His wiki entrydetails his production over time but doesn’t really speak to why he seems to operate at the periphery vs major titles these days.
Indy comics have collapsed in the economic slump, & a great many people in the Big Two are P.O.ed with him.
That might be a factor.
We got tired of him.
Seriously. At first it was exciting to watch him essentially reboot every character he worked on, but it gets old. As do those weird chins he puts on everyone…
I’ll never forgive him for what he did to Donna Troy.
Is it any worse than what the did to WW, though? I mean, he killed her twice in two straight story arcs. The second time she died it was literally said that she suffered more than any living being has ever suffered.
Byrne was a brilliant artist who was way too forceful in imposing his own ideas over everything he worked with, and so popular that he had the power to reboot everything to his own particular tastes without supervision. He was at best a mediocre writer, and in the new millennium his old fashioned way of writing comics (you know, characters describing what’s going on in the panel, or using ridiculous sounding expository dialogue) made him unreadable in the postmodern age.
He’s working for IDW now, rehashing old Silver Age ideas in his neverending homage to Kirby. The art is as superb as ever (a bit of same-face-edness here and there, but every artist is guilty of that one) and the writing keeps on being terrible.
I thought he was with Image…
Still, IDW’s not exactly one of the Big Three (DC, Marvel, Image), but he’s still getting support way out of proportion to the quality of his books.* (I don’t think his art’s as good as it used to be, either - still very good, but something just doesn’t click like it used to.)
And while we’re talking about not forgiving Byrne for what he did to characters - the Demon and Doom Patrol. Argh. (Though his ranting about Moore, Morrison, and Gaiman’s handling of the characters is a bigger :dubious: than what he did to them.)
- Digression: Personally, I think IDW’s the most consistently GOOD of the four companies, although I only read 4 of their ongoing books (and currently 2 miniseries) - what I have read of the others is good…I’m just not interested in them, outside of crossing over with ones I am.
Byrne knows how the internet works.
John Byrne’s artwork began to noticeably decline by the early to mid 90s. His work became sketchier and cruder, and relied way too heavily on computer graphics to create backgrounds. All his characters began to resemble one another. His ‘rough edged’ style that was so distinctive and energetic in the 70s and 80s just degenerated into looking sloppy.
As mentioned above, Byrne was never a strong writer. He frequently wrote stilted, arch dialogue and even worse re-used the same bad lines of dialogue repeatedly. Check out any run of five issues on a title that Byrne wrote - you will notice the same exact words spoken by multiple characters again and again.
Byrne’s perpetual insistence on shoe-horning in reboots to make every series the way it was when he was 10 years old grew increasingly tiresome. His re-imagining of Superman was brilliant. But his labyrinthine plot to send Diana Prince’s mother Hyppolyta back in time so that she could become the ‘first’ Wonder Woman (and therefore exist in the JSA stories of the 1940s) only made a messy situation more convulted. Worst of all IMO, Byrne undid decades worth of genuinely good character development to make the Vision and Scarlet Witch more like the way they were when he was a kid.
Byrne also has a reputation of having a super-star ego way out of proportion with his talent. He is reportedly often childish and petulant and extremely difficult to work with, demanding complete autonomy on what he writes / draws, but typically deilvers storylines that are ill-conceived, underdeveloped and just plain uninteresting to read. He often insists that whatever company he works with cater to him, and has even demanded that entirely separate titles rework their storylines to satisfy him. (Example - When Byrne took over writing “Wonder Woman”, Donna Troy was firmly entrenched in the “Green Lantern” series as Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend. He insisted that she be written out of GL so that he could write a long storyline about her in WW. Kyle & Donna’s romance was an interesting storyline in the GL book. Byrne’s confusing storyline about Donna was absolutely not.)
Byrne is a prime example of an “anti-auteur.” The auteur argument is that great artists should be allowed full autonomy to write whatever the hell they want, and that editors and other “suits” only stifle their creativity series by making decisions based on marketing and long-term saleability of the character. Yet for every Busiek and Gaiman who really understand what makes their characters tick and writes challenging, well-crafted stories for the, there are people like Byrne who think that any slight whim of fancy they get is BRILLIANT!, no matter how badly it might de-rail a character. His career (and its decline) only go to show that a good editor is essential to the long-term success of a comic book series. Someone has to be in place to say “no” to bad ideas like Superman and Big Barda making a porn movie.
I disagree. Byrne has no idea how the internet works.
Because if he did, he wouldn’t have have said that uh…er…whatshername. (Jessica Alba? I’m blanking on the name and that doesn’t sound right)…the lady who played Sue Storm in the FF movies looked like a whore because any Hispanic woman with light hair is clearly a prostitute.
Or saying, days after Chris Reeves death that Chris Reeves was a ginormous douchebag for spending time/money on a charity/foundation to help cure spinal injury because Reeves wasn’t interested in the issue before it affected HIM.
People who are internet savvy don’t make comments like that on the internet.
Fenris I had no idea about your level of nerdgeekness.
I don’t find “Man of steel” or 1980’s FF art any different from 2013’s Byrne, frankly. You have to keep in mind that there’s very few artists who write, pencil, ink and manage to hit every single deadline. There’s plenty of worse artists who only do one of those things and even then need constant filler issues to make up for their lack of pace.
And yet Byrne consistently produces epic, well detailed panels. You have to admit that in that respect he’s a prodigy.
Why was it ever expected that the authors and the writers would be the same people, anyway? Sure, there are a few gifted individuals who can do both well, but there are a lot more who can do one or the other. Why not keep Byrne on for his art, and just have someone else who’s actually capable of it write the stories?
Because in the 80’s, 90’s and part of the 00’s he was incredibly popular. His presence still drove crowds of fanboys. And he was willing to use that fact to force companies to allow him full authorial powers. For years it’s been “his way or the highway”, for better or worse. Mostly worse.
He’s got a bit of an abrasive personality, apparently.
Is he the comic artist with the bizarre fixation on little girls crushing on grown men?
Why, yes, yes, he is.
Back in 2010, he did a six-issue series (now collected as a graphic novel) Star Trek tie-in, “Leonard McCoy, Frontier Doctor.” It was actually quite good. Nice art, clever writing.
He’s currently doing various superhero things.
And, yeah, his abuse of Wonder Woman riled me, a lot. I was reading William Messner-Loebs’ WW, and liked it a lot. Byrne came along and just trashed everything WML had done. It was one of the most grotesque creative discontinuities in comics history.
His personal attacks on Jim Shooter, after the “New Universe” farrago, were also morally reprehensible.
On this one comic board I used to go to they had a firm rule. Attack the work, not the creators. Yet when someone would attack Mr. Byrne, the mods would just ignore it, and if reported just be all “well, he’s a jerk so it’s okay”. Whether he is or not, that’s pretty lousy moderating and I quit going there after that.
Anybody ever notice how often one of his characters says “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO…”
…no?