Articles with the Tag John Byrne

That time Englehart was Byrned

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Byrned -- from WCA 51

Andrew Weiss is asked is there “A hated story or story line you like?” and answers with John Byrne’s run on West Coast Avengers

Without trying to defend that nonsense (because, honestly, I can’t), I will say it regrettably overshadows an fairly entertaining and mildly innovative run of comics. For starters, it was John Byrne’s return to Marvel after a three year stint at the Distinguished Competition. The significance of that might be lost on kids born after 1980 or so, but for my demographic peers it was a Big Deal. Our memories of his X-Men and Fantastic Four and Captain America work was recent enough to give Ol’ Crankypants another chance.

Byrne’s run happened just as I was branching out from reading Dutch translations of Marvel series to the originals, as the local comic shop had finally started to carry them. First priority lay of course with all the series that had not been translated and WCA was one of them. For a noob like me, Byrne’s dynamism and willingness to shake up the status quo was great, even if I didn’t like what he was doing to the Scarlet Witch, who already was a favourite of mine. It was only later, when I’d more context to place his stories in that it became clear all his change was for the negative.

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And it was only when I read an angry open letter Steve Englehart had send to Amazing Heroes that I realised that was probably deliberate. Byrne has always had a reputation for trashing everything he didn’t like in series he took over, prefering to strip continuity back to his own view of what Lee and Kirby did, rather than build on the work of other, lesser writers. As far back as 1982, when Byrne had only just started his Fantastic Four run, you had Len Wein and Marv Wolfman complaining about the changes Byrne made. In an interview for The Fantastic Four Chronicles special put out by Fantaco, Len Wein wrote: “I muchly resent what John is doing, I resent his implication that everything in the past 20 years hasn’t happened, that it’s still 1964.” Now on The Fantastic Four, Byrne created as much as he broke down, but on West Coast Avengers it was different. True, he brought back the original Human Torch and remade Hank Pym, Failed Superhero into Jump Suit Battle Scientist Hanky Pym, which was rather cool, but apart from that:

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  1. Tigra reverted to a cat like state
  2. Master Pandemonium, from independent villain to lackey of Mephisto
  3. The Vision went from a crying android into an emotionless, “logical” Data clone
  4. Vison got a new, fugly piss yellow costume
  5. Scarlet Witch went insane and joined Magneto for a bit
  6. Scarlet Witch went insane and molested Wonderman
  7. Wonderman meanwhile hat the hots for the Witch
  8. The Vision and Scarlet Witch’s babies? Never existed, just shards of the soul of Mephisto

Byrne started his run with issue 42 and left with 57 and from begin to end he set out to systematically demolish everything that Englehart had done with the Vision & Scarlet Witch. Personalities destroyed, marriage demolished, their kids retconned out of existence, etc. It’s hard not to see that as a deliberate vendetta against Englehart, especially in the light of the troubles he’d later ran into on his other two titles under DeFalco as editor-in-chief. Rereading it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, seeing the creations of a writer who surely deserved better be torn down so brutally.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 25: Essential X-Men Vol. 2

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cover of Essential Essential X-Men Vol. 2


Essential Essential X-Men Vol. 2
Chris Claremont, John Byrne and friends
Reprints: Uncanny X-Men #120-144 (April 1979 – April 1981)
Get this for: Byrne and Claremont at their peak together — five stars

Essential X-Men Vol. 2 contains the first X-Men comics I had ever read, which was also one of the very few superhero stories that ever gave me nightsmares: X-Men #141-142, “The Days of Future Past”. It’s the story in which the X-Men found the nemesis they would be fighting for the next two decades, the inevitable future that would await them if they slipped up, that for all their victories they might not be able to prevent happening. It’s a great story, perhaps the best Byrne and Claremont ever did together and it captured the essence of the X-Men.

And here it comes at the end of a great run of stories. While the first volume saw Claremont still finding his feet, here both he and John Byrne are fully in control and confident of their craft. The volume starts with the last leg of the X-Men’s world tour that had begun in the previous collection, as the X-Men run into Alpha Flight attempting to take back Wolverine into the Canadian secret service. This followed by their first match against Arcade, the murderer for hire who likes to kill his victims by funfair. Barely recovered from these fights, they discover Jean Grey, whom they had thought had died in the climatic fight against Magneto a dozen issues or so again, was still alive and kicking at Muir Island, but menaced by a new menace: Mutant X. Defeating him turns out to be the heaviest fight and costliest victory they have known yet, but that’s just the start.

