Novels:
Fearbook! (Warner Books)
Whipping Boy (Abyss/Dell)
Wonder Woman: Gods & Goddesses (Prima Publishing)

Short Stories available in Anthologies:
Hotter Blood: "Nocturne" by John Byrne (Pocket Books)
Shock Rock: "Hide in Plain Sight" by John Byrne (Pocket Books)

Do your recall who was the FIRST artist who "grabbed" you and got you going on drawing? Perhaps when you were a child?

JB: Your question has a much more literal answer than you might have guessed when you posed it. There have been many influences in my artistic career, but the one who I will always credit as having jumpstarted the whole thing was my paternal grandfather, Frederick Aurthur Byrne, who, when I was a baby, would hold me on his lap, hold a piece of chalk in my right hand, and draw on a small slate. I still have the slate, recovered from my grandmother's house when she died. On it is a choo-choo train which she preserved and which, given the damp English climate, has eaten into the board to the point that it cannot be erased. The oldest existing John Byrne original, vintage 1952!!

Yes, the "Surfing With The Alien" album cover featuring the Silver Surfer was drawn by John Byrne. However, the drawing was not an original piece, and JB did not give permission or receive payment for its use. The art is lifted from panel 1 of page 6 of SILVER SURFER #1 published in 1982.

Question: Will I have to read the first 30 issues of the original run in order to understand what's going on?

John Byrne: When [IDW's] Chris Ryall finally talked me into brining back JBNM, one of the things we were both concerned about was making it easy for readers completely unfamiliar with the book to jump on without having to read any of the previous issues. To this end, I came up with a structure for the first issue that does just that -- but I'm still worried that some retailers and fans (even well meaning ones -- remember GENERATIONS 3?) will start telling potential new readers that they "have to" read all the previous issues before starting in on the new series.

So here it is: YOU WILL NOT HAVE TO HAVE READ ANY OF THE PREVIOUS ISSUES IN ORDER TO PICK UP THE NEW ONES.

Trust me on this! And SPREAD THE WORD!

JB: I have decided to take a sabbatical from the monthly grind, clean the pipes, and concentrate for a while on the commission pieces. (08/21/2006)

In addition to the commissions, JB will return to his creator-owned NEXT MEN in December 2010. Published by IDW, this new storyline takes place immediately following the events of the original series in 1995.

JB is also writing and drawing Star Trek miniseries for IDW, including STAR TREK: CREW and STAR TREK: LEONARD MCCOY, FRONTIER DOCTOR. In the recent past, JB has written and drawn other Star Trek miniseries such as ASSIGNMENT: EARTH, ROMULANS: SCHISM, and ROMULANS: THE HOLLOW CROWN.

JB has also announced upcoming projects involving the Buffyverse's Angel, following his recent work on ANGEL: BLOOD & TRENCHES and ANGEL VS. FRANKENSTEIN.

An announced JB project called CITIZEN ZERO has not yet been scheduled.

John Byrne has worked continuously in comics since 1975, following his first professional sale in late summer of 1974. Beginning humbly enough, with the likes of WHEELIE AND THE CHOPPER BUNCH and DOOMSDAY + 1 (for Charlton Comics), and IRON FIST and THE CHAMPIONS for Marvel, he eventually moved on to Marvel's number one cult book, X-MEN (not yet Uncanny) in 1977.

It was his work on X-MEN which truly ignited John's star, and from there he moved to CAPTAIN AMERICA, THE AVENGERS, and a five year run on Marvel's flagship title, FANTASTIC FOUR. Seeking new heights to conquer, in 1986 John accepted the daunting assignment of revamping the oldest and most famous of all superheroes, Superman. Beginning with the hugely successful MAN OF STEEL miniseries, John brought SUPERMAN back into the attention of the fans, and that success continues today. In 1990, John decided to venture into the unpredictable waters of creator owned works, launching NEXT MEN in 1991. Following that success he brought out DANGER UNLIMITED, followed by BABE in 1995. Since then, he has written and drawn such titles as WONDER WOMAN, X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS, LAB RATS, DOOM PATROL, and BLOOD OF THE DEMON. In 2005, he returned to Superman performing art duties for ACTION COMICS.

JB: The earliest use of the word "fanboy" of which I am aware was in the "Obligatory New Pages" of Jim Engle and Chuck Fiala's FANDOM CONFIDENTIAL collection (from the pages of "The Comic Reader".) In a scene in which Jim and Chuck collapse into paroxysms of mindless adoration because they have been in the room with me for more than five minutes, Jim had me refer to them as "a couple of fanboys in bondage". This was a reference to/play on a Monty Python skit in which an Elizabethan character is scene reading "Gayboys in Bondage" which she claims is by William Shakespeare. (4/18/2005)

JB: Born not far from the town of West Bromwich, in England, on July 6th 1950. Father Frank (now Lord Rushton), mother Nelsie. No sibs.

I've heard you say more than once that you disliked your ALPHA FLIGHT run. Was it the art or the writing that you thought fell down?

JB: Alpha Flight (the team) were never really meant to be anything more than a bunch of superheroes who could survive a fight with the X-Men. They had no real depth, and I resisted suggestions that they get their own book for a couple of years. Then, finally, realizing Marvel would probably get someone else to do it, if I didn't, I relented and agreed. (Sidebar: ALPHA FLIGHT #1 was the biggest selling comic of its day -- 500,000 copies!!)

Down through the years, a number of Gay fans have approached me to say "thanks" for ALPHA FLIGHT and NorthStar, so I suppose it justifies its existence in that way -- but as a whole, except for a couple of bright moments, the book just never gelled for me, art- or story-wise. (4/4/98)

If you had stayed on X-Men provided that Jim Lee, Whilce Portacio and possibly Bob Harras had been more professional in dealing with you, what story ideas would you have come up with?

JB: I generally prefer to avoid discussions of storylines that did not pan out. Too many prying eyes, too few ethics. And too many times seeing my ideas repackaged under another writer's byline.

JB: Too many fans today consider themselves far too hip and a-go-go to ever go along with the most basic conceit of serial fiction: that the main characters will survive, but we will pretend, for the sake of this story, that that is not a given.

When I was a lad, I worried every time Superman fell into a kryptonite death trap. Usually I only had to wait four or five pages to find out that he was going to be okay, but it never occurred to me to shrug and flip to the next story to see if he survived. Only when reading SUPERBOY was I ever aware that there was no "tension", since we knew Superboy would become Superman. (I refer to this as "Superboy Syndrome", and caution writers to be very careful about it when doing flashbacks or, more significantly, flash forwards.)

If you reach a point at which you "know" no real harm can ever befall the main characters, and you are unable to simply accept that (without commenting that there is "no real tension") then you have crossed an important line, and there is no point in you continuing to follow this kind of fiction. Accept it for what it is, or move on -- but don't find fault with the ocean because it is too wet. (5/10/2004)

JB: Start work around 7am. Break for an hour at noon. Afternoon is from 1 to 4, typically. 7 days a week, unless I have something else to do on the weekend.

Did a second issue of the "How To Draw Comics Comic"ever come out? I remember getting the first one ( very informative) but never seeing a second.

JB: Here we come to some of the Bad Things That Happen When You Trust People. I had nothing to do with the HOW TO DRAW COMICS COMIC aside from loaning the publisher a whole whack of my sketchbooks -- sketchbooks he never returned -- from which to lift any art he might feel was appropriate. I did not write a single word for the book, and I even had to stop him calling the dang thing "JOHN BYRNE'S HOW TO. . . " (11/12/97)

If I asked for a commissioned piece by JB that was a version of a classic X-Men cover, and paid JB for said work, Does this break copyright?

JB: Freelancers doing drawings for the fans, and getting paid for them, is a convention of the industry almost as old as the industry itself. Traditionally, it has been considered free advertising, and "fair use". Mostly, for the Companies to try to shut it down would simply be too much trouble. Can you imagine trying to maintain a watchful eye on every convention, in every state, every country? The mind boggles.

When the problem rises is in reproduction. A few years back Marvel shut me down when I printed up a few hundred copies of a Fantastic Four miniposter that I intended to sell at a convention, donating the proceeds (proceeds, not profits) to Breast Cancer Research. If you were to order up a recreation of a favorite cover, that would not be a problem. If, however, you (or I, or anyone) sold prints of that recreation, then copyright would be infringed.

It's my understanding that this is essentially what happened to Carl Barks. Disney was prepared to look the other way when he was doing duck paintings for paying customers. They clamped down when he started selling prints. (9/9/2006)

Comment: I'm glad that readers will be able to jump on board with issue #31 without first having to read anything else. However, I really hope that those who haven't read the first 31 issues of JBNM (and/or 2112) will be "triggered" by the new stuff, and become inspired to pick up the collections at some point. I want as many people as possible to experience those incredible Next Men stories!

