He never did draw kids well. My biggest complaint about Byrne in his heyday is that he had a habit of heading a title, making wholesale changes and then leaving before he had tied it all up. My friend and I referred to as “getting Byrned”.

One thing we all should take from this story is: inkers are very important in comics, and never believe your own hype,

The Byrne & Austin combination was the best I've ever seen. Wish they had worked together more.

Byrne himself claims he simply found a way to streamline and refine his process, allowing him to work faster without a noticeable drop in quality. If you're wondering if that holds true, one simply has to google JB's commissions. From 2005 on, he began to recycle and reuse body shapes and just about every character sported the same goofy grin. Even the grim ones like Batman. Then again, his recent X-Men: Elsewhen 'fan fic' series looked as great as his mid 90s output. Proving he can still deliver... if he feels like it.

Byrne NEVER knew how to draw children. That was consistent through his career. One could argue his art dropped when he was doing too many comics at the same time and backgrounds disappeared, 90s I feel his main declining was letting his personal grudges interfere with his writing.

His 1990 run of Namor was super underrated, he wrote and pencilled a lot of those books. It's a shame they haven't done much with thr character since.

GOOD job on this video,the thing is,George Perez went the exact opposite direction with his artwork,he got so much better during his career. Especially during his Teen Titans run,gradually started getting better with his figures and backgrounds.During his eariler work Perez said he was faking it ( his words not mine )and was known at Marvel as-KING-of the unfinished projects for trying to draw TOO many titles a month.

Just finished your video on the art of John Byrne. I think some artists work can fall at times but Byrne has proven over and over again that he has what it takes when he loves a project. Just look at his recent Elsewhen art. He’s going back to basics with that X-Men tale and knows how to layout scenes better than most modern artists working today. I wish you had mentioned his time on NAMOR as well as his DC output on his trilogy series GENERATIONS. He has such a love for these characters that he goes back to them again and again. You also said you wished Byrne tried other genres but he has with sci-fi (a variety of STAR TREK comics - regular and picture book, DOOM PATROL, & LAB RATS), horror (THE DEMON) and spycraft (COLD WAR). He also tried his hand at creator-owned books but they were essentially X-MEN of a different name. I think the fact that he’s not working in comics right now is a sad state of affairs based upon his own stubbornness to work with others as well as his strong opinions on all matters that some find offensive or distasteful. I also think comic companies should allow him creative control for his pure vision to hit the comic stands - similar to Dan DiDio giving Neal Adams carte Blanche to write/draw anything he wanted (to less than stellar results for a man not known for his writing). No one is perfect but no one can do what John Byrne (a writer, artist and inker) did for the comic industry. He revitalized characters while creating new characters for the big two. He also told some great stories that people can read again and again for years to come. And for that, I deeply thank him.

I grew up and first got into comics in the 80s, so based on his work in X-men, Superman, Fantastic Four and She-Hulk it's hard for me to not think of his art style as the "default comic style". He's said some really dumb things and holds many opinions that I do not, but this is true for a lot of creators whom i used to worship. I think his work speaks for itself though, and in the long run will be much more influential than his various opinions.

His 4 issue run of OMAC is one of his most incredible piece of work in my opinion.

The inker is a lot of times 50% of the quality of the artwork. Terry Austin, for example, is responsible for how great those X-Men issues looked compared to almost everything else Byrne drew. Another example is how great Carlos Pacheco art looked when he had Jesus Merino inking. When they split, Pacheco's art was never the same. Or look at Jim Lee who, except for a couple of brief experiments, throughout his career was wise to always keep working with Scott Williams. I'm sure he knows how much of his career he owes to Williams, even though most people don't realise that. That's why I believe one of the worst trends Joe Quesada is responsible for during his reign as Marvel EiC, is that he actively tried to minimize the importance of the inker, both in crediting work (he started billing colorists ahead of inkers ffs) but also encouraging the awful trend of publishing uninked artwork which most of the times looks terrible compared to what we had before. I hope with time, the importance of the inker is restored, because it's such an important aspect of the art of comics.

I never saw too much of his later work. His X-men run will always be legendary

Grell was a lot like Byrne. Given time and interest on his part, a written, penciled, inked book by either was a masterpiece. Once time caught up (or maybe even interest?), the art took a beating. Main character and maybe something small per panel and general rush.

