Comics fights!

One of the weird things about comics to me is that there are a LOT of professionals who have a rock star like feeling about themselves. Never mind that they produce funny books for aging fanboys, but most of the ones with the biggest egos seem to be ones that USED to be "hot artists" and are now just barely able to sell enough comics to make a living at it.

For example, John Byrne was the man who drew the X-Men when it started getting big, did a great run on the Fantastic Four and re-designed Superman. All of those things happened from about 1978 to 1986. By 1992, his star had fallen so far that his "creator owned" comic "The Next Men (oh no, he wasn't trying to play off his past fame there at all) was stumbling out of the gate, and he was becoming best known for knocking younger artists and poor convention behavior. Right or wrong, Bynre got a reputation as a prima donna, and his public statements did nothing to help his cause.

Nor did his terrible horror novel Whipping Boy, which had as one of its character, a fat, hygenically challenged comic book fan who is gleefully killed as part of the plot.

Mostly, he now shows his personality on his message board , where he decires black people remaking old TV shows, thinks the Onion is a serious newspaper and blasts other comic creators for disagreeing with his ideas.

Somewhere on the internet, there is a serious discussion to be had about the point in the final link...how some comic book characters can be so open to interpretation that they become almost mythological and it is more important what the person reading the story brings to it thanb what the creators intend...but Byrne's forum isn't the place. It's the place for "That's how it was in the 70's, and since that's when I started reading comics, things should just stay like that."

And if you feel the same way, I point you to the reprints and back issues and say, "Get reading, bub." I, for one, would rather see comics change with the times.

That and Neal Adams is about a bajillion times the artist that John Byrne is.