gold.

Because obviously people will do things and say things online that they would never in a million years do. The worst convention experience I’ve ever had doesn’t come within light years of these bozos online. It’s the anonymity. You get these clowns tearing a strip off me and saying, “Well, the next convention, boy, you’re gonna get a piece of my mind.” They never turn up. Yeah, it’s easy to pretend you’re Batman lurking in the shadows, but when you actually have to face somebody, it just doesn’t happen.

JBC: Did you ever just say, “I don’t like this anymore.”

JOHN: Oh, yeah.

JBC: Do you periodically stop?

JOHN: Oh, yeah. I’ve gone cold turkey a couple times, but I always find myself creeping back.

JBC: I was amazed, I did some online chats with you—you were actually instantaneous in your response. I think we did a 5000-word interchange in a half an hour.

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Previous Page: An unfinished piece which was intended for Jack Kirby’s Fourth World.

Above: In X-Men: Hidden Years #8, Joe Sinnott—FF inker for most of Jack and Stan’s classic run—inked the FF throughout the issue (Tom Palmer inked the rest).

New Gods ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Fantastic Four, X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: I don’t mean to diminish in any way, but nobody has yet asked me a question that I haven’t been asked before. In fact, when my ex and I first got married, we went to a little dinner party at a friend’s place who was an old high school teacher of hers. And he asked me a comic book-related question, and I answered. He sort of paused and he looked at me, and he said, “You’ve been asked that before, haven’t you?” I realized that I’d gone into convention mode; it had triggered and given the answer and I’d turned into that guy that I always refer to as “John Byrne,” that guy over there who goes to conventions. I was dating a gal a couple of years ago and right at the beginning she said she’d like to go to a convention with me sometime. I

said, “No, I don’t want you to meet him yet.” [laughter] Because he is a different guy, he is a different personality. The deflector shields are up, basically.

JBC: It’s interesting, I have to say. I’m quite close with Walter [Simonson] and he thinks very highly of you.

JOHN: Walter is the nicest human being on Earth. And Walter was smarter than me. When he started doing stuff online—one of the things I absolutely refuse to do was all those stupid little sideways smiley faces. I hate those. Well, Walter does the little <g> thing all the time. So Walter can say “F*ck off, a*hole. <g>,” and everybody goes “Walt Simonson is such a prince!” and I’ll go, “Hmm, I moderately disagree with you.” “What an a*hole Byrne is!” [laughter] Okay, they can’t read context, they can’t read inflection, they don’t know.

JBC: Is there something about books not having letter pages anymore?

JOHN: One of Stan’s most brilliant ideas was the whole “Stan & Jack” thing. “Dear Stan and Jack,” “Dear Roy and Neal,” to make it personal. But you can’t have that anymore. When any idiot who can type and hit an enter key can poke his letter into an unedited “letter column” and get “published” every single time, he doesn’t have to write a letter that he hopes the editor will pick. I’ve often addressed the fact that there’s a false sense of empowerment that fans used to get from having a letter published. “Wow, I’m now a part of the creative process!” No, actually, the editor needed to pump some other book and you happened to mention it, so he ran your letter and said, “Funny you should ask....” Let’s be really cynical about this. But that false sense of empowerment has continued over into the Internet mentality.

JBC: Well, half those letterhacks became pros.

JOHN: Yeah. They did, they did.

Which is another problem! I only ever had one letter published and that was in Mad. [laughs] On the Fantastic Four, which sold about 250,000, I used to get about 500 letters a month.

JBC: Wow! 80

JOHN: And they stopped doing letter columns because they were getting, like, five. Nobody writes anymore.

JBC: So they just go to the DC message boards or whatever?

JOHN: And post them, and it’s there. Or they can go to a general message board; they can go somewhere that won’t try to control the content, and they can write whatever they want about whatever they want about whoever they want. They can say whatever they want—nothing controls it. They don’t have to try to figure out what the editor needs. They don’t even have to spell, for God’s sakes. I used to do my own letter columns for most of my career, and people would say, “How do you get a letter published?” And I would say, “Number one, type neatly. Don’t write me a letter with a number six pencil on gray paper. Presentation is important. Make it easy for me to read, and your odds—.” But now, even people who are relatively intelligent—who are apparently relatively intelligent—I see on the Internet, who don’t understand punctuation.

They don’t know how to spell.

Some guy wrote tearing a strip off me for something. And I read it and I thought, “You know, there’s a period there. And if I remove that period, this makes sense. Is this period supposed to be there? Does he think his thought ended there and this is another thought, in which case I don’t know what he’s saying?” You just don’t know. Roger Stern quoted a great line where he said, “They used to say that an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters would produce the works of Shakespeare, but the Internet has disproven this.” [laughter] I’m going to be in so much trouble when this comes out.