Chris you nailed it. John was the first artist that I recognized and sought out his work. Subscribed to Avengers, FF and X-men because of him. Bought anything he drew. Loved Rog 2000 when I eventually found it. His runs were just epic. Austin was the perfect inker for him. As you noted his art changed and became simpler. I always assumed he was just burnt out. That flame had burned so hot for so long that it just ran out of gas. Cant say I blame him. Snowbird issue really pissed me off tho.

His X-Men run with Terry Austin was incredible formartive for why I still love comics and went into creative work. You're spot on about his use of negative space, as I still refernce that in my photo/cinematography work when I"m doing storyboads and shot-planniung through production, Appreciate the work!!!

Man I love his artwork on the X-Men, it really was such a classic era I can’t help but have a lot of affection for!

I was a huge fan as a kid. I agree his art did fall off but most artists do. He came in and his style was wild/exciting and then he refined his style. Hit his peak. With that said not sure if you seen his X-Men fanfic recent art. It's excellent. Only pencils but full pencils.

I grew up reading comics with John Byrne's and George Perez's artwork in them in the mid-70's and continue to do so even today. I own several sketches from both of these men that they did for the teenage me at Chicago Comic Cons in the early 80's. These two guys will always be my personal favorites. In one format or another, I own almost everything Byrne has ever done and most of Perez's work as well. These guys will forever be my favorites and re-reading their books always fills me with nostalgia and joy. I'm very glad they were the comic artists I grew up with.

Yeah...Pretty on point, Chris. When he started to ink himself, the weight-lines of his inks started to get hard, weird and kinda fuzzy over time. Cheers!

I remember people feeling incredibly ripped off with that Alpha Flight # 6. I think it's undeniable that Byrne's artstyle began to appear "lazy", but since I didn't pick up all the books, I couldn't pinpoint exactly where like your video. No question though, Byrne will always on a list of comic artist greats. Happy Thanksgiving, Chris. All the best and keep 'em coming.

2 things happened with Byrne at around the same time and together they created what you see as the drop-off but I feel you are coming at it from the wrong angle by not referencing his writing output. The first thing was that, as mentioned in another comment, he streamlined his process to work faster and part of this was his discovery of japanese brush pens - very rare back in the day. There's a letters page in an issue of the FF where he addresses fan's criticism of the art by explaining that he had started using brush pens instead of traditional dip pens/brushes and found he was able to pretty much dispense with a lot of the pencilling thus increasing the workflow but as the brushes dried out and he couldn't get replacements quickly he basically used the old brushes longer than he should have and the fibres begin to break up making the art look very sketchy. So he basically did away with the pen and moved purely to brush art, something which is very clear when you know what to look for. Secondly, IMHO Byrne at this stage progressed from being an artist or a writer/artist to becoming a bona fide storyteller. His priorities changed from creating his best art to creating the best storytelling that he could and sometimes that means the less important background details, figuratively and metaphorically, are overlooked in the rush to advance the story one is telling. Byrne is not alone in this - the same happened to Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, Paul Craig Russell, Walt Simonson and even to Byrne's hero Neal Adams. Byrne did notice this - or was made aware of it at least - and for a time he employed an artist to fill in backgrounds for him because he was concentrating on the figure-work as he considered that to be where the "real" story is. The crucial factor in these changes was, I think, the first issue of his main FF run where he inked himself under the pseudonym Bjorn Heyn. Terry Austin was intended to be the inker on this run but for reasons I can't recall that didn't happen and Byrne inked himself - albeit in a very Austin style manner and as any creative person will tell you the mind is always looking for ways to move forward so, having discovered he could progress from writer to penciller to full artist to "creator" of each issue it became the law of big numbers - the more issues he created the farther away he got from the tightness of that first issue because why waste time creating detailed breakdowns or tight pencils when you are going to ink over them anyway and you can do the creative editing in your head as you go along. Didn't always work, I have to agree on that but when it did...boy did it work! No single reason, then, simply creative progress from his point of view I reckon.