John Byrne: That would be ideal, of course!

As I mentioned in another thread, the other day, one of the most destructive phrases that as worked its way into comic reading is "What's a good jumping on point?" Whole "generations" of potential readers have been scared away by the idea that there is no way to simply START READING, as I did lo these many years ago. And it certainly has not helped that far too many writers now THINK in terms of "jumping on points" -- not in the sense that EVERY issue should be one, but that by throwing out a "jumping on point" every once in a while, they are free to ramble on with their lazy, undisciplined, "decompressed" stories.

These guys should be tossed into a time machine and sent back to 1956, where they would be forced to write "jumping on point" stories THREE TIMES PER ISSUE!!! Gun to their heads, I'll bet most of these wankers could not write an eight page, done in one story.

JB: Characters "cleaning up their act" as they become more popular, as with Mickey Mouse no longer feeding cats' tails into sausage grinders, or Superman and Batman no longer killing the bad guys. (11/02/04)

JB: New writers and/or editors thinking being assigned to a title or character is a mandate to blow everything up and start from scratch. (Applied facetiously, since this is usually done without a fraction of the time spent working out what was done in MoS.) (11/02/04)

JB: Adding unnecessary details which complicate a character's backstory. This comes, of course, from the bottled city of Kandor, which used to reside in Superman's Fortress of Solitude, making it necessary, every time Superman visited the Fortress, to spend a coupe of panels explaining what Kandor was. Finally, a story was done in which Superman succeeded in restoring Kandor to its normal size, and also placing it on an alien world that "phased" out of our reality, Brigadoon-like, for 100 years at a time. Problem solved -- until another story was done in which it was decided that Superman "missed" having Kandor in its special place in the Fortress, so he created a perfect scale model of it, which had to be explained every time he went to the Fortress. And then, another story was done in which an alien race who were naturally that small moved into the model, so every time. . . .   etc, etc. (11/02/04)

JB: Several members of what became Alpha Flight date back to my fan days. Guardian is chief among them, being created when I was in my early 20s as the figurehead of a whole line of "Canadian comics" I was hoping to produce. Snowbird, in very different form, was born around the same time. Shaman, originally called Chinook (he had only weather-controlling powers) came next. (There was also a character called Phoenix. No chance he would ever have made it into Alpha Flight!)

When I was assigned the gig of penciling UNCANNY X-MEN, Chris Claremont mentioned that Dave Cockrum had an idea that the Canadian government probably would not be too thrilled to see their multi-million dollar investment -- Wolverine -- head south as had so many other Canadian resources. Surely, he suggested, Ottawa would send somebody, perhaps even a team, to get him back. This sounded like a great idea, to me, and, of course, I had just the characters to do it. We decided to start with just one, tho, the leader of the group. Since Marvel at that time was publishing GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY the Powers that Were nixed the name Guardian, and since my backup, the Canadian Shield, was equally problematic in the Marvel Universe, he was without a name for a while. Chris took to calling him "Major Mapleleaf", and Roger Stern said we'd better come up with a name before that one stuck. Chris then tacked on "Vindicator", which absolutely did not work for me. What does Canada need to "vindicate"? I began pushing for the restoration of Guardian, and eventually pushed that thru.

Before that happened, tho, we had our "sequel" to do, with that group of Canadians coming down to reclaim Wolverine. I dropped in the renamed (and power enhanced) Shaman and a redesigned Snowbird, and came up with Northstar and Aurora (super speed to counter Nightcrawler's teleportation), and Sasquatch (to balance Colossus) and off we went. In the process I came up with real names and some backstory for each.

But in my mind, Alpha Flight existed only as a team assembled to fight the X-Men. When Marvel asked for an Alpha series, I resisted for a long time. I just didn't see much that could be done with them. (7/16/2008)

JB: Beta and Gamma teams appeared as single panel shots each in the first issue of ALPHA FLIGHT. I had no idea who those people were! As the series progressed, and I wanted to bring in more characters, I went back to those two panels and started thinking about who they were. (11/04/2005)

What name did you prefer most for Mac: Guardian/Vindicator/Weapon Alpha?

JB: As to Guardian -- Guardian! "Weapon Alpha" means nothing, and Canada has nothing to "vindicate". (Chris named him after a cool airplane, without thinking about the real meaning of the word.) Guardian is what the character was called when he was a fan creation (mine!). Canadian National Anthem, after all -- We stand on guard for thee... (11/04/2005)

Is Puck named after a hockey puck or is his name an homage to Jack Kirby's Oberon, another dwarf with a Shakespearean name?

JB: He's named after a hockey puck. (5/30/2006)

What real world color is Aurora and NorthStar's hair supposed to be?  Is it just shiny black?

JB: Yup.

I have always wondered about that issue of ALPHA FLIGHT with five pages of blank panels indicating Snowbird's battle in the snowstorm. Did you get paid your normal page rate for "drawing" those five snowstorm pages, or was it a lesser rate, or did they even pay you at all?

JB: I got paid my normal rate. Shooter said the blank pages were "an artistic decision". (2/17/2006)

JB: Bounced back and forth between Canada and England until I was 8. Settled in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1958. Moved to Calgary, Alberta in 1966. Moved to Chicago (when I got married) in 1980. Brooklyn Heights from 1983 to 85. Since then, Fairfield, Connecticut.

Did you intend for Heather to become leader, from issue one?

JB: It was a couple of issues into the run on ALPHA that I decided Jim Hudson was for the high jump, and that Heather would become team leader. I did NOT want her to get powers, or put on the suit. That was such a cliché, I thought.

How did "The Last Galactus Story" end?

JB: At the virtual End of the Universe, Galactus is confronted by a Watcher. This Watcher turns out to be the same one who witnessed the "birth" of Galactus in our universe. The Watcher (not Uatu) was eventually driven mad by the accumulated guilt he feels for the acts of Galactus. He has been trying to move galaxies to somewhere Galactus cannot find them, but has been destroying them in the process. Galactus and the Watcher battle -- a huge cosmic confrontation that stretches over centuries, as the universe falls into near total entropy. Finally, to defeat the Watcher, Galactus sucks all the remaining energy out of the Universe. Nothing is left but Galactus and his loyal herald, Nova. Realizing at last what his purpose is, Galactus cracks the seal on his suit, starts to remove his helmet, and in that instant all the energy he has absorbed explodes out of him. He becomes the "big bang" of the next universe, and when the smoke clears, we see Nova has been reborn, as that universe's Galactus.

Incidentally, back when I was first approached about Marvel's "The End" project, I was asked to think about "last issues" for the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. One of the things that occured to me was using this as a way to finally finish the Last Galactus Story. Goes like this:

One day, out of a clear blue sky, literally, Nova falls into the heart of Manahattan. The FF go to investigate. They find her, and after a bit of trouble deciphering what she is saying they realize she has come from billions of years in the future. Reed's "universal translator" was having problems with her speech because she was speaking English, but English distorted by billions of years. Anyway, she finally tells them what's going on with Galactus and the rogue Watcher, and the FF race off to use their captured version of Doctor Doom's time machine to speed to the future and try to help Galactus. (Reed, you see, being Reed, has already figured out what Galactus' purpose is in the scheme of things.)

Uh oh! Using Doom's time machine alerts the good Doctor to what they are up to, and he goes after them. Pretty quickly he figures out what is going on, and realizes this is a perfect opportunity to steal the power of Galactus for himself. The universe may die in the meanwhile? What cares he?

So, of course, the FF end up battling Doom, who is doing all kinds of things to try to get Galactus' power, while Galactus is busy himself dealing with the rogue Watcher. Finally the good guys -- which includes Galactus in this case -- win, But Ben and Nova both die heroically in the process. Galactus wonders what it was all about, what it was all for. Reed tells him. Galactus understands. The FF (what's left of them) start to head back to their time machine with Doom as their prisoner. Galactus calls after them. "Leave him!" Moment of tension, but Reed agrees. The FF return to the present, and just as they wink out they see Galactus open the seals on his armor and begin to release all his stored energy.

The three are back on Earth, in the present. They mourn Ben, but they resolve to continue to fight the good fight, in his honor. The Fantastic Four are no more, but the Three shall fight on! Sue wonders what Galactus wanted Doom for.