Now things kick into high gear, as professor X is back, two new mutants, Kitty Pryde and the Dazzler are found and turn out to be bait in a trap a new group of villains, the Hellfire Club, has set. Meanwhile this same club turns also be behind a long running subplot in which Jean “Phoenix” Grey has had multiple flashbacks to the live of one of her ancestors, which turns out to be the result of manipulation by Mastermind, in order to recruit her for the Club. The X-Men manage to defeat the Hellfire Club in their first encounter, go on offensive but this turns into tragedy as Jean Grey is indeed turned to the dark side, so to speak. Their second clash with the Hellfire Club sets in motion two new menaces, one longterm as senator Robert Kelly is confirmed in his suspicions about the X-Menb and mutants in general, the second an immediate threat as Mastermind’s manipulations awaken Jean Grey’s cosmic powers and she turns into the evil Dark Phoenix.

The Dark Phoenix Saga is the end point of more than two years of stories and subplots coming together, as Jean’s powers ultimately consume her in one of the most moving issues in the entire X-Men run. Reading these stories in one sitting, all the way from the still fairly mundane fight with Alpha Flight in #120 to the end of Phoenix in #137, you can see how Claremont and Byrne slowly but relentlessly speed up the action and danger until at the end the X-Men have no breathing space whatsoever going from one menace to another. Whereas other heroes, other teams might get some time to savour their victories, the X-Men never get to catch their breaths until it is too late. Even after the climax of the Dark Phoenix saga, there’s only one issue of recaps and half an issue of Kitty’s introduction to the X-Men before the race starts again. First it’s Wolverine and Nightcrawler up in Canada helping out Alpha Flight with Wendigo, then as said, it’s “Days of Future Past”.

Now from the start the X-Men had had as their hook, the thing that made them unique, that they were mutants, heroes different from normal people not through some unlucky accident, study of magic or high tech battlesuits, but because of what they were born with. For a long part this aspect, that they were supposed to be the team that made mutants acceptable to a world that might otherwise hate and fear them, was only paid lipservice to, the occasional Sentinel appearance not withstanding. Under Claremont this aspect had become more prominent, but it was only with “Days of Future Past”, which showed a nightmare future in which the X-Men had not succeeded in their mission and the Sentinels had wiped out most mutants and taken over the world, that this became the cornerstone of the series. With the original X-Men, all that suspicion and fear people felt was just a typical Lee shtick to handicap his heroes: here it became something real and tragic. You could call it a metaphor for racial or sexual prejudice, or more cynically, a metaphor for adolescence, but this is a metaphor made concrete: in the end it is a story about how we might react to the discovery of a mutant race of superpowered beings living amongst us…

That delayed future would become everything the X-Men fought against, though it was still some time away before it would really dominate the series — we must also remember that basically this future denies the very reason of the X-Men’s existence. As long as it is still a possible outcome, it means that all their victories are hollow…

Back to the current volume, the “Days of Future Past” is followed by a perfect one issue story, as Kitty Pryde takes on a demon that does looks nothing like the Alien from the Sigourney Weaver movies at all, uh huh. It’s a textbook example of an “outmatched hero uses the environment and her brains to defeat her almost invincible foe” story. This is followed by another one issue story, a solo Cyclops story following his adventures after he left the X-Men what with Jean’s dead and all, which ends the volume.

That last story is the only one not to feature Byrne on the art. It’s not always easy to appreciate him, what with the great volume of mediocre work he has done since X-Men, but he starts great and keeps getting better each issue. You understand why he set the style for at least one generation of superhero artists. He takes the best aspect of the Marvel Housestyle of the seventies, that clear, easy to follow style of layout and drawing that means you can immediately understand what’s happening on any page and puts it together with his own flair for composition and figure drawing. His work is always in the service of the story but he always makes it look good as well. He has that knack that so few artists have, of not only making you see the world in his art, but seeing the world through his art. Reading a huge chunk of his work in one go like this means I will see Byrne poses everywhere for the next few days.