I think John Byrne was the first comic artist I learned to recognize his name and art when I was little. Back then my favorite superhero was Superman and his Man of Steel series (here it was published in a tpb with the full run, I remember reading it back and forth for that whole summer) and it was definitely a pivotal moment for me as a fan but also an artist. His art felt so dynamic and powerful , great work with perspective and detailed backgrounds , and great character acting and expressions. But yes, I remember being hyped when he came back to do Spider-man in late 90s and being more disappointed than anything. It felt rushed and lifeless, a pale shadow of what it used to be. I didn't know a lot of these comments , and truly fills like he's not a pleasant person to put it nicely. As much as I want to try to separate him as a person to the artist, at one point I think himself gave up on being a good artist in favour to believe his own hype, something that I also feel happened to another gifted creator like Alan Moore. He created artwork that I love and was really magical and special in my childhood and for that I am forever grateful. But that's one living artist I wouldn't want to meet in person, he just sounds like a douche.

I think Byrne did plenty of experimentation to challenge himself and keep up his interest in a project. His Alpha Flight had a style distinct from his X-Men which was distinct from his FF which from his Namor. And look at his OMAC mini-series from the early '90s. Brilliant in both writing and art! (We need a reprint, DC!) I will grant you that detailed backgrounds are better than bare ones, but sometimes the ideas just don't come. As for line weight, I understand its importance, but it's less important than other aspects of comics art.

At some point on his FF run he went from using brushes and ink nib pens to felt tips when inking his own work and it muddied some of the detailed stuff he did I think when he jumped to DC to reboot Superman he switched back

This is a really great episode! I've always loved Byrne's artwork. I think you're right on with all of your assessments of his work, here.

I really liked his X-Men run, and liked mostly his FF run (before the streamlining). I even liked his visuals for post-Crisis Superman. But he himself has been off-putting enough since the mid-80s that it made me less and less able to get into the stories his art is attached to, unfortunately. It's one of the reasons I became less into finding out about artists' personalities and, to a degree, personal lives.

Such a tough career to cover. My absolute favorite artist/writer for 20 years.

The video mentioned that Byrne quit Sensational She-Hulk after only eight issues. This was due to a conflict with the editor. But he later returned to the book when it had a different editor and stuck with it for 31 straight issues, for a total of 39.

I really enjoyed Byrne's art in Fantastic Four. It's probably where I first took note of it when I was handed a paperback in the late 90s. But as I've gotten older and seen more of his stuff I started to feel like there might have been a point where it dipped a little bit. That's why I'm very happy to see this episode. I've been waiting for it for a few years now. Thanks for keeping me informed, I'll keep reading comics.

There's so much art that just looks wrong once the colors go from flat fills to the cheap gradients of the mid 90s. A look that still plagues (IMHO) comics to this day. There are so many art styles that are paired with the wrong coloring.

Byrne is one of my favorites. Neal Adams, Jim Lee + Scott Williams, are my all time favorites.

I wish Joe Sinnott inked the entirety of Byrne's Fantastic Four run. The FF issues they did together in the late 70s always looked better to me than when Byrne inked it himself.

I really love your videos on artists, I appreciate the more experienced eye while still being very accessible

Speaking as someone that is approaching 60 years of age, I wonder if when John Byrne's artwork became more simple looking he was going through something in his personal life that affected his artwork.

Remember drawing is not like riding a bike I went on a hiatus and here I am doing basic anatomy training again It is as frustrating and pencil throwing as it sounds to "forget" how to draw I wasn't the best artist before but I started getting confortable sketching skulls and monsters I forgot how to draw people and now I'm re-learning

The first time i saw Byrne's art was his work in X-Men. I already knew the Claremont/Cockrum team, but Byrne made me really pay attention to the comic. His art jumped off the page on that book, his Kirby/Adams influence was evident. Then i read his initial FF run and i was like "He thinned everybody", but i liked the change, especially with the detail to the backgrounds. That page where Doctor Doom has everybody of the FF on that simulation is sick. For me, Byrne's art of this period has a manga feeling to it. (George Pérez art had that vibe too). The characters drawn with a simple but solid anatomy and the background unbelievably detailed, making the characters pop off on the art, just like Ōtomo Katsuhiro 80's work or Ishinomori Shotarō late 60's/early 70's work.

Byrne’s run on X-Men and FF is what brought me to comics and are still my favorites to this day. Not a fan of his political views though and that includes his views as a “company man.” On a side note I was surprised that Chris didn’t mention his run on Namor. It was quite big back in the days.