JBC: Do you hang out with Walter and Weezie with any kind of frequency?

JOHN: Not with any sort of frequency,

because they’re so far away. They’re, like, two or three hours away. But most of my friends, my real close friends, are not in the business. They are from this area, neighbors and people who I’ve known through my ex in show business and that kind of stuff. I have very few comic book people who I really consider close friends: Walter, Howard Mackie, Roger Stern, Frank Miller. Although Frank and I don’t see each other all that much.

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Previous Page: Stan and Jack were at their best together on Fantastic Four, and John had a nice run of his own on the title. FF #262, page 21.

Above: Pencils for She-Hulk #4, page 12.

Fantastic Four, She-Hulk, Watcher ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JBC: Do you talk to Terry [Austin] with any frequency?

JOHN: No, I don’t talk to Terry more than a couple times a year. His dentist is still in South Port, and he comes here to go to the dentist and we go out to dinner twice a year.

JBC: I’ve never met him, but I’ve talked to him zillions of times.

JOHN: Art Garfunkel. He looks like Art Garfunkel.

JBC: He’s a sweet guy!

JOHN: Oh, Terry’s a great guy. Terry’s a classic example of “still waters run deep.”

There’s some interesting depths to Terry. You sort of look at him once in a while and go, “Okay, you’re gonna be a serial killer when you grow up, aren’tcha?” But yeah, he’s a neat guy.

JBC: How do you feel about ACTOR? JOHN: I think there’s a lot of people who sort of jumped on the bandwagon after the fact. Frank Miller gets very mad at people like Todd McFarlane going around talking about the great fight for creators’ rights. And Frank sort of says that fight was fought and won before Todd ever turned up on the scene. We fought that fight, we won that fight. It’s a fight that’s not over; we have to keep fighting for it, because the publishers will try to take everything.

all comes down to. If you’re going to start talking money, which is usually what it always comes down to in the end, unfortunately, then who is taking the risk.

Who’s going to lose his shirt if thus-and-such fails?

JBC: It’s the nature of the beast.

JOHN: It’s the nature of the beast. And also, one can make a very good argument that it is the publisher who’s taking the risks. We’re not taking the risks. That’s what it

JBC: I think it was Ernie Colón who mentioned it to me, it’s the only industry that the people work in it 82

because they love it, and they’re not going to really, generally speaking, make a lot of money doing it. It’s just a funny business in that way. It’s almost like being emotionally retarded. You’re talking about an entire group of people who are kind of not looking out for themselves.

blood.” Well, y’know, problem there, right?

This is a really great job. This may be the greatest job in the history of the universe. But it’s a job. And it has its requirements. And these people who have gotten this “growing roses” crap that McFarlane has conned everybody into—

JOHN: Exactly. I mean, that’s how I got into it. When the royalties started to come along and we saw the paradigm shift— Roger Stern and I were talking about it, and Frank and a couple of others, and I said we were so lucky, really, that we got in before the money, because we got in because we loved it. We got in because we couldn’t imagine doing anything else, that this was what we wanted to do. And now you get people who are coming in because of the money. “Hey, this is a way to make a bajillion dollars!” Well, not anymore, kiddo.

JBC: What’s that?

JOHN: To quote Todd McFarlane, “Anybody can sh*t out a book on a monthly basis, but we’re growing roses.” And I just think, “Well, Jack Kirby and Curt Swan and Joe Kubert and Gil Kane and John Byrne—

JBC: So did you kind of see that perhaps there isn’t a lot of professionalism in the attitude of particular artists?

JOHN: I remember very early on I wrote something to the Comic Reader about—the big buzz at the time was “How can you be so fast?” And I said, “I started out fast, and luckily I learned how to draw and didn’t lose my speed. The thing is, look at the calendar, guys. There are 22 pages in a book and 22 working days in a month. That’s not real tough to work out.” And one of the editors, I remember, had a particularly snotty tone of voice, even for a letter or an editorial response, and said, “Well, suppose you can’t do a page a day.” And I said, “Then you can’t do this for a living.

It’s just that simple.”

JBC: Do a bi-monthly book.

JOHN: Do a bi-monthly book, do something independent, do your own thing, but don’t think you can come in— JBC: If you can’t do it, you can’t do it.

JOHN: If you can’t do it, you can’t do it. It’s like a doctor saying, “Well, I want to be a doctor, but I can’t stand the sight of 83

Previous Page: The House of M storyline wasn’t the first time the Scarlet Witch went nuts.