Cut to somewhere, somewhen else. Energies roil. A Universe is aborning, and at its heart we see a great cosmic "egg" akin to the one that once gave birth to Galactus. It opens, and Galactus rises from its midst -- but when he turns to us, we see he now has the face/mask of Doctor Doom. Like a certain other human we all know, Doom is about to learn that "with great power must come great responsibility'. (2/15/2005)

JB: You don't know about the Byrne Curse, do you?

Chris Claremont and I did a story about a blackout in NYC. The week it came out, there was a blackout in NYC.

We did a story about an earthquake in Japan. The week it came out. . .

Okay, so those are no big deal, as such things happen all the time. But on my own I. . . . . . blew up a Space Shuttle in the second issue of MAN OF STEEL (and hastily redrew it as a "space plane" before it came out.

. . . named an aircraft carrier after a former Canadian Prime Minister (against the tradition of only naming ships after dead folk). He was dead by the time the book came out.

. . . and killed Prince Diana (Wonder Woman) in a book (replete with fake newspaper cover) that shipped week before the Saturday that. . .

If only this power could be harnessed for good! (5/15/2003)

Was writing a novel a life-long goal, or an outgrowth of doing comicbook writing? Did you just decide at some point after being established that a novel would be an interesting thing to try?

JB: I started out to be a novelist, really. I could always draw, to one degree or another, and I used my drawings often as not to tell little stories (usually for my own amusement only), but to tell the kinds of stories I found myself wanting to tell, the novel form seemed more efficient, somehow, than the words-and-pictures form. But, somewhere along the way, I found myself gravitating towards comics SOLELY as an artist -- then, only after several years did I start full time writing as well. Eventually, that led me back to the novel writing -- and finally to publication.

JB: Mechanical pencil with an HB lead.

I had always thought Venom was one of the better spider-villains -- something I credit more to David Michelinie in spite of the fact that McFarlane got most of the credit.

JB: I've told this story before, but it's worth repeating for illustration purposes: Todd McFarlane likes to say he "created" Venom -- usually forgetting David Michelinie. When I hear this, I usually respond by saying "No! I created Venom!" And it goes like this: Iron Fist used to be getting his costume torn up all the time. By the next issue, it was usually repaired again. I didn't much like the notion of Danny Rand sitting in a corner with a needle and thread, so, extrapolating from Chris's (then) idea that K'Un L'Un was actually a crashed spaceship that used its warp drive to phase between dimensions (Chris being in a sci-fi mode that week), I suggested that the outfit was made of some kind of biological material that "healed" instead of having to be patched. We never got around to using that in IRON FIST, and years later, after Spider-Man got his alien costume in SECRET WARS, Roger Stern asked if he could use the notion, and added the idea that the suit was some kind of symbiote. Tom DeFalco (if memory serves) took this a few steps further, until David and the Toddler added a big, ugly mouth and gave it a name, Venom.

So, who "created" Venom?

Question: Is there a special reason/story as to why now is the time it is coming back?

John Byrne: I have said for years that I was waiting for the marketplace to recover enough that I felt I could bring the book back without it sinking without so much as a ripple. I fear that -- the marketplace recovery -- is never going to happen, so when [IDW's] Chris Ryall said "How about NEXT MEN?" for the 437th time, I said "Okay."

Clearly I am never going to be able to put these stories anywhere else, and I need to get them out of my head!!!

Was it your intent when you created NorthStar that he would be a gay man?

JB: When I created Alpha Flight they were basically half a dozen characters who could survive a prolonged battle with the X-Men. They had very little depth -- tho I am a compulsive creator of backstory, so I knew something about their histories even then -- and were not really created with any thought toward them eventually getting their own title.
Unfortunately (?) they proved enormously popular, and so Marvel began pushing me to do an ALPHA FLIGHT book. Eventually I relented, and agreed to do the series -- which meant I had one problem instantly: I had to find ways to make those characters more three dimensional.

One of the things that popped immediately into my head was to make one of them Gay. I had recently read an article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN on what was then (the early 80s) fairly radical new thinking on just what processes caused a person to be homosexual, and the evidence was pointing increasingly to it being genetic and not environmental factors. So, I thought, it seemed like it was time for a Gay superhero, and since I was being "forced" to make ALPHA FLIGHT a real series, I might as well make one of them Gay.

From there, it was a process of elimination. I didn't want the homosexual character to be one of the girls, since that was something people tended to associate (rightly or wrongly) with Claremont books. Mac Hudson and Heather were happily married and I did not want to mess with that. Michael was widowed with a daughter, and that way lay what I considered too much of a cliche, if he turned out to be Gay. Besides, as a Native Canadian he was already the resident "minority". The new guy, Puck, had his own set of problems. Sasquatach would be just too damn scary!! So I settled on Jean-Paul, and the moment I did I realized it was already there. Somewhere in the back of my mind I must have been considering making him Gay before I "decided" to so so.

Of course, the temper of the times, the Powers That Were and, naturally, the Comics Code would not let me come right out and state that Jean-Paul was homosexual, but I managed to "get the word out" even with those barriers. (8/24/2004)

JB: The X-Books have been responsible for more muddying of the basic concept of what makes a mutant than you would think possible --especially since the definition (as seen in the MU) started in those books!

Mutants are, as noted, entities born with "powers" that their parents do not possess. This does not necessarily mean their parents must be mere mortals -- Namor and Franklin Richards come to mind -- but it usually makes for cleaner storytelling if they are.

I recall a letter I got while I was doing the FF, around the time I was starting to grumble about Chris trying to turn everybody into a "mutant" -- he was convinced Reed's intelligence made him a mutant! -- in which the writer said he loved the FF, they were his favorite mutants. sigh

Once upon a time, there were three settings:

Human -- no powers at all. (J. Jonah Jameson, Aunt May, Willie Lumpkin)

Non-Mutant Variant -- a term that also originated in X-MEN and described the likes of Spider-Man or Captain America, the Inhumans or Luke Cage. In UNCANNY it described Sauron.

Mutant -- powers different from either parent Namor. Franklin. Cyclops. Beast. Storm. Etc.

Implied was a fourth level -- those who had the same powers as one of their parents (Wolverine, when Sabretooth was his daddy), and so qualified as the first of a new species. (1/20/2005)

I've read on the web that John sometimes used felt tips for his FF inking. Is this correct?

JB: Yup. And sometimes Rapidograph pens. And sometimes brush. And sometimes Japanese brush-pens. And sometimes even ball-point!! (9/22/2005)

JB: Depends on how you define "comic book". First place I encountered the form was in a hardcover British SUPERMAN ANNUAL published around 1956. First in the more traditional format was SUPER COMICS, an Australian reprint title that had, in the one I read, a Superboy, a Batman, and a Johnny Quick story.

Do you think you would have worked ALPHA FLIGHT differently if there hadn't been such a drive for doing "real" death stories in comics at the time? And do you wish you wouldn't have killed Jim?

JB: One of us is misremembering the period. I don't recall any "drive" for "real" death stories at the time I offed Mac. Rather, I did that particular story because I felt Mac was the least interesting of all the members of Alpha, but realized that from his death I could generate a whole flock of interesting subplots and arcs. In my constant quest to make the members of Alpha more three dimensional, I was always looking for anything that could be used to generate depth in their personalities. Mac's death -- and their reactions to it -- was such a way. So, no, I've never regretted killing him.

What's the story behind the unused Avengers West Coast cover with Kang?

JB: I'm going to break my own Number One Rule and tell a story that did not see print.

All this came out of the Immortus/Scarlet Witch debacle, of course. With the "realism" in Marvel at the time -- you know, like talking dragons being "telepathic", because that was more "realistic" -- it had become impossible to accept that Wanda's hex power could be something as prosaic as merely causing people to have "bad luck". So it had been decided that what she actually did was alter probabilities . Thus, if the probability of a badguy's gun jamming was 1000 to 1, she could make it 1 to 1, and the gun would jam. Bad luck for him!

When I came to do AVENGERS WEST COAST this was the accepted way of portraying Wanda's power -- but the more I thought about it, the more I realized this was really an incredible complication of something that had once been so simple. I mean, think about it! For Wanda to alter probabilities she would have to be reaching back thru the whole temporal chain of events that led to a single moment. She would have to be altering time -- retroactively!

Well, that sure seemed like something that could catch the eye of Immortus, eventually, and as I wrote the story, it did. Immortus, who had been seen pinching off alternate realities as part of a set up to this story, was engaged in a program of whittling the multiverse down to a single time-line. One which he would control.

Discovering Wanda's power, he was going to kidnap her and use her to further his plans. And the first thing he was going to do was alter probabilities so that when the Avengers battled Kang the first time, Kang won!