I noticed the same thing in his artwork, starting with his FF run: thin lines with little variation in thickness. But the biggest change for me was how much leaner all his figures became, especially the men. I also think that Terry Austin was a huge reason for the X-Men run being some of the best art Marvel ever published

When it comes to John Byrne, I've only ever been familiar with his two Hulk runs. Both of which were just okay in my opinion. I know he's had legendary runs on Man of Steel, Fantastic Four and She-Hulk, so I will have to check those out.

Don't forget John Byrne was working on Iron Man before his run on West Coast Avengers/Avengers: West Coast, and continued to do so for a while. It was getting a bit wonky, towards the end, with other artists and writers (of wildly inconsistent quality) coming onboard while he was abandoning Iron Man, though he'd done covers for that title during that time. One of them was a body-swap story involving an unstable mutant with radio transmission powers who ended up switching the minds between Tony Stark and the then current Crimson Dynamo.

Your assessment of John Byrnes is on the mark. I noticed this trend as well. The hidden years had establishing scenes, but interiors were sometimes none existent. It was like his style shorthand was in full effect. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with pacing yourself. It's hard to recognize when you may be burnt out from lack. Of interest vs. getting a steady paycheck?

Great research and editing as always

LOL I love that you still called him Paste Pot Pete. Yeah baby! "Trapster," my Aunt Petunia!

Well, you're correct about Byrne's art. He said he was "streamlining" his art. I would call it "simplifying" his art because he and other artists realized that they were going to be paid the same page rate whether they spent 3 days doing a single page or doing 3 pages a day. A good frame of reference is the '80s when artists like Barry Windsor-Smith and Neil Adams couldn't keep up with their monthly deadlines because they were spending a lot of time on their art. Marvel was having to pay their printer penalty fees when it missed printing deadlines, or else throw in reprints while it waited for pages. Meeting deadlines was more important than great art. I always bought comics based on the art. But when Byrne started simplifying his art, that's when I stopped buying Byrne's stuff.

It was around the time that he added Alpha Flight to his portfolio of titles that the art started to suffer---at one time Byrne was Writing drawing inking the FF Drawing Alpha Flight & writing The Thing---that's a heck of a lot to keep up with & it began to show

You forgot to mention, Byrne also wrote and drew Alpha Flight while doing FF. A friend of mine noticed the change in his art also. We used ask each other, who'll have the good art next month.

The inker on FF #232 was named "Bjorn Heyn," which is an anagram of John Byrne. The Snowblind story was the realization of a long-running joke and took place during the "Assistant Editor's Month" company-wide event. Byrne only provided the words to the first Hellboy arc, working from Mignola's completed art, he didn't co-plot.

Great episode. Loved the examples and references pulled.. you wrangled so much into a really tight script for this.

As usual, great video! I completely forgot about photo-comics were a thing. Maybe that could be an interesting video.

John Byrne as great as he is,always suffered from "every face looks the same" .....including kids I've seen some of his recent work (last 10 or so years) & I personally don't like it as much

I have been waititng on you to talk about Bryne for a long time now! Thank you sooo much! He is my FAVORITE artist and his X-men run is the reason I started reading comics!

Good stuff, as always ! Thanks for another one big dawg

I'm so glad you mentioned those Star Trek photo comics he did. Those things are insanely bad. Really, you could do a whole big thing on all the weirdness of Byrne's career. Like the debacle with the woman Kitty Pryde was named after, or his thoughts on younger women.

Have you done an episode on Alan Davis? He is an artist I’ve always loved that had a very similar style to Byrne.

I first came across John Byrne in the pages of Doomsday +1. And I was blown away! It was dynamic and different and a pleasure to look at. I was so excited when he took over from Dave Cockrum on Uncanny X-Men. And you are not wrong about the changes in his style. His early work was always dynamic, and always highly detailed and easy on the eyes. Later on he may have "refined" the process to get in more work over time, however there was a noticeable drop in the quality. Well, that, and as has been shown, sometimes an inker can change or bring down the quality of the art.

Byrne was one of those creators who needed someone looking over his shoulder to make sure he's doing his best. By the time he hit late FF he wasn't being watched anymore. By the time of his Trek comics it was obvious how much this hurt him. As a man, well, he was a great artist.

Great video, as usual! A brief and balanced assessment of Byrne as an artist. I suppose that drop in quality (and that feeling that he could have been mucho more) is very in tune with his "cog in the machine' approach to comic books.

A remember coming across those Wonder Woman comics a few years ago and I couldn't comprehend how they were made by the same genius who did his famous X-Men run.