Cover art for Avengers #187, inked by Terry Austin.

Below: Page 22 of 1978’s Power Man & Iron Fist #50. Inks by Dan Green.

Avengers, Iron Fist, Power Man ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

thank you very much for calling our work ‘sh*t.’” Those of us who can do it, can do it. I mean, Kirby blew me away. Kubert blows me away. Of course, Kubert now, he puts three lines on the page and it’s an airplane.

And I just think, “Damn you! Damn you!”

JBC: And it’s always good.

Above: As with Todd McFarlane much later, working on a Spider-Man title was a pivotal point in John’s career.

Right: John played the part of “art robot” for this Magneto/Dr.Doom story which appeared as a back-up feature in an X-Factor Annual.

Next Page: Joe Kubert’s take on Hawkman circa 1942—yes, he was the artist on the series back then—was what John referenced for this opening page from Generations II. Blackhawks, Hawkman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Dr. Doom, Magneto, Spider-Man™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

JOHN: It’s always good! When the Enemy Ace Archives came out, I called him.

And I’d tried to call him a couple times and never managed to connect. But Joe was there this time and he comes on the phone and he goes, “John! How are you doing?” And I just kind of went, Joe Kubert knows who I am. Y’know, sell my clothes, I’m going to heaven.

The important thing, too, is most of those guys came into comics as a job. It wasn’t that they were super-huge comic book fans as kids; it was something to do. They came into it more like a commercial art job than like this great emotional vocation or whatever the hell it is we seem to think of it being these days. And I’ve said it myself that the best work I’ve done is the stuff that I have no emotional connection to. Where it’s just about making the pictures. One of the best jobs I ever did was this little eight-page Sunspot story that I did as a favor to Bob Harras because his assistant had “just sold his first story and he would think it was the greatest thing in the world if John Byrne illustrated it.” So I said okay. Didn’t know the guy’s work, didn’t care about Sunspot.

I drew the story, and I just watched it coming out of me going, “Look at this!” I didn’t care about the character, I didn’t care about anything in the story—it was all about the art. And everybody has said it’s one of the best jobs that I’ve ever done. And again, True Brit, where I was just the art robot—it’s some of the best stuff that I’ve ever done, because there’s no emotional connection to it.

It’s just, they tell me what the picture is and I draw that picture. And it’s like, “Wow, this is how these guys do it.

This is amazing.” So if you take that and you add a little bit of emotion, suddenly you get a Joe Kubert. It’s amazing, amazing stuff.

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85

JBC: Is that telling you something? Is that saying perhaps you should collaborate more?

JOHN: I’m too emotional is what it’s telling me! [laughter] It’s telling me I’m putting too much into the— JBC: There’s medication for that. [laughs] JOHN: Yeah, time to get the Prozac! The Robin thing, too, that I did with Stan was a very detailed plot. I turned it inside out a little bit. But that was another where the character didn’t even exist before I drew it, so there was no emotional connection to the character. And again, everybody said, “Wow! This is the best stuff you’ve done in years!” Of course, that’s one of the funny things I’ve noticed is people will always refer to my latest job as the best stuff I’ve done in years. It’s like, “Your old stuff was better. This is the best stuff you’ve done in years.” “But you said that about the thing I did a month ago!” [laughter] So I dunno.

JBC: You can always just say that. You must think of their motives sometimes.

JOHN: Well, sometimes. I mean, editors say this, too.

“Wow, this is the best stuff you’ve done in years.”

JBC: Is Mike Carlin pretty much the guy you deal with?

JOHN: Yeah. He’s like the Byrne wrangler.

JBC: What’s happening with Marvel now?

JOHN: Marvel doesn’t exist. Marvel went out of business a few years ago.

JBC: How do you feel about the industry? It’s always been “doomed”....

JOHN: I’ve never seen it as bad as it is now. When I got in, in ’75, it was the lowest ebb it had ever been at to that point. Everybody was saying, “It’ll be gone in five years. The whole thing will be gone in five years.” And then this totally unexpected thing called the direct sales market happened and saved us—literally saved us. But now it has become, as is so often the case, a problem in itself. All the other venues are shut off and you have to go miles out of your way to find a comic shop and then, of course, the speculator boom really ravaged us.

JBC: Do you go out—?

JOHN: I get all the DC stuff free, and I go through and I take out the archives and I take out the trade paperbacks of cool stuff and that one extra copy of Lab Rats or whatever, but I don’t pay much attention to the content of the books anymore, because there’s just not much stuff that I find appealing to me. And that’s why we read these things.