A small sacrifice.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 20: Essential OHOTMU Deluxe Edition Vol. 1

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Essential OHOTMU Deluxe Edition Vol. 1
Mark Gruenwald, Peter Sanderson and friends
Reprints: OHOTMU Deluxe 1-7 (December 1985 – June 1986)
Get this for: State of the Marvel Universe ’86 — Four stars

So back in 1982 Mark Gruenwald and co concieved the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe detailing all the most important characters, places and things concieved up in some twenty years of Marvel Comics. It had run its course by mid-1984 and a year later the need was felt for an update. Hence this, the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, Deluxe Edition. Instead of the standard 32 pages of the first edition, it had 64 pages per issue with no ads, room to expand individual entries, cover more characters, up the text size and most importantly, use more artwork.

It was the latter that drove George Perez away from Marvel.

Which seems strange, until you know that all that extra artwork was, unlike the main art in a given entry, was not new, but copied and pasted from older comics, uncredited and unpaid for. Once Perez saw that this had happened to his artwork as well, he got so angry he refused to work for Marvel ever again. Since his main series at the time was New Teen Titans for DC this wasn’t that hard a gesture, but it did mean that the fourth part of Perez and Macchio’s Black Widow serial in Marvel Fanfare (which had been commissioned years earlier but never saw print) had to make do with an Arthur Adams cover rather than new art by Perez. He would come back to Marvel in the early nineties, after Jim Shooter had left, when ironically it was DC that was dicking him around…

Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge but it did make this version of OHOTMU a bit controversial. Marvel has learned from this: in the modern series reprinted art is all neatly credited and I assume paid for as well.

The format of the series is no different from the first: entries in alphabetic order, with corrections, glossaries and other editorial content on the inside covers. Speaking of which, the wraparound covers by John Byrne are beautiful, almost as good as Perez’s covers for the DC equivalent, Who’s Who in the DC Universe. I first encountered these covers in a Marvel Comics diary/calender published in Holland, where they were used as the background to the diary pages. Back then I could name perhaps one in ten of the characters shown but they were fascinating nonetheless.

The entries are longer and feature more obscure figures as well as the obvious ones, though luckily total time wasters like (ugh) Shamrock are not carried over from the first series. Much of the added length of many entries comes from giving those characters that deserve it longer histories, recapping the highs and lows of their careers. More attention is also paid to powers and abilities, in an attempt to standarise and systemise them, though to be honest little attention to these efforts was ever paid to them in the real comics. For geeks like me though this stuff is gold dust. No longer do you need to argue who’s stronger, the Hulk or the Abomination: the Hulk is Class Strength 100, meaning he can bench press a hundred tons regularly, while the Abomination might be able to do that once, but not in succession.

What I also like about this series, especially when I wasn’t that familiar with the Marvel Universe yet, was seeing all these characters and getting some of their backstory. It showed what a weird and wonderful place the Marvel Universe was. For those who are not quite that geeky, this is far from an essential purchase of course, but still a good snapshot of mid-eighties Marvel.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 15: Essential X-Men Vol. 1

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cover of Essential Essential X-Men Vol. 1


Essential Essential X-Men Vol. 1
Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, John Byrne and friends
Reprints: Giant-Size X-Men #1, Uncanny X-Men #94-119 (July 1975 – March 1979)
Get this for: the start of the X-Men revolution — four stars

Hard to imagine now, but once upon a time The X-Men were a failure, never having been more than a cult hit throughout the Silver Age, even becoming a reprint series with #67. It limped along for a couple of years, up until issue 93, while the team showed up here and there as guest stars in other titles, some members becoming Champions, well The Beast had his own solo series in Amazing Adventures before joining the cast of The Avengers. It all seemed over for the X-Men, but like good superheroes they came back in the nick of time and it all started with Giant-Size X-Men #1, the first issue reprinted here.

Giant-Size X-Men was followed by a renewed X-Men series, started with #94. While these first two issues were written by Len Wein, by #95 Chris Claremont had come aboard and he would remain the X-Men’s writer for some seventeen years. It takes him a while to find his voice and the first few issues are on the rough side, but it really doesn’t take long for the mutant juggernaut to start rolling. Claremont’s writing on X-Men revolutionised superhero comics and it’s here that it started: by the end of the volume the classic Claremont is established.