Another amazing comic history video! Thanks, Chris!

I have an old F4 special drawn by Byrne, and what really cought my attention was the introduction of the editor decribing his as the best hugs in the business. Quite a unique point to bring forth but fitting the issue since it involved Sue and Franklin ( I think it was a crossover during the onslaught saga )

Excellent video, Chris! Byrne has always been my favorite comics artist of the early 80s and amazed at his speed and skills, both at drawing and writing! A comics creator to emulate:-) AGL

I'm not an '80s kid, but I read a few of his FF and X-Men stories back in the '90s. _Phoenix: The Untold Story_ was one of the very first comics I read as a child, and I was automatically smitten with the gorgeous art in that one book, though I was too young at the time to take an interest in learning the names of any comic creators. Fast forward to 2005, when I began reading the trades collecting his Superman run, and I automatically recognized him as the same artist who'd worked on those '80s comics. However, I didn't realize he was also the artist who'd worked on _Spider-Man: Chapter One_ and ASM in the late '90s. The art in those titles was so middling, they made no impression on me whatsoever; I never would've expected they'd been made by a top comic artist, let alone one of the first to impress me.

good video, Tropes. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Your last remarks on the end of the vid got cut off. Nevertheless, great vid chris! Another fun knowledge to know about behind the scenes in comics.

Well researched. Well analyzed. Well presented. This is why I subscribe to this channel. Keep up the good work, my friend!

Would love to see a vid like this one (GREAT!) about John Romita Jr.!!!

The page cited at 15:00 as an example of Byrne’s art getting simpler later in his FF run is actually from pretty early in his run, from WAY earlier than the other issues mentioned. It’s from issue 244.

A few corrections & context: 11:00 - While Byrne did pencil several issues of the Fantastic Four in 1979, those issues were written by Marv Wolfman. He didn't take over writing and drawing the FF until 1981 with issue #232 (after he'd left the X-Men, as you say). 11:50 - While yes, Byrne had four Marvel comics on the stands at the same time with July 1980 cover dates, that doesn't necessarily mean that he penciled all four of them in the same month. Amazing Spider-Man #206 was a rush job done when Roger Stern realized that someone had miscounted the issues and no one had assigned a Spider-Man #206 after Marv Wolfman's run ended and before Denny O'Neil's run began with #208. In addition, O'Neil's first issue had J. Jonah Jameson his normal self while Wolfman's run had him on the run & not in his right mind. So Stern wrote a story explaining JJJ's personality change & Byrne penciled the 17-page story in a rush to make the printing date. With the two-parter that ran in FF#220-221, that was a story that was originally done for a special comic to be issued through Coca-Cola. When that fell through, the story was repurposed into two regular issues of the FF. So the most that Byrne probably did there was a new splash page or some material recapping what happened in FF #221. So that was definitely a case of repurposing old material that had been sitting around for a few months. 13:12 - FF #266 with the Kerry Gammill pencils was a fill-in issue that they were burning off, most likely because Byrne had just recently changed the FF's uniforms in FF #256 and the costumes were now outdated. (BTW, you'll notice that the story teams the Thing with the Invisible Girl. That's probably because it was intended to be used as either an issue of the FF or Marvel-Two-in-One, the Thing's team-up book, whichever one needed a fill-in first. Marvel did a lot of that sort of thing in those days.) 13:21 - I don't know if complaining about sparse backgrounds is really a valid complaint when the examples you show are Doc Ock's room at a psychiatric facility and Johnny Storm's unfurnished apartment. Neither one of those settings are going to have a lot in the way of decoration. 16:20 - Byrne explains his reasons for leaving most of these books on the FAQ on his Forum at Byrne Robotics. And honestly, most of them sound like valid reasons for leaving to me. Usually it amounted to him being told mid-story that he couldn't finish off his story the way he'd planned. That was the case with Indiana Jones, the Hulk, She-Hulk, and the West Coast Avengers. I'd probably do the same thing if I were in his shoes. (And BTW, Byrne actually did more issues of Wonder Woman than he did of the X-Men, so you have to count that as long run, too.) 20:47 - Most of the Kitty/Peter "romance" in the X-Men happened after Byrne left after Uncanny X-Men #143. Kitty was introduced in issue #129 and didn't become a regular character in the book until the very end of #138, just five issues before Byrne left. The only real romance between the two was in the Days of Future Past story of #141-142, where both characters were adults and the age difference no longer mattered. Other than that, it was pretty clearly just a teenage crush that Colossus didn't reciprocate or act upon. It was just a 13-year-old girl having a crush on an older boy of 19 or so, something that happens every day. Anything that happened after that you have to lay at Chris Claremont's feat. Also keep in mind that Terry Austin is an inker who tends to add a LOT of background detail when he's inking a job. (posters on walls, graffiti, extra buildings in the BG, etc.) So naturally that stuff wouldn't be there when Byrne is being inked by someone else. But yeah, Byrne's kids have always been weak. I attribute this largely to him not having young kids of his own. (Kieron Dwyer was somewhere around 12 or 13 when Byrne married his mother in the 80s.) Byrne's young kids look like little people more often than not.