JBC: Do you have any idea what the sales figures are on the collections for your stuff?

86

JOHN: No. I don’t know about the trades. I know that both Marvel and DC now are making much of their money from the collections. DC has always held that market. And Marvel has finally figured it out, because Marvel has been printing stuff for the last week, whereas DC has been printing stuff since a hundred years ago.

But, yeah, the worst thing is this box that we’ve put ourselves in, but I can’t see a way of getting out. When it was so low back in the ’70s, we did not see the direct sales market coming. We did not see that that would suddenly appear and save us. And in fact, not only save us, but get us to a new level of accomplishment. But then, to use that Air Force military term, we really screwed the pooch with the speculators and stuff. That was just insane. I was the little guy sitting in the back of the car as we careened down the cliff road in a thunderstorm saying, “Maybe we should slow down. This is not good.” And people would go, “Oh, John, this is the future, this is wonderful.” And then we went off the cliff. And people turned to me and said, “Okay, bright boy, what do we do now?”

“Back there, I knew what to do. Now, as

we plunge to our deaths, I don’t know.” I’m hoping that something’s going to happen like the direct market, some unexpected thing is going to pop up and suddenly....

JBC: Start a new marketplace?

JOHN: Something. But people go and pay bajillions of dollars to go see the Daredevil or Spider-Man movies, and it translates over to comics like nothing. So there’s always been a tremendous resistance to reading comics, and as the audience has gotten older, and the comics have so stupidly shifted their targets to the older people. I remember, I pitched to one of the powers that be at DC many years ago. I said, “I’d like to do an entry-level Batman book.”

Because I’d talked to a couple of retailers when the first Batman movie came out, and they all said people were coming into their store looking to buy Batman for their kids.

And they didn’t feel like they could sell Batman to ten-year-olds. And I had this book called Batman and Robin, and I said, “I wanna do—call it Batman: Year Three if you need something for the geeks to hook into—but one-issue stories, much more straightforward, none of this psycho87

Previous Page: The cover and opening splash page to Just Imagine Stan Lee with John Byrne Creating Robin #1.

Above: Freaks was a series John pitched to DC back in the mid-’80s, which they accepted and were all set to publish.

They even hyped it in their History of the DC Universe Portfolio, as shown here. And while the series was never published, John did take the concept and used it as the basis for 2112 and Next Men. Batman, Freaks, Robin ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

a stigma. Let’s face the reality of the world, too. If six months after a movie comes out you can go and get it on a video, or you can go and get a video game that lets you live the adventures that we used to read about, who’s going to want to read a comic book?

depressed Batman thing.” And their response was, “We consider Batman to be one of our adult titles.” And I said, “Your average, harried businessman looking for something to read on the train going home would sooner pick up the latest issue of Whips and Toddlers than the latest issue of Batman.” People don’t want to be seen reading comic books, because comic books are not just for kids, comic books are for dumb kids, and that’s the barrier that we’ve always had. That’s the thing we’ve always been fighting. And unfortunately the industry has addressed that by saying, “No, they’re not,” as if that solves it, as if that would change the way people think.

Movies and TV shows, if they need shorthand to show that someone is an idiot, they make him a comic book reader. Every single time. “This guy’s a dummy.” There’s that stupid Pierce Brosnan movie, Lawnmower Man, where the guy gets super-intelligent, and one of the ways that he shows us that he’s super-intelligent is he gives away his comic book collection.

That’s how the great unwashed, the public, view these comic books. And now, because there are so many fans running the industry, they can’t see past it.

“Oh, I think they’re great, and I think having these characters say ‘f*ck’ is mature.”

Well, no, we call it “juvenile.”

JBC: Us. JOHN: Yeah, us. I mean, when Shooter had his Valiant stuff and he was doing some comic that was based on a video game, I said who wants to read a comic based on a

JBC: I don’t know. For instance, the alternative comics are not getting fabulously rich from the stuff, but I have a perception that Gen X and the generation after me, they don’t have this leftover kind of stigma or stupidity about comic books, that comic books are just a part of reading matter.

JOHN: Well, they’re there, but I think there’s still 88

video game? The whole point of a video game is that you’re driving. You’re not being driven. And in a comic book, let’s face it, you’re a passenger. You don’t control it. Which is something a lot of fans have trouble wrapping their brains around these days. I’m sorry, you’re valuable, you’re important, we need you, but you’re a consumer. You’re not the driver. I’m the driver.