My story would reveal this in flashback, however, as we would open in the world long after this had happened. Pretty grim place, where most of the familiar heroes had been killed off or never become super powered in the first place. No FF, since they never took that rocket ride. No Hulk, since Rick Jone has never driven his car onto the Gamma Bomb test site. (One of the main characters was going to be Peter Parker, who had not become Spider-Man because of Immortus' manipulations.)

As the story progressed, we would learn slowly what had happened -- and also learn that we were not seeing "present day" Marvel, but rather a time a "few months" (Marvel Time) ago. The date would be just prior to when Thor, in order to save a wounded Black Knight, had used his hammer to open a portal in time and space and stuck the Knight into it. We would learn this when the Black Knight basically fell out of the air into the post-Kang's victory world. In that timeline, Thor had not placed him in the "time stasis", so when the changed world "caught up" to that moment, out popped the Black Knight. The multiverses intersected at that point, you see. Well, the Black Knight pretty quickly figures out what's going on, learns there is an underground (of course!) and helps the folk of the twisted version hunt down and stop Immortus, freeing Wanda (herself another link to the multiverse, by virtue of how Immortus has been manipulating her power) and setting everything right.

When all is restored, the Black Knight of course is back in that "hole in time", and Wanda is the only one who remembers how things were. A memory that fades, like a dream, very quickly. . . .

LOOK FOR THIS TITANIC TALE IN A NuMARVEL BOOK APPEARING SOON !!

JB: As I have often noted, the one thing that most clearly defines DC is the "de-uniquing" of their characters.

I don't mean creating franchises. Superman and Batman, for instance, have always had multiple titles, at least from the point at which they got their own books. What I am referring to is the multiple iterations of characters with the same powers and abilities -- So for Superman we see Superboy, Supergirl, Krypto, Comet, Streaky, and all the inhabitants of Kandor. Batman gives us Batwoman, two Batgirls, Bat-Mite, Ace the Bat-Hound and several future Batman. Many of the characters had kid versions, as with Kid Flash, Aqualad, Wonder Girl, etc. And, of course, Green Lantern was the least unique character ever, with literally thousands of beings who could do exactly what he did.

Even when we were presented with a character who was effectively a "one of", like J'Onn J'Onzz, we had to have a whole race of beings to whom his abilities were just standard issue, like having brown eyes. As a kid, I enjoyed all the multiples of multiples, but as I got older, and especially after I got into the business, I got to really wishing there was some way every DC character could (much like their Marvel equivalents) be the only ones. Not surprising, is it, that once a generation of writers and artists raised on Silver Age DC started working at Marvel, we started seeing multiples of the characters -- multiple Captain Americas, for instance, or "parallel universe" versions of the FF. (5/09/04)

JB: I'm always writing novels. My computer has about twenty of 'em tucked away in various folders, at the moment. I tinker and tinker -- but I'm never sure which will be "the next one" until its finished

JB: "A big one".

Was just wondering if had planned (or if you had already) done a run on Batman?

JB: I do Batman as infrequently as I do for a couple of reasons, but the main one is detective stories (good ones, anyway) are just to darned hard to write! I could not begin to imagine doing so on a monthly basis. (Blow up a couple of planets? Sure! No sweat! Solve a locked room mystery? My head hurts!!) (5/7/1998)

That's OK, when was the last time Batman functioned as a detective? I mean, obsessive compulsives with a revenge complex don't need no magnifying glass.

JB: And that's the OTHER reason I don't do much Batman. Logically, he should be the healthiest guy out there. After all, check out his GREAT therapy! To deal with his "inner demons" he actually gets to Beat People Up!! (5/8/1998)

Question: Will you be continuing the original issue numbering? John Byrne: That's the plan. Altho it needs a little something extra to allow new readers to jump right in, this will, for you Old Timers. be nothing more or less than the Next Issue. (Tho I am probably not going to use the cover I drew originally for 31. The storyline has mutated a bit!) EDITOR'S NOTE: The image to the right was intended to be the cover to issue #31, but ultimately got used as the cover to the french Omnibus collection. Thanks, Lars.

JB: When I was a kid, reading superhero comics, I was absolutely in awe of the characters. To call Superman "Supes" or Batman "Bats" would never have occured to me. It would be on a par with calling the President of the United States "Tricky Dick" or "Slick Willy" -- names, you will recall, that were not applied with even a modicum of respect.

Thing is, I was not alone in this. None of my comic-reading friends called the characters by anything other than their names, unless it was a pre-existing nickname like "Cap" for Captain America, "Cap" being common armed forces parlance and long established -- and not pejorative in any way.

When I got into the business, I soon discovered that many writers used nicknames in their plots simply to save the typing fingers. WW or "Wondy" is quicker to type than "Wonder Woman", for instance. Likewise the wince-enducing "Bats" and "Supes". Stan, of course, would occasionally refer to Spider-Man as "Spidey" in the printed books -- and it seemed that it was from this that the affectation really took its hold on fandom. (Stan also once -- and only once -- refered to superheroes as "long underwear characters", but as with so many things, Stan was able to get away with stuff that didn't work when others did it.)

Slowly, the nicknames began seeping into the stories themselves -- often not making much sense. I think it was Don Thompson, in CBG, who once pointed out that writers had taken to having her fellow Justice League members call Wonder Woman "WW" -- something which Don pointed out made perfect sense to a writer trying to save a few keystrokes, but none whatsoever when spoken aloud. Won-der Wo-man has fewer syllables than Dou-ble-You Dou-ble-You, and would be "quicker" to say aloud. (He noted he could not quite "hear" Superman or Batman saying "Dub-yuh Dub-yuh", and I agree!)

As with all such things, it comes down to respect for the characters -- and when I hear "Supes" and "Bats" and "Mags" and "Wondy" and all the rest, I cannot help but think that the speaker is surrendering, if only just a little, to the contemptuous attitude civilians have toward these characters. By calling Batman "Bats" the speaker is signaling to the listener that s/he does not really take these characters and stories seriously, so should not be viewed as one of those geeky fanboys or girls. (9/21/2004)

What scanner do you use (for the full pages), and are you happy with it?

JB: I use an Epson Expression 1640XL, with which I have been very pleased. (10/31/2006)

JB: Let's do a little math. Dick Grayson, in the time we had known him, up to the point at which I introduced Cassie in WONDER WOMAN, had aged from about 10 to about 26, according to what I was told at the time by Those in the Know at DC. Cassie was then 15. This version looks about 25, but since she is in the Teen Titans let's say 19. So that's 4 more years, meaning Dick would now be 30, and would have aged 20 years since he appeared as Robin in 1940. Curiously, Dick is the same age as Wally West, who appeared as a 10 year old around 1958, some 18 years after Dick first appeared. Wally would be 30 now, too. So would Donna Troy. So would Aqualad. So would Speedy. (God knows what this does to the original Hawk and Dove, who had already been seen to have aged faster than the Titans who had been, at one time, their contemporaries.)

So. . . Batman and Superman, who were approximate contemporaries when Dick first became Robin are now 20 years older than they were then -- or pushing 50 in both cases. Ditto for Lois Lane. Jimmy Olsen must be close to 40. And how old is Impulse, these days?

Anyone still think aging the characters is a good idea? (04/28/2005)

JB: Hey, if calling 'em "graphic novels" somehow makes comicbooks acceptable to the steaming masses, I say let's encourage the misuse! I have been searching for years for a term that would be more accurately descriptive of the product than "comicbook". If, in the end, we must accept a term that really does not apply per se, well, so be it. After all, I call myself a freelancer, but I've never even held a lance in my hands! (04/26/2005)

In retrospect, do you think the whole "universe" idea that arose with Marvel in the 1960s to have been a mistake, or at least something that ought to be done away with now? Continuity -- in the sense that we talk about it now -- only became an issue after the idea of a cohesive universe of super-people was established.

JB: It's okay to have a shared reality -- when I was a kid I thought it was really neat that Hal Jordan and Barry Allen were pals in their "civilian" lives -- provided it is not carried to extremes. And by extremes, I mean those "fans" who seem somehow to assume that everyone is working from the same game plan so, for instance, Princess Lilandra would never turn up in Reed and Sue Richards' bedroom to make trouble unless it had been carefully planned out by all involved. Such a scene would not be slipped under the table, without the FF office knowing anything about it -- and with the approval of the EiC!

But, as we know, this is not the case, so often characters turn up doing things they should not or would not do, as if there was no "continuity" between the books -- because there isn't!

