For me, I wouldn’t say worst, but I’d agree that overall they were pretty bad. I give him points for trying to bring back some of the Golden and 50’s era villains, but I’ll conceed that they really didn’t have any real resemblance to the originals.
And while I appreciate what he was trying to do with Hippolyta vis-a-vis the Justice Society, it was so badly botched as to make my eyes water. And I despise what he did to Donna (and what he did to the then-current Donna/Kyle thing. AND that he offed her kids. Why does Byrne keep killing children? Vision and Wanda’s, Donna’s, I know there’s another…)
Besides, with Donna, he took a strong female character (and an Amazon (sort of) at that) and made her existance dependant on a man’s perception of her. I found that offensive at best.
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I’d reverse the two. But that’s what makes horse-races.
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As much problems as I had with Byrne’s Wonder Woman run, I have to say that for me, the Spider-Man run he did right after his Wonder Woman stint was far worse and far more damaging. (Aunt May’s NOT dead? The Green Goblin’s back? Peter and MJ’s kid is dead <-THERE’s the other dead kid by Byrne (and Mackie)) And his Spider-Man Year One is one of the single worst comics story I’ve ever read, and I’ve been reading since 1975.
I think Byrne’s big problem as a creator is he wants everything frozen the way it was in 197x when he was a fan. Spider-Man shouldn’t be married, Aunt May shouldn’t be dead. His West Coast Avengers butchery was an obscene attempt to undo everything Steve Englehart had done over the previous 25 years (I’m thrilled that Busiek is slowly de-Byrne-ing the Avengers). I fully believe that if he could’ve gotten away with it, Byrne would have had Steve Trevor break up with Etta and start chasing Wonder Woman, simply because that’s the way it was when he was reading.
Something happened to Byrne when he left FF and went to do Superman. And it wasn’t good.
End micro-rant.
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MM doesn’t V, much. My ‘favorite’ current Byrne story is that after a recent debacle where he was quoted as saying something abysmally stupid (in context) from his website on several comic-book news pages and on rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe Byrne decreed that no one shall be permitted to quote (or even print excerpts) of his words under any circumstances. He started adding a sig line to all of his posts to that effect (“These words are copyright John Byrne and any reproduction of them in any context…etc”) Someone pointed out that A) this would have the effect of forcing people to paraphrase him, which, if he wanted accuracy as he claimed would be counter productive and B) this violated any number of fair-use doctrine laws.
The man did some great work once, and when he’s not breaking other people’s toys he can still produce good stuff (His “Generations” series for DC was excellent, if sketchily drawn), but as a person, he seems to be an ass and as a creator he’s more interested in destroying other people’s work than doing his own stuff.
Fenris