A friend of mine a few years ago, she summed it up perfectly. She said the reason some fans have a bad reaction when they meet the professional—me, anybody else— they read the books every month, and for them, they get involved with it emotionally, and it becomes like a conversation. And when they meet the person who’s doing it, they expect the conversation to continue.

But for the person who’s doing it, it isn’t a conversation, it’s a monologue. And I said, “That’s perfect, that’s exactly right.” I’m not having a conversation with the fans. I’m a monologue; I’m like George Carlin up on a stage saying, “Welcome to my job.” George Carlin opens one of his routines with that.

And that’s exactly it. And the fans are wonderful, important, and I used to be one. But they’re not part of the creative process.

JBC: It’s been longer than 20 years since you worked around him. Do you have any assessment of Jim Shooter?

JOHN: Let me just call my lawyers to see what I can say.

JBC: I mean to say, what positive impact has he had on the industry and what negative?

JOHN: Shooter had a tremendous positive impact when he first came in, when he first became an editor and, ultimately, editor-inchief at Marvel. What I have often said was that Shooter reached a point that he took the stumbling giant that Marvel had become, and he bought it orthopedic shoes or something. And he got it back on track and he got us all focused and he got everything going the way it’s supposed to be. And in so doing, he made himself redundant. He wasn’t needed anymore. So he had to keep tinkering, he had to keep fixing beyond the point that it was fixed. I went to work for DC, and I noticed the sort of lackadaisical structure that was going on over there. And I said, “You know what we need right now?

We need for Jim Shooter and Dick Giordano to swap jobs.” Because at that point Marvel needed the kindly father figure and DC needed somebody with a death-ray.

And probably every ten years they should have just swapped jobs back and forth.

Shooter brought some good things.

Shooter was one of the main campaigners for royalties and other such creators’ rights.

I mean, he likes to take full credit, and as Mike Hobson used to say, “Hey, who do you think signed off on that?” But yeah, Shooter did some good stuff and he certainly bought me my first pair of shoes at Marvel. He was the one who called up one day when he was still Archie Goodwin’s 89

Previous Page: The opening page of the never-published Freaks.

Above: John created Alpha Flight during Jim Shooter’s tenure as Marvel’s editor-in-chief.

Alpha Flight #12, page 24.

Freaks ™ and ©2006 DC Comics. Alpha Flight ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Marvel Team-Up #79 cover art. Inks by Terry Austin.

Next Page: In this page from Fantastic Four #236, John makes sure the reader knows who the players are.

Fantastic Four, Spider-Man ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. Red Sonja ™ and ©2006 Red Sonja Corporation.

assistant and said, “Do you want to do Marvel Team-Up?” And I still remember, I said, “You mean Marvel Team-Up with SpiderMan? That Marvel Team-Up?" And he said, “Yeah.” “Okay! Sure!” But yeah, I’ll give him his props. And I often quote Shooter, because there are things that he’s said that are very good. My favorite Shooterism— which is probably a Mort Weisingerism—is “every issue is the first issue for somebody.”

And that’s something that nobody seems to think about anymore. Just that notion that you’ve got to be able to grab that first issue that you read and understand.

JBC: Now they’ve got this intro page, which is really— JOHN: But, if your writers are doing their job properly, you don’t need an intro page.

An intro page is an admission of failure.

Because....

JBC: But it’s serialized, it’s going to be a collection. The point is, you’re doing chapters of a trade paperback.

JOHN: Yes, but you shouldn’t write it that way. And that’s a key problem is that they’re writing for the trade, they’re writing for the collection. And I’m saying, “No, no. You’ve got 22 pages. By the end of every issue, you should know who everybody is and why they’re doing those terrible things to each other. You shouldn’t have to read a page of text at the beginning that will tell you.” That was one of the things that Shooter got rid of, was the top copy. That old banner at the top of the splash page?

JBC: He got rid of it?

JOHN: He got rid of that. He said, “If you’re doing your job right, you don’t need that. The book will tell you that he’s Bruce Banner and he was zapped by Gamma Rays.” You find a way to do that every issue.

JBC: But I just wonder if to have that.... Obviously, comics are an impulse buy. If you have a first-time reader, that’ll bring them in; they’ll go “Oh, okay.”

JOHN: No. No, it doesn’t. Because number one, they don’t read captions.

And they don’t read text. I mean, we do. We’re weird. I used to read every word. I used to read the indicia. But I remember reading a fascinating study years ago where they gave a block of college students the same test, but on one of them an important piece of instruction was in a box. And all of the students given the test with the box flunked, because they didn’t read the stuff in the box.

Apparently, people have a resistance to that. People don’t read the top copy.