A mammoth work like a fictional "universe" rarely works even if there is only a single creator involved -- Tolkien never did pound all the dents out of "The Lord of the Rings" -- and when it's serial fiction, with different writers, artists and editors, over decades. . . Well, suffice to say it all works as long as everyone accepts that it doesn't really work at all. (9/8/2004)

JB: I gave Bill no tips nor insights on ALPHA -- because he said he didn't want any! He told me he had got himself a complete set of the series, and sat down and literally torn them apart, pasting pages and panels into a notebook so he would have a handy reference for each of the characters and subplots I'd developed.

Of course, he then went on to do the "origin" of Puck, with the whole "demon inside" thing being based, apparently, on the single reference Puck had made to being in constant pain, something which Bill failed to grasp was an effect of the condition -- achondroplasty, called by name in the same issue that referenced the pain -- which caused Puck's dwarfism. (This was a manifestation of something I used to call "Claremont-itis", before it came to infect almost everybody -- that manner of backstorying characters in such a way that absolutely no one, nowhere, is ever "normal".) (1/31/2005)

I was curious about how much you choreograph / lay out events and action in each issue.

JB: When I am plotting or scripting a story, these days, I use a sheet of typing paper on which I have printed a grid representing the number of pages in the issue. In each box of this grid I jot down what I imagine being on that page, sometimes also indicating panel layouts. Since I usually draw the pages out of order, it's vital that I have the whole issue worked out in this way before I start! (2/15/2005)

In response to the revelation of an outline of planned storylines for UNCANNY X-MEN through issue #150:

JB: Something that jumps out at me is the "death of Mariko" referece. That was going to be a hugely powerful story. In fact, when this list was made, with the death of Phoenix not even in the cards yet, it was probably the most powerful story we had planned.

I'm going to break one of my own rules here, since I have, at one time or another, discussed most of the details of Mariko's death as I had worked it out. So here it is all together, for those who haven't seen it before (and even those who have):

Sabretooth attacks Mariko as a way of getting to Wolverine. He brutalizes her beyond imagining. (Nothing sexual. This is sheer animal violence.) He leaves her for dead, torn and bleeding in a alley.

But she isn't dead, and the X-Men, tracking Sabretooth, find her. They race her to a hospital, and over the next several issues she lies in a coma, on life support. Other things occupy the X-Men's time for a while, but their thoughts keep coming back to Mariko. Wolverine returns to her bedside as often as he can. Her condition remains unchanged.

Finally, he can take it no longer. He begs Jean and Xavier to do something, to save her. Xavier scans her and makes a sad discovery. She is brain dead. Only the machines are keeping her alive.

Wolverine refuses to believe it. But Jean links his mind to Mariko, and he feels the emptiness where her soul used to be. He asks to be left alone with her.

Xavier and Jean depart, to wait outside. Wolverine sits by Mariko's beside, holding her hand, stroking her hair. He rises. He looks at the machines that are maintaining her life functions. In a sudden, swift movement he pops his claws and slashes the power cables. The machines fizzle and shut down.

Outside, in the hall, Jean and X have both "felt" what has happened. They move toward the door, but Wolverine comes out before they can enter. He stands for a moment in silence, looking at them. Finally he speaks. "She ain't meat," he says softly. And in an instant, he is gone, disappearing down a stairway.

Next issue, he finds and, in the most horrifying battle the Code would allow, kills Sabretooth (who was, at this point, to be revealed as his father.) (8/29/2006)

JB: Having set out to be "shocking", being compelled to keep upping the ante in order to remain "shocking." (11/02/04)

JB: Taking offense at something which should not be offensive to the person taking the offense. ("Anyone who wears a red sweater is an idiot." "Hey! I have never worn a red sweater in my life, and I resent being called an idiot!") (11/02/04)

JB: Most complaints about violated continuity tend to come from people who don't really have a grasp on the continuity they claim is being violated. It's that whole "Since I Started Reading..." Syndrome about which I have made many previous comments. (11/02/04)

Once people start telling other people how to think, what to think, when to think, there will grow up among the "tellers" those who consider themselves to be "experts" on the subject -- and once that happens, it takes a particularly strong intellect to avoid the next step, when the expert's role ceases to be that of expanding human knowledge, and becomes, instead, all about protecting the area of his expertise. I have dubbed it "Expert Syndrome". (11/02/04)

JB: A lot of fans suffer from Taxpayer Syndrome. You know how that works -- people thus afflicted are the ones you hear telling cops they cannot give them a parking ticket because they (the taxpayer) "pay" the cops' salary. (11/02/04)

JB: Okay -- I'm going to slightly bend one of my rules, and spell out for you what Howard and I briefly -- o, so briefly! -- considered for our Shaper of Worlds "fix" (to reboot the Spider-Man books).

In a nutshell, Peter Parker's life goes completely to hell. Cut his life into the thinnest slices you can, and there will be something very, wrong with every slice. Everything has gone wrong.

He finds himself once more on top of the Brooklyn Bridge. This is the point where it all went to hell, he thinks. When Gwen died. Or when Captain Stacey died. Or when Uncle Ben died. Or when that damn spider bit him. There's no way to pick a point. It's all just blackness, blackness and more blackness. And…

He falls from the bridge. Did he slip? Did he jump? We'll never know. Because the last shot in that issue is him falling like a limp rag wrapped around a rock…

…And next issue he wakes up back in Queens, back in Aunt May's house, back in high school. Along with everybody else in his supporting cast, he's been rewound. Only, he doesn't know that. The readers know it, of course, but for Peter, it's business as usual -- for maybe two issues. Then there's this little tickle at the back of his brain that tells him this isn't right. Look over there. Johnny Storm is twenty-something. Why does Peter think they should be contemporaries? It's just little things, but over the span of a few issues it brings him back to the Bridge again. Here. Something happened here. What? What happened?

"I happened," says the Shaper of Worlds, appearing alongside Peter. "I was drawn by your pain. I reached into your mind and found the last place you were happy. And I put you back there. I fixed everything."

"Well, UNfix it," demands Peter.

"No can do," says the Shaper. "What I shape, remains shaped." And he disappears.

Peter goes back to Queens. What can he do? He can't tell anybody. And -- now that he's met the Shaper, he's finding those little tickles are starting to disappear. Like they're being erased. Like he's forgetting that things used to be different.

By the end of maybe nine, ten months, the status quo would be the status quo, and no further mention would be made of the Shaper, or the previous timeline. (1/15/2008)

I just finished "Wonder Woman: Gods and Godesses" and I really enjoyed it. I was wondering where it fit in the comic series. I'm guessing about #106 but I was wondering if you had a definite time frame in mind when you wrote it?

JB: Against my own protestations, the then-editor insisted that GODS AND GODDESSES be set into something approximating continuity. I tried to keep it to a minimum -- knowing that this book would be aimed primarily at "civilians" -- but there were just enough strands that a regular reader of the comic would be able to say "Ah! It must happen more or less between panels HERE." Unfortunately, repeated and seemingly endless editorial screwups resulted in the book being published almost a year later than it was supposed to be, and some eighteen months after I finished the first draft, and in that time the comic storyline drifted away from some of the points the novel (because of when it was written) "presaged". Result, it takes place on Earth-N -- a world very similar to our own, but different in small but significant ways.

JB: I have an achitect's drafting machine mounted on my board.



This is typically used, in the trade for which it was intended, to rule parallel lines. However, the straight edges rotate on a hub, with makes them ideal for drawing perspective grids. I usually lay a grid into most panels, even those that are figures without backgrounds. 3 point perspective, usually.

Does anyone know why the license plate GNU556 shows up in a lot of JB's stories? The first time I noticed it was FF #249. I've seen it all over the place since then, my favorite was in Danger Unlimited on a boat.

JB: When I was a lad I was introduced to the comedy stylings of musical team Flanders & Swann. One of their pieces was about a Gnu (the animal), and in setting up the song, Michael Flanders told the story of how he was inspired to write it by the licence plate number of a car that was park for some prolonged period in front of his flat. That number installed itself in my memory as GNU556, tho on several different recordings Flanders varied the number slightly. The CD version I purchased in England a few years back, for instance, has the number as 596GNU. Anyway, Flanders and Swann are both dead now, and have been for quite some time, but GNU556 is my little tribute to them. (6/23/2004)

Question: Do you anticipate any difficulties "jumping into the story" after all this time? Has this kind of situation (picking up a storyline several years after you've dropped it) ever occurred to you?

John Byrne: This is a first, and I was a bit wary going in. I was sort of afraid / would have to read all the back issues!!

But, I sort of calmed down and let myself drift around the stuff, and bit by bit the pieces started to come back together. In fact, I even found a place to use something that had occurred to me only recently, but seemed to have no "home". I realized one of the subplots of NEXT MEN would be much better served by this new idea than by what I had planned originally.