Thank you for this trip down my comic memory lane. John Byrne was hugely influential on my love of comics in the 70s and 80's. He's a comics legend in my eyes.

Always love his art... but I remember getting turned off from his writing and storytelling with his response to people being upset with his Vision storyline. His response was basically "he's a toaster people are mad that I "killed" a toaster?" ....It was such a WTF take from a creator. It would be like if when writing X-men he'd brutally killed Nightcrawler and responded with "He's not even human...he's a monster. Why should you care."

I always found it interesting, and a bit weird, that he had the FF's unis change from blue with black trim to black with white trim. Just seems like an odd choice, particularly that the uniforms were actually altered (and such a fine detail that the blue became black and the black became white, causing the black drop shadow on the 4 on the chest emblem to disappear into the white background while the blue 4 became black). Of course, other artists seemed to ignore that, and just made them dark blue (though given the coloring limitations of the time, it's probably similar to how Ditko originally intended Spider-Man's costume to be red and black, and the blue "highlights" eventually overtook the suit to become the one we're familiar with today).

The FF issues where the drop off happened were when John brought in the She-Hulk. My theory: Byrne was so enamored with the character he wanted to make her look as realistic as possible as opposed to the more simple cartoony style he drew people's faces. Drawing her more realistic meant drawing every character the same way which took more time and thats why the backgrounds were simplified.

I think technically, to some sense, he isn't wrong about comic creators creating products first, stories second, when they work contractually for a company, but it's just not the point. Creators deserve credit and ownership over their personal creations, direct or indirect, which are then sold as a product on behalf of a company. It's the same thing for musicians. If you sign a contract with a record label, you deserve all rights, credits, and ownership of said music you produce for them but that contract you signed also obligates you to produce said music as a product for the company's benefit. To not see what most other artists were fighting for at the time and why it was important, and then to publicly speak out against them (especially historically critical moments like Siegel and Schuster) is absolutely baffling. At the very least I'd have thought he'd simply not comment. Perhaps his perception of the comics industry is a partial contributor to the devaluing of his own work. He allowed himself to become rapidly burnt out producing 'products,' rather than pushing to create precisely what it was he enjoyed creating; the art of it all. That could explain his need to continue X-Men fanfiction.

I always thought the same thing. His art in the 1970s up until around the issue of FF you mentioned were incredible. But I also noticed a slight drop after that. It was still really good, just not up to his earlier work. I never cared for him inking his own pencils. Great video....

Wow, I never knew much about the person behind the art. I will always be a fan of those early books and his contributions to the characters he helped shape, but sad and disappointed in his outlook towards certain subject matter that I don’t align with. Thank you for educating me today.

Wish I never saw that Star Trek photo comic..... But his older work will forever blow minds and inspire and teach artists worldwide. METALLICA

Thanks for this video! There's so much to talk about with John Byrne, you could probably make two or three videos. The thing about Byrne's work is that the vast majority of it is done with characters created by other people. I've tried to figure out what interests Byrne creatively by looking at his original work, but it's difficult. I thought Next Men was great at first, but the stories often seemed to deliberately swerve away from saying anything significant. There's an arc of Next Men called Faith (the one that introduced Hellboy) that has one of the characters imagining the story of Jesus, but with the characters re-imagined as people he knows. It comes so close to saying something deep, but just doesn't. I remember reading that one over and over, trying to figure out what the point was. I mean he definitely seems to be going somewhere with it, but swerves before the story can get there. Maybe one needs to read his novels to come to a fuller understanding of what he wants to say. I don't know, I've only read Whipping Boy and didn't care for it. But there's also Fear Book and Wonder Woman: Gods And Monsters.