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would use at least some manifestation of their powers every issue, so that by the time you got to the end of the issue, even if you’d never read one before, you knew who they all were. And if it was the middle of a three-part or twelvepart story, by the time you got to the end of that issue, you might start confused, but you wouldn’t finish confused, and you’d be ready for the next issue.

I remember discovering that they don’t read captions.

Some kid came up to me at a convention one time and said he didn’t understand a story I’d done. And I said, “Well, what do you mean?” And he said, “Well, this, this, this.” And I said, “Well, there’s this caption right here that explains it.” “Oh, I don’t read the captions.” [Jon laughs] And then I was talking to Weezie Simonson about it one time and she said, “Oh, yeah, they don’t read the captions.” And I flash back to that story that Steranko tells in his History of Comics book: one of the guys who worked for Fawcett was sitting in a barber shop and he was watching the kid read Captain Marvel, and the kid was just burning through it, and he couldn’t figure out how the kid was reading it so fast.

He went over and asked him, and the kid said, “Well, I only read the top two panels on each page.”

Well, that’ll do it! [laughter] So over the years I stopped using captions and I tried to stop using thought balloons and anything that sort of slowed things down. But I remember, when I went back to Marvel to do Chapter One and Spider-Man and I saw that they had this gatefold, I said, “Are you telling me that you’re going to hand this to a potential new reader and say, ‘Oh, by the way, you’ve gotta read two pages of text before you can understand what this issue is about?’”

I started reading comics when there were three stories in every issue and every issue was self-contained and every story was self-contained and the universes didn’t touch on each other in any way. All these guys were in the Justice League, but their own adventures never affected the Justice League, and vice versa. But you can still do that, you can still have....

And that’s one of the things that I noticed about Stan.

When Stan started to get into continued stories, one of the things that he never forgot was, over the space of 24 pages, he would have everybody call everybody by every permutation of their name. “Hey, Sis!” “Yo, bro, what’s going on?”

And “Johnny” and “Ben” and “Reed” and “Thing” and “Stretcho” and all this stuff, it’d all be there. And everybody

JBC: Hooked.

JOHN: Hooked, yeah.

JBC: You know, I asked for a positive note about Shooter, but obviously Shooter had a negative impact on a lot of creators there. What would you say was his greatest weakness?

JOHN: Let’s see if I can say this without getting sued. This is what happened to Jim Shooter in my humble opinion. I am not a psychiatrist, I am not a psychologist. Shooter used to say that Marvel—and for Marvel, read “Jim Shooter”—would rather publish a really great book that didn’t sell than a piece of crap that sold through the roof. And he would always cite Roger Stern’s Doctor Strange as a really great book that didn’t sell.

And then Shooter himself went on to do the biggest piece of crap that sold through the roof: Secret Wars. And I think that in his own mind he had to justify that somehow, he had to tell himself that Secret Wars sold because it was brilliant. And it was really Secret Wars, I think, that pushed him over the edge, because from that point on we would get the make-readies back with his notes on it that would always say, “See Secret Wars number whatever for how to do this right,” and that kind of stuff. I’m sorry, I wouldn’t look at Secret Wars to see how to make toilet paper right. I’m sorry, it’s just—it was crap. What was Mike Zeck’s great line at one point...?

Shooter had completely redrawn something and made Mike redraw it. And I asked him why, and Mike said, “Because it wasn’t dull enough.” [Jon laughs] So, yeah.

JBC: I guess there must have been a new attitude, though... because obviously Miller was doing Daredevil 91

earlier in the decade, you guys were doing the X-Men, and Walter was doing Thor. There were some really bright moments.

came was to try and prevent the assassination of Lincoln, and Luthor flees back to the present. The last shot or next to last shot is Luthor sitting in his time bubble with his head in his hands, and he’s saying, “All the terrible things I’ve done, and now this: the blood of Lincoln on my hands.” And that just wrecked me when I was a kid.

And it was around the same time that the Civil War bubble gum cards were coming out and all that stuff, so I kind of plugged into them. Lincoln was the greatest man of his century, the greatest president we’ve ever had.

If they ever come up with commercial time travel, there are three things I want to do: I want to go to the Gettysburg Address; I want to go to Jack Kennedy and say, “When you give that speech, don’t say the ‘moon in this decade,’ say ‘Mars in this century,’” and then I want to go and spend a week at the ’39 World’s Fair. Because that was such an influence on comic book artists of that period.

JOHN: And Roger Stern was writing Spider-Man. JBC: And then it was Dazzler. For me, that represented G.I. Joe and Team America and just a lot of crap that was coming out. So obviously something happened.