I remember in an earlier post you used a 3D illustration program to work out some perspective issues in a drawing. What program do you use? Do you see yourself expanding its use to buildings, vehicles or other elements?

JB: The progam is Strata 3DPro, which I've used since I switched from ModelShop about ten years ago. (The first time I used a modeler to create a "set" for one of my books was the time machine in OMAC, which was done with ModelShop.)

In the ten or twelve years that I have been using the modelers I have made very extensive use, from building the whole city that Wonder Woman was based in, thru models of New Genesis and Apokolips for JK4W, a fleet of Batmobiles for GENERATIONS 2 (and Gotham and Metropolis), and various vehicles plus the X-Mansion in HIDDEN YEARS. Bits and pieces have turned up elsewhere, usually when I want a complicated set or prop to remain consistent thru-out. The most "intensive" use was probably the robotic Luthor who appeared in G2. 90% of the shots of him were model shots. In all those cases (except OMAC) the actual renderings of the models were either imported to the scanned art (as in WW and JK4W) or literally pasted onto the boards (as in GENERATIONS and XHY.)

Lately -- in DOOM PATROL so far, but likely to turn up eventually in BLOOD OF THE DEMON -- I have returned to the method I used in OMAC, where I printed out a rendering of the model and then used a lightbox to trace it onto the boards. Altho I found the pasteup versions seen in XHY and G2 worked very well, I find this tracing approach produces an even more "organic" image -- especially when the book is being inked by someone other than myself. (9/10/2004)

Question: Your writing style will undoubtedly have come on since JBNM appeared 20 years ago. Will you be trying to emulate your old style in the storytelling too?

John Byrne: One of my smaller vexations in life is when writers revisit their old stories but, because they have changed some of their attitude over the years, end up damaging those old stories. This is something I will be trying very hard to avoid. I know there are future "generations" who will be reading the TRULY "compleat" NEXT MEN in compilation form, and I want the join between the last page of issue 30 and the first page of issue 31 to be as seamless as possible.

It takes 40 hours to complete a single 3D model? I didn't suspect that using computer for drawing could be so hard.

JB: Not so much "hard" -- I wouldn't do it if it was hard! -- as time consuming. Working out the shapes, creating the maps appropriate to those shapes --- it eats up the hours.

Saving time is one of my lesser justifications for using the models, of course. If it really was a case -- as some seem genuinely to believe -- of basically typing in "Daily Planet Building" or "1940s Batmobile" and then walking away and letting the computer do the work, I would not use the technique. But the fact that the end result is something I spent time and energy actually creating means it is, to me, just as much a part of the process as a pencil or a brush. (Since it only takes a couple of minutes to draw some of these things -- the Planet tower, the Batmobile -- it is, of course, not particularly a time saver to use the models. Say it takes even ten minutes -- much too long, but... -- to draw a single shot of the Batmobile, I would have to use the model a couple of hundred times to "use up" the time it took to build it!) (6/29/2005)

JB: Alberta College of Art from 1970 thru 1973.

Who decided Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were Magneto's children? Was it implied all the way back when Stan was writing X-MEN?

JB: That was my idea, tho I will admit it was rereading some old Stan and Jack issues that made the lightbulb go on over my head. It was never explicitly stated in those earlier stories, but it sure seemed to make a lot of stuff fall into place once I had the idea. (11/2/97)

If I remember correctly (and I may not be) it was STATED in the first Scarlet Witch and Vision miniseries. But back when you did X-Men I believe we first saw an image of Magneto's wife, who looked similar to Wanda.

JB: Yeah, Wanda and Pietro were "outed" as Magneto's kids in that mini -- something I never wanted to see happen. It was one of the first instances of Marvel blowing one of its "open secrets" -- things the fans knew, but which had never been stated outright -- but, sadly, far from the last. (11/2/97)

What did you think about the various incarnations of Batman in the movies and on TV?

JB: I've made no secret of how completely enamored I am of "Batman Begins". The rubber suit is still a distraction, but the guy living inside it is a Batman I know. I have been reading this guy's adventures for years. And, true, he never baked a giant birthday cake (so far as we know!), but he does smile. In fact, the single moment that won me over, in the trailer, was the twinkle in Bruce's eye as he asks "Does it come in black?"

That's Batman!

The four non-Adam West BATMAN films were not about Batman, tho the first was pretty good in its own right. Consider Keaton's Batman: the armored suit was, of course, not his choice, but right away we are presented with a character we have never seen in the comics (unless, perhaps, we invoke the "inflato-Batman" suit occasionally worn by Robin). Machine guns mounted on the Batmobile were not Keaton's doing, either, but they belong to no Batman we have seen since the earliest days of his publishing history -- a there a Batman who vanished completely within the first two years.

What about Bruce Wayne, then? Minor detail -- when has Bruce ever worn glasses? Major detail -- when has Bruce ever been the assemblage of ticks and mannerisms Keaton brought to the roll?

It is an actor's prerogative to bring his own insights to a performance, but he must begin with the established character. Playing Hamlet in a clown nose and fright wig might get people paying attention, but it would add nothing to the character.

The Adam West Batman movie WAS about Batman, but. . . . well, you know.

A TV show is a TV show is a TV show -- it exists on its own merits (or lack thereof), and really should not have any effect on the comic(s) from which it is derived. The greatest sin of the "Batman" series was that it planted ZAP! POW! BAM! apparently forever in the minds of journalists whose idea of originality is to crib what the last guy wrote.

Beyond that, I will say that the Adam West show was more faithful to the underlying structure of the comic than anything until the "recent" animated series. Batman and Robin were at least good at what they did, and Batman was a great detective --something Tim Burton should have paid a wee bit more attention to!

In my opinion, I don't think that Tim Burton forgot the detective aspect in the first movie. Batman solves very cleverly the Joker poison mystery and do some detective research on Jack Napier=the joker.

JB: Unless there is a "director's cut" floating around that I am unaware of, I don't recall Batman doing much in the way of detective work in the Tim Burton movies. He spends a lot of time letting his computers sort things out for him, and he makes a couple of guesses that don't really spring from any logic. Nothing that requires him using detective skills tho -- especially not the Napier/Joker connection.

There he simply Recognizes the guy.

JB: Someone once said that everybody has 10,000 bad drawings in them, so what every artist has to do is draw and draw and draw and draw and draw and draw and draw until those 10,000 bad drawings are all gone.

Question: How will the overall “look” and “feel” of the book compare to what it was back in the 90’s?

John Byrne: Funnily enough...When a friend was here a while back, we were poking thru the flatfiles with my old pages, and I was surprised to discover this one was still there…



Of all the pages I did on NEXT MEN, this was my favorite. Can't really say why, but as you can see I immediately brought it out and affixed it to the corner of my drawing board, and THIS is the look I will be attempting to recapture for the continuation of the series.

Remember the two issue crossover between the FF and Avengers that dealt with the FF returning from the Negative Zone? How did that story come about?

JB: The AVENGERS part of the Negative Zone/Annihilus storyline in FF was not so much a "crossover" in the true sense, but more an example of addressing something fans often ask about -- why Hero A seems to be oblivious to the exploits of Hero B. (Usually expressed as "Where were the Avengers when Galactus first attacked?") So in our story, Roger Stern and I decided to answer that question. The FF part more "intersected" than truly "crossed over" with the Avengers part. (10/10/2005)

Why did you decide to bring back the Original Human Torch?

JB: The most obvious answer to this question, of course, is "Why not?"

I "met" the original Torch in the FF ANNUAL Stan and Jack used to bring him back into the Marvel Universe (completing the "set" begun with Namor and Cap). I was fascinated by the idea that Johnny Storm was the second Human Torch -- the richness that kind of revelation added to the MU was, for me, immeasurable.

Of course, by the time I could do anything with the Torch, he was effectively "gone". having been transformed by Ultron into the Vision (an idea I really disliked -- shoehorning a new character into the history -- and credibility -- of an old). Then one day I happened to be chatting with Peter Sanderson and he made a passing reference to the Torch's funeral.

"There was a funeral??" I asked, mind boggling.

"Yes," said Peter, and he proceeded to tell me where and when. (Peter is the kind of guy who can answer just about any question in vast detail. Ask him what he wants to drink and before you know it you may know the entire history of the British East India Company.)