Did someone say John Byrne?!!? Love the comic rack over to your side. Your take on subjects is pure gold. Great video as usual!

Thank you thank you thank you for paying tribute in a respectful video dedicated solely to John Byrne! John Byrne was THEEE man and he has always been FUCKING AMAZINGLY AWESOME as an ARTIST! He was not only the Hallmark artist of DC and Marvel between the 70s and early 90s, but I don't even think there could have been an artist BIGGER than him at any point during his run. Still to this day he is probably the CORNERSTONE ARTIST of ALL comic book artists today. I did not draw in his style, I preferred a Jim lee, Mark silvestri, Alan davis, but WITHOUT a DOUBT I knew he was the PINNACLE of high quality art, with Rapid Release and consistent in his delivery! John Byrne is not simply a catalyst great visual artists, but he is also a magnanimous writer and inspirer to those who would ever dream to read a comic book draw a comic book or imagine the world inside comic book art! Thank you again this was phenomenal!

Great video!!!!! Consider making this a sort of mini series? Bryan Hitch, Greg Capullo,etc. Either way, I'm here to stay. 😊

excellent work as always

Oh shit I found your channel last month and have been binging your videos and you’ve easily become one of my favorites. This is the first new upload I’ve caught. Byrne’s work on X-Men and She-Hulk alone put him high up there. I loved his art from that time. Never really checked out anything he’s done past the early 00s.

Hey Chris, love your show! Always entertaining and educational. This episode alone I feel you are missing something. Next Men, in my humble opinion, was peak Byrne. It was an absolute masterpiece. When I go back and look at his X-men and FF runs, the art is an example of an early manifestation of his talent that, to me, evolved later. Although his detailed backgrounds (there are plenty in Next Men) are eye candy, and demonstrate elbow grease, the simplification and abstraction of his art was a kind of progress. Cheers

We have to recognize the effects of age on artist - eyesight deterioration, hand arthritis, back pain etc all force an artist to change his/her style…

great thoughts........thank you very much!!!

The storm in the thumbnail and mohawk storm are my two favorite storms!

I noticed the change in style during his FF run. I agree that the early Byrne FF art, where he did his own inking, was phenomenal. When Jerry Ordway came on as inker during the Time Travel story just never gelled.

"Key" books for me in the early 80's, when collecting, were any Byrne artwork books. Highlight of my collecting days was when I was able to attend a Creation Events convention where he was a guest. He was the biggest thing in comics for sure but conventions were small and mellow and you could hang out in front of his desk getting signatures and watching him draw as long as you wanted. He was really nice to all of us fans/collectors.

Speaking as someone who watched him move from obscurity in Iron Fist to absolute dominance in X-Men with Claremont, his quality of work really went south right after he left X-Men. He lost his mojo and thereafter never had the same bright creativity that made me love him so much.

Excellent analysis Chris!

Jump scare warning on those first two panels

Byrne was my favorite artist in the 80's to this day his art is some of my favorite. I definitely felt disappointed in his art especially in the 90's. But after getting older myself i can see how to every artist experiences a drop in quality maybe due to burnouts, or boredom or just getting older.

Great video. Love John Byrne so this one was fun for me.

Fell in love during AWC/WCA. Great arc for Scarlet Witch.

Happy Thanksgiving Chris!

as controversial (😅) as he and his later art might be, some of his superman art leaves me jaw-dropped to this day. genuinely incredible

Very interesting! Great video

Chris video have gotten so much better!

I was hoping to hear a little more about Next Men. I recall thinking his art on that book was nowhere near as detailed as what I had seen on Alpha Flight or Man of Steel, but I liked the concept behind the story.

Great topic, probably one of my favourites if we are talking about comics. I was obsessed, as many people, with his earlies runs on FF, X-Men, Alpha Flight, Cap, Superman,... and I am a huge fan of Next Men and 2112. Imo that was his Swan Song. Excellent art, peak story telling. He disconcerted me a lot in the late 80s. As you said, maybe the last third part of his run with FF was the beginning of his fall. WCA ŵas a very exciting era for me. My favourite artist and my favourite group together at last. The result was confusing (the plot!) and the composition of the pages were more vague than in the past times. A genius imo, with all the bad things that entails 😅 Eternal love for him. Cheers 🎉