JOHN: The defining thing for me is, the very first conversation that I had with Shooter was on the phone. He had just become Archie’s assistant, and he called me to introduce himself. And we were talking about stuff, and he told me about how Doug Moench had come up to the office with something and he was saying, “I can’t make this work because I can’t get a fight scene into this story.

There’s no reason for a fight scene.” And Shooter had said, “You don’t have to have a fight scene.” And Doug had said, “Sure you do, you always have to have a fight scene.” And Shooter said, “No. There are no rules. As long as it’s a good story, there are no rules.” Now we press fast-forward, and Roger had realized at that point the only super-hero or comicy-sounding name that hadn’t been actually used for a character was Boogeyman. And he called me and said, “Let’s do Boogeyman!” And I said, “Yeah, let’s do this!” And we came up with this character, and we walked in—literally, because I was in the office—into Shooter’s office and we said, “We want to do a character called Boogeyman.”

And without asking us a thing about it, Shooter said, “You have to spell it right.”

And I just stood there thinking, he didn’t ask who it is, what it is, where it is.

His first flash was “here’s my rule.”

The guy who had said, “There are no rules,” had become the guy who had a rule for everything.

JBC: You’re right! That whole Dick Sprang thing.

JOHN: Jack Kirby was drawing the ’39 World's Fair until the day he died.

JBC: Let’s say you retired right now. If it was all over right now, would you be okay? You seem to have set yourself up pretty nicely....

JOHN: Yeah, I’m okay. I did the math. Well, before the stock market collapsed, I did the math and I figured that I’ve got six years with zero income, living in the manner to which I have become accustomed. If I live like a normal human being, it would probably be even longer. And I figure if I can’t find something else to do in nine years, then I’ll just go step in front of a bus.

It’ll be easier.

JBC: Do you still feel challenged by the work?

JBC: Hey, what is this? You have a bust of Abraham Lincoln. What is it about Lincoln that made you buy this?

JOHN: Constantly. It’s still the scariest thing in the world to face that blank page every day.

I mean, that still will get the adrenaline rushing.

Yeah, it’s still challenging, it’s still fun. This is why my fans get mad at me, of course, because I’m always messing with it. I won’t draw the same thing the same way twice in a row if I can possibly help it. “John, we like the way you did that!” “Yeah, but I’ve done that now. I have to do something else.” And if I go off in a direction that doesn’t work, I just have to keep going in that direction until it comes back to something that does, because it’s about the work, it’s about the art.

JOHN: A lot of things, but what really did it for me was a Superboy story.

JBC: Really? It goes back to a super-hero comic? [laughs] JOHN: Superboy goes back in time to try and save Abraham Lincoln, and he fails, because the adult Lex Luthor, who is also traveling with him, stops him, because he thinks that he’s come to get him. And then Luthor realizes that the real reason Superboy

Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

92

John Byrne

Aurora, Invisible Woman, Marrina, Snowbird ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Art Gallery

This Page: Illustration designs for a calendar.

Next Seven Pages: From John’s sketchbooks.

All artwork ™ and ©2006 John Byrne, Inc.

94

102

96

97

Silver Banshee ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Batroc, Mr. Hyde ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

98

Solomon Grundy ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Wendigo ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

99

Jean Grey, The Lizard, Wasp ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

100

Artwork ™ and ©2005 respective owner.

Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

101

This Page: In the post-Crisis mid-’80s John pitched a Black Canary series. At left is the costume design John drew as part of the pitch.

Above is a sketch John drew for Terry Austin.

Next Page: The Savage She-Hulk sketch was drawn well before she became sensational. The Jurist Prudence character design is a spin on Judge Dredd.

Black Canary ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

She-Hulk ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

102

103

Preliminary sketches for Namor, the Sub-Mariner. Note that Carrie and Caleb Alexander were originally drawn as Caucasians.

Namor ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

104

Namor ™ and

Char ©2006 Marvel

acters, Inc.

105

Namor, Wolverine ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

106

107

Alpha Flight, Cyclops ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Rog-2000 ™ and ©2006 respective owner.

110

X-Men ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

111

Cloak & Dagger ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

112

Metallo, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Darkseid, Superman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

114

Justice Society of America ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

Alpha Flight, Wolverine ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

116

Guardian ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

117

Founding Fathers ™ and ©2005 respective owner.

Alpha Flight ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

118

Fantastic Four ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

119

Fantastic Four, Super Skrull ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

120

Dr. Doom, Fantastic Four, Silver SurferTerrax ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

121

Bucky, Captain America, Red Skull ™ and ©2006 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Batman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

125

Wonder Woman ™ and ©2006 DC Comics.