Well!! One of the first rules of superhero fiction is that if a VILLAIN tells you something, it is almost certainly false, and after a bit of research I realized everything we knew about the fate of the original Torch had come from Ultron, who of course had absolutely no reason to tell anybody the truth. The real clincher, tho, was that funeral. According to Ultron's story, he had found the Torch's body right where the Mad Thinker had left it, in a lab under the Arizona(?) desert -- but Toro had attended the Torch's funeral!

So, building on that I was able to "split" the Vision and the Torch, and allow us to have both characters! (2/24/2005)

When you wrote AVENGERS WEST COAST was it your intention that Wanda Maximoff was always a disturbed young woman or was it all caused by the manipulations of Immortus?

JB: From the earliest days of her introduction in X-MEN, it was clear Stan and Jack intended Wanda to be "troubled", tho "disturbed" might be overstating it a bit. I used this, and her quest for anything even close to a "normal" life, as the basis for the storyline in which I revealed her twins were the result of what happens when a probability-shifting mutant experiences a hysterical pregnancy. (7/14/2005)

JB: Being such a fan of the first film and being hugely unimpressed with the second, I DID have my own third chapter worked out.

In my version all is as it has been shown to be. Darth is Luke's father. Darth's whole focus, then, is compelling Luke to join him on the Dark Side. He unleashed terrible forces against the universe. He destroys, kills, annihilates. Everything is designed to push Luke to the edge, as he is driven back by Vader's power.

The Moment comes. Vader has killed Someone Important. Leia. Han. Doesn't really matter. But Luke is pushed over. He's going to fight fire with fire. He opens himself to the Dark Side.

BAAAAAD Nastiness! A cosmic battle like we have not seen. Whole systems are destroyed.

But in the middle of it all, some spark of who and what Darth Vader used to be glimmers in the darkness. He sees his son become something more horrible than anything he has ever been -- and he sees that he has been wrong. He understands, perhaps for the first time, everything Obi-Wan taught him.

He kills Luke. He cannot do anything else. But in the process, he also ABSORBS him. They both become One with the Force, and out of this, Darth Vader is reborn -- HE is the "other" Yoda prophesized.

The reborn Vader sets out to restore order and peace to the Galaxy, his black armor now transformed into brilliant, blazing white. (I did a drawing of this. It looks WAY cool!)

And somewhere off in the great by and by, Obi-Wan looks upon what he set in motion, and knows that, in the end, he did the right thing.

Have you seen the Fantastic Four movie?

JB: Nope! Nor shall I. My emotional commitment to the FF was (and is) far greater than what I had to the X-Men. I could watch the latter and merely wince and growl. The former, I would have to throw the TV out the window. That gets expensive. (5/8/2006)

JB: (My new project) is BLOOD OF THE DEMON, which will indeed be my take on the character created by Jack Kirby, but which will, as the title suggest, focus a little more on Jason Blood as the main character this time out. Some old friends will be returning, along with some new faces. Also I hope to delve more into Jason's long life, doing occasional "flashback" issues looking at times past. Hey! The guy's been around for at least 1000 years! Will Pfiefer will be handling the scripting, from my plots and pencils, much as Chris did on the JLA arc. As we go along, I'll doubtless be open to more and more input on the plotting level, from Will, as this will be an ongoing series, and not an arc, like JLA, that's completely finished before the scriper even sees it. (8/14/2004)

Will Etrigan be rhyming?

JB: Kirby had Etrigan rhyme the first couple of phrases he spoke after the transformation, sort of as a continuation of the spell ("Banished be the form of Man, Rise the Demon, Etrigan!") and with some spells of his own. That's how I intend to play this version. (8/14/2004)

I've read posts about Etrigan being possessed by Blood instead of the opposite...which is it?

JB: Etrigan was a demon the wizard Merlin brought under his control and made a servant. He fought against the forces of Morgaine Le Fey at the fall of Camelot. When the battle was lost, Merlin decided to keep Etrigan around, to do his further bidding, and so transformed him into the human (but immortal) Jason Blood. Later writers decided this idea was too clever and turned him into the tired old cliche of a man possessed by a demon. Since this contradicts Kirby on all points, I have always chosen to ignore it in my handling of the Demon. (10/24/2004)

Has the Demon had a history of being a violent series?

JB: Contextually, yes. Kirby's Demon -- frankly, the only one that matters, as it is the only one (until now) that was true to the original concept -- was published when the Comics Code was in full vigor, but it nevertheless contained a great deal of violent action and mayhem, as well as what were, for the time, really scary images. My version hits about the same level, albeit for a different time and a different audience. (04/07/2005)

JB: I have been pitching a Demon series every couple of years or so since I first went to work for DC "full time" in the days of MAN OF STEEL. With a "new regime" in the form of Dan DiDio, I decided it was time to try again, but this time, knowing Dan comes from a Hollywood background, I decided to take a slightly different approach. To this end, I sat down and "shot the pilot", drawing, completely on spec, the whole 22 pages of my "first issue". This I turned in to Dan, along with a script. He liked it -- but there was a problem. DC has a new policy (DC seems to be in love with new policies, just at the nonce) which requires that all work done with existing characters be vouchered before the work is done. (Smart, I suppose -- prevents people popping up later and trying to say work-made-for-hire was not, in fact, work-made-for-hire.) This meant they could not use the "pilot" -- but they did want a Demon series from me.

So, with echoes of STAR TREK in my brain, I wrote up vouchers for the first six issues, and sat down to salvage as many pages from the original job as I could. (Imagine if "The Menagerie" had been ST:TOS's second pilot.) I shuffled thru the pages and extracted those that I felt could be used as the basis for something which would set up the stuff I needed, and then drew new pages (sometimes half pages or just panels) to bridge those existing pages. This was a rare instance in my work where the content of the page dictated the flow of the story, instead of the other way 'round.

Altho some got left out, and some got chopped up (literally) to make new pages, I ended up with a new story that was just as satisfying, to me, as the first one had been. (03/02/2005)

I have a question about Etrigan's cape. For the most part I've seen him with a tattered cape in your series, though occasionally (as with the cover posted a few days ago), he has the squared-off cape that he's usually known for. Wassup wi' dat?

JB: It's a little "joke" I included for my own amusement. The degree to which Etrigan's cape is frayed indicates the degree of control Merlin's magic is exerting over him. The more frayed, the less control. (9/23/2005)

What is "DuoShade"?

JB: DuoShade and Craftint are -- or were -- the trade names of a kind of board some artists used for creating grey tones in their work. The boards were imprinted with line or dot screens, in non-repro blue, which became visible when a special chemical was applied. One chemical would bring out one of the line or dot screens, the second would bring out the other, so that two shades of grey could be created. Skilled artists, such as Wally Wood, managed to create the illusion that there were more shades than that.

The chemicals could be applied with pen, brush, or any other tool the artist might choose.

The downside of these boards was that the chemicals that brought out the line screen were a kind of photographic process, so if the artwork was exposed to light the line would continue to "develop", growing darker and darker. Even the areas not treated with the chemicals would darken eventually.

Incidentally, altho they printed black, and thus gave a grey tone, the line screens themselves appeared on the board as a deep brown or brownish red shade. (11/25/2006)

JB: Dry brush is just what the name implies -- a brush that is not wet. Or, at least, not very wet. Just enough ink to produce a gray tone. Especially on textured paper. (09/04/08)

JB: ROG-2000 for Charlton, appearing in E-MAN was the first published. My first professional comic book sale was to Marvel, a short story called "Dark Asylum" written by David Anthony Kraft, which languished in a flat file somewhere until it was used as filler in GIANT-SIZED DRACULA #5, long after the first ROG story. First DC was UNTOLD LEGEND OF THE BATMAN #1.

This may be a minority opinion but I didn't think the Incredible Hulk TV series with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferigno was that bad.

JB: You're not alone there. The Hulk TV series was probably Marvel's best venture into live action to date. Although it's ponderously slow by the standards of current tv drama -- and from that vintage, what isn't? -- it managed to entertain me every week. And I'm a tough audience when it comes to comic-related material. (1/17/98)

Could you give a quick run-down on how you created your font?

JB: The one I currently use in all my books is based on Jack Morelli's lettering. Knowing that I had been experimenting with hand-lettering fonts, Jack asked me what I would charge to make one for him, of his own lettering. I said "I get to use it." So Jack lettered up an alphabet, including all punctuation and special keys (like those little three line bursts that kinda look like > and <), and I scanned them into my computer. Then, using a low-end font maker called FONTastic, I dropped each letter into the appropriate "slot", fiddled the kerning, fiddled the leading, and created those option keys I mentioned above. That done, I imported the whole thing to FONTographer, which tidied up all the pixellation and created the different sizes. Whole process (excluding Jack lettering the alphabet) takes about an hour and a half.