Some elements of it pop up even earlier. Both the most loved and hated characteristic of Claremont’s style is having long, drawn out plots and subplots, stacked on top of each other, with one menace fading into the background earning the heroes only a little respite before the next one, long foreshadowed, has to be fought. Here Claremont starts doing this as early as #96-97, the first of which foreshadows the return of the Sentinels, with #97 introducing the menace of Eric the Red, while Prof Xavier was plagued with strange dreams of a Galaxy far, far away. The first threat takes until #100 to be resolved and of course leads to the metamorphosis of Marvel Girl into Phoenix, which comes in handy for defeating the second villain, who turns out just to be a pawn of a mad emperor of the alien Sh’iar Empire, who in turn threatens to unleash the end of everything. It all gets fixed by #108.

Said issue incidently features something I wish was still used in modern Marvel stories, the half page or full page looking in at the rest of the Marvel Universe while the heroes of the comic you’re reading are struggling to defeat the menace du jour. In this case you have Peter Corbeau onboard the Sunwatch space station briefing Mr Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, Beast and Captain America of the Avengers as well as then president Jimmy Carter via teleconference, explaining that yes, the strange blip felt at the end of the last issue was indeed the entire universe ceasing to exist for half a second and that if it happens again, the universe may not come back… This kind of scene always helped emphasise the seriousness of a threat, that it was not just the X-Men’s fate that mattered, but everybody’s. But it also helps build up a sense of interconnectness, that these adventures are not taking place in a vacuum.

From the start the X-Men are kept busy here; there are no quiet issues. After establishing the new team and sending them on their first mission in Giant-Size X-Men, they immediately have to defeat Count Nefaria’s threat of nuclear annihilation in the next two issues, deal with the death of a teammate, fight the sentinels over multiple issues, see Professor Xavier deal with futuristic nightmares, deal with old enemies gunning for them, first Black Tom and the Juggernaut waiting for them in Ireland, only defeated with the help of leprechauns (not their finest houre), then Magneto returns, but their fight with him is cut short as they’re swept up in the intergalactic adventure mentioned above. Once finished with that, Wolverine has to deal with the Canadian government wanting him back, before yet another old enemy turns up and makes the X-Men into funfair performers. The Magneto turns up again, kidnaps them to his secret base near the Savage Land, which blows up and leaves two sets of X-Men, as the Beast and Phoenix manage to return home, while the rest helps Ka-Zar fight a would be conqueror in the Savage Land, before being picked up by a Japanese vessel who drops them off in Japan just in time to fight Moses Magnum, which ends the volume. It’s all fastpaced and incredibly busy, but Claremont always remains in control and keeps things understandable.

He’s helped in this by the art, which from Giant-Size X-Men #1 up to X-Men #107 is in the hands of Dave Cockrum, with the rest of the issues drawn by John Byrne. Quite different artists of course, with Cockrum having a much looser, cartoony and swashbuckling style, lending itself well to widescreen space opera, while Byrne is more realistic in his art. Byrne is also one of those artist who, like Jack Kirby have the effect on me that if I read a large run of their stories in one go, I start to see the world through their art. So now suddenly everybody on tv is standing around in those typical widelegged, slighty skewed Byrne poses… Both Cockrum and Byrne are wonderful artists here, well suited to Claremont, who adapts his stories to their strengths. Of the two I prefer Byrne, just because he does things for me Cockrum can’t.

Sadly, some of Claremonts more annoying tics are also in evidence here, especially in the characterisation. There’s a lot of ill established antagonism between characters, which especially in the earlier issues was wearisome. There are also the first glimmers of another bad Claremont habit, the subtle and not so subtle references to the past lives of some of the X-Men, especially Wolverine. Some idiot plotting as well, where Claremont goes for the “make life more complicated for the characters through bad communication and drawing out of misunderstandings”. It’s bearable here, but I do remember at the end of his X-Men run, when it just became too annoying.

One other complaint I had was the misuse of Jean “Phoenix” Grey. Supposedly the most powerful person on the team, story after story has her being taken out easy or struggle to defeat villains she should have been able to take with one arm tied behind her back. The same goes for Storm, though to a lesser extent. Also very powerful, she again is kept out of action more than she should have been. If you have strong female heroes, use them, don’t find contrived ways to keep them out of action to keep the story going for longer…