THE MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks and DVDs are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus a COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEW (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), DELUXE SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more!

And don’t miss the companion DVDs, showing the artists at work in their studios!

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH GEORGE PÉREZ DVD

MODERN MASTERS: IN THE STUDIO WITH MICHAEL GOLDEN DVD

Get a PERSONAL TOUR of George’s studio, and watch STEP-BY-STEP as the fan-favorite artist illustrates a special issue of TOP COW’s WITCHBLADE! Also, see George as he sketches for fans at conventions, and hear his peers and colleagues—including MARV WOLFMAN and RON MARZ—share their anecdotes and personal insights along the way!

Go behind the scenes and into Michael Golden’s studio for a LOOK INTO THE CREATIVE MIND of one of comics’ greats. Witness a modern master in action as this 90-minute DVD provides an exclusive look at the ARTIST AT WORK, as he DISCUSSES THE PROCESSES he undertakes to create a new comics series.

(120-minute Standard Format DVD) $29.95 (Bundled with MODERN MASTERS: GEORGE PÉREZ book) $37.95 ISBN: 9781893905511 • UPC: 182658000011 Diamond Order Code: JUN053276

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Our planned volume on Darwyn Cooke is near completion, and expected for release in 2013. Please visit www.twomorrows.com for updates.

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Modern Masters: MICHAEL GOLDEN

Modern Masters: JERRY ORDWAY

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Modern Masters: MARK SCHULTZ

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Modern Masters: MIKE ALLRED

Modern Masters: LEE WEEKS

Modern Masters: JOHN ROMITA JR.

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Modern Masters: KYLE BAKER

by Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781893905863 Diamond Order Code: JAN083937

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by Roger Ash & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 9781605490076 Diamond Order Code: SEP084304

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Modern Masters: CHRIS SPROUSE

Modern Masters: MARK BUCKINGHAM

Modern Masters: GUY DAVIS

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Modern Masters: FRAZER IRVING

by Todd DeZago & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $14.95 ISBN: 97801605490137 Diamond Order Code: NOV084298

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by Nathan Wilson & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490397

More MODERN MASTERS are coming soon!

Check our website for release dates and updates!

Modern Masters: RON GARNEY

by Jorge Khoury & Eric Nolen-Weathington (120-page TPB with COLOR) $15.95 ISBN: 9781605490403 Diamond Order Code: OCT111232

NEW!

Modern Masters: ERIC POWELL

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NOW SHIPPING FROM TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING

STAN LEE UNIVERSE The ultimate repository of interviews with and mementos about Marvel Comics’ fearless leader!

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CARMINE INFANTINO

MARIE SEVERIN

COMICS’ FAST & FURIOUS ARTIST

PENCILER, PUBLISHER, PROVOCATEUR

MIRTHFUL MISTRESS OF COMICS

Explores the life and career of one of Marvel Comics’ most recognizable and dependable artists!

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The first dedicated book about the Golden Age publisher that spawned the modern-day “Freedom Fighters”, Plastic Man, and the Blackhawks!

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MARVEL COMICS

MARVEL COMICS IN THE 1970s

THE ART OF GLAMOUR

An issue-by-issue field guide to the pop culture phenomenon of LEE, KIRBY, DITKO, and others, from the company’s fumbling beginnings to the full maturity of its wild, colorful, offbeat grandiosity!

Covers how Stan Lee went from writer to publisher, Jack Kirby left (and returned), Roy Thomas rose as editor, and a new wave of writers and artists came in!

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IN THE 1960s

(224-page trade paperback) $27.95

(224-page trade paperback) $27.95

MATT BAKER

(192-page hardcover with COLOR) $39.95

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TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom!

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

JOHN BYRNE From the death of Phoenix to the rebirth of Superman, John Byrne is one of the most influential comic book artists working in the business. As the artist of the X-Men, he penciled the greatest stories in the history of the title and helped propel the X-Men to their current household-name status.

His work as writer and artist of Fantastic Four returned the group to prominence within the Marvel Universe.

And his reboot of the Superman mythology brought national attention to the comic book industry.

Add to that his work on such titles as Captain America, Alpha Flight, She-Hulk, Superman/Batman: Generations, and his creator-owned Next Men, and it is easy to see that John Byrne is a Modern Master.

MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time.

$15.95 In The US ISBN

ISBN-13: 978-1-893905-56-6 ISBN-10: 1-893905-56-X 51595

9 781893 905566

Characters TM & ©2012 Marvel Characters, Inc.

978-1-893905-56-6