BTW, I ended up using Jack's font so much, I also now PAY him a small stipend for the privilege! (2/7/98)

MidOhioCon 2004 is billing your appearance as your last ever. How come?

JB: When I first got into the business, I used to look upon conventions as a kind of mini-vacation. I'd go to a con, hang out with folks, meet the fans, and be back at the drawingboard Monday morning. But as years went by, it got to be Tuesday morning. Wednesday. Thursday. Monday -- but of the next week. Basically, I found that I was needing more and more "recovery time" after each convention -- and that recovery time was time in which the real part of my job, drawing comics, was not getting done. So I weighed the advantages (interacting with a few hundred fans) against the disadvantages (not working on books that are for tens of thousands of fans), and I decided the former did not outweigh the latter. So, after MidOhioCon 2004, no more cons for me. (10/03/2004)

Question: Will the continuation's background technology will be consistent with the original?

John Byrne: One of the things a lot of readers didn't seem to pick up on was that NEXT MEN was set "in the future". I did not specify just how far -- luckily, as it turns out, since I would have caught up to and passed the period I had in my head quite a while back -- and, since technology in the real world has not matched what I had in JBNM, the book can still be set comfortably "in the future".

Quite a long way in the future, in fact, by the time I'm done!

JB: Nic Cuti, then an editor at Charlton, was the first to give me regular work. He'd seen the ROG-2000 story I'd illustrated (script by Roger Stern) in CPL fanzine, and offered me a ROG backup (script by Nic) in E-MAN. Out of this came WHEELIE AND THE CHOPPER BUNCH, DOOMSDAY+1 and finally SPACE: 1999. During this time Chris Claremont saw my work and began agitating for me to draw something he had written. When Pat Broderick missed a deadline on the Iron Fist series in MARVEL PREMIERE, John Verpoorten fired him and offered the book to me. (Remember when missing a deadline got you fired, not turned into a Hero of the Republic?) I turned around the first script in time to meet the deadline, and so started getting more work from Marvel, until I was able to leave Charlton and focus entirely on the Marvel stuff. (1/19/2006)

Over the decades, a few of JB's stories have contained elements that were later mirrored by real-life events. For example:

* JB drew an issue of MARVEL TEAM-UP with writer Chris Claremont that involved a blackout in New York City. Soon after the issue was released in 1977 (and months after JB had drawn it), New York City experienced a massive blackout.

* In UNCANNY X-MEN, JB and Claremont created a story where Japan was struck by an earthquake caused by supervillain Moses Magnum. In 1978, Japan was struck by a number of earthquakes.

* In the Superman reboot miniseries MAN OF STEEL, JB planned to have Superman introduce himself the world when he saved the NASA space shuttle from a disaster. While JB was still working on the issue, the Space Shuttle Challenger operated by NASA experienced a fatal disaster. JB was able to redraw the pages so Superman was shown saving a fictional space-plane instead of a "space shuttle."

* In late August 1997, WONDER WOMAN #126 hit the stands with a story about the death of Wonder Woman, Princess Diana of Themyscira. A few days later, England's Princess Diana was killed in a car accident.

JB's perspective on these coincidences, as published in Scientific American: My ability as a prognosticator…would seem assured—provided, of course, we reference only the above, and skip over the hundreds of other comic books I have produced which featured all manner of catastrophes, large and small, which did not come to pass.

JB: There used to be a painter in Calgary named John Byrne. He did Indian heads and things like that. He was very well known and respected, locally. For years my father had a print of one of his paintings on the wall of his office at City Hall. When people would ask "Did your son paint that?" Dad would indicate the date and say "Yes, when he was eleven."

"John Byrne" is a very common name. I have been told "Byrne" is the seventh most common name in Ireland -- and as to "John", well in all my years in school I was never once the only John in my class. (Curiously, a websearch reveals that many of the "other" John Byrnes are also artists in some fashion or other!)

Still, when I call catalogs to order model airplanes or faux antiques or whatever, about 7 times out of 10 the person I end up talking to will ask if I am "the" John Byrne.

Usually I say that depends on who they think "the" John Byrne is!

JB: When Roger Stern and I were doing CAPTAIN AMERICA we flirted -- too strong a word already! -- with the notion of doing a story in which Cap visits a VA hospital, and in one corner of a ward full of damaged survivors of WW2 comes across a legless, armless vegetable who, upon seeing Cap, stirs from his forty year coma and is revealed to be Bucky. We were thinking poignant, painful, pathos, lots of P words. And we realized, instantly, than in two and a half seconds someone else would have transplanted his brain, cloned him, or some other nonsense. Anyone who has any respect at all for the whole story of Cap and Bucky would, ultimately, know it was best to leave Bucky dead. (3/30/1998)

The collaboration between you and Roger Stern on Captain America in the early '80s was quite possibly the best version of Cap ever. Why did this run end so prematurely? I've seen the pages you drew that had Cap ready to depart from the UK after the Baron Blood two-part story. What the heck happened there?

JB: Start with Jim Shooter. One day he decided that all stories should be complete in one issue. There could be "continued stories" in the sense that subplots or locations could carry over from one issue to the next, but each issue had to contain a complete story unto itself. And, as with all such Shooter declarations, this was to be put into place +now+, immediately-with no consideration of the fact that some of us (say, Roger and I) might be already working on what was intended as the first chapter of a three part story.

To cut a long story very short, Roger came into contention with the CAP editor (Jim Salicrup) over this, and decided he would leave the book in protest. Although Salicrup asked if I would be interested in staying on as writer, I decided to support Roger, and left too.

A great pity, all things considered.

Why did JB appear on the Spider-Man DVD if he didn't see the movie?

JB: I appeared on the DVD to talk about SPIDER-MAN, one of my favorite characters. I didn't talk about the movie. In fact, they asked me not to, knowing I do not approve of the changes made to Peter Parker's character. I wish a big budget extravaganza like the movie could have been at least as faithful to the character as was the old animated series, poor as that was, or even the live action TV show. Both lack the budget to really do justice to the character of Spider-Man, but at least they did not mess with intrinsic elements of who he is. And they certainly didn't make changes based entirely on the director's ego.

Question: Will you include more of the ongoing comics & comics culture satire that was threaded through the original series? That was one of my favorite aspects.

John Byrne: When JBNM went on "hiatus" I was preparing for a major change in the direction of the stories -- Hey! Dinosaurs! -- and that, with some minor modifications, is where I will still be going. Very little of what's coming up will be set in the Next Men's "present".

Any news on the announced CITIZEN ZERO project?
BR> JB: As I mentioned when I announced CZ as a work-in-progress, I am taking a very different approach to producing that storyline than I have in the past. I want to "let the story tell itself", which means it comes out of my pencil in sudden bursts, then drips, then surges, then pauses. And since I want at least six issue done before I let any of them out in public, CITIZEN ZERO will basically happen when it happens. (6/28/2008)

Any news on the announced CITIZEN ZERO project?

JB: As I mentioned when I announced CZ as a work-in-progress, I am taking a very different approach to producing that storyline than I have in the past. I want to "let the story tell itself", which means it comes out of my pencil in sudden bursts, then drips, then surges, then pauses. And since I want at least six issue done before I let any of them out in public, CITIZEN ZERO will basically happen when it happens. (6/28/2008)

JB: "The Adventures of Superman" and George Reeves' portrayal of the title character is what introduced me to superheroes when I was 6 years old and still living in England. It's hard to put into words the sense of wonder that filled me as I watched what was for me the first episode on my parent's tiny black and white "telly". Even at so tender an age, the notion of a man leaping into the air and flying was mindboggling. (I would already have seen Disney's "Peter Pan" at this point -- 14 times, in fact! -- but a whole world of wonder opened up with the idea that there were people who could fly without a sprinkling of fairy dust.)

That will always have a soft spot in my heart, and was, all things considered, a fairly faithful adaptation. We would not see something nearly so close to the source until "Superman - The Movie" starring Christopher Reeve and directed by Richard Donner. Although that outing messed with certain elements, they were mostly window-dressing, and it made no changes to Superman himself. Most of the animated versions -- excluding the Fleisher cartoons -- I have found a disappointment. Even the most recent. After having done such a superlative job bringing Batman to life, I felt the folk at Warner Animation missed the target with "Superman".

Question: Will this series also have a letter column like A FLAME ABOUT THIS HIGH that ran in the original series?

John Byrne: No plans for a lettercol or AFATH. In conjunction with this Forum, I think that would definitely qualify as overkill!

Has JB been thinking about re-booting DOOM PATROL for a while now?

JB: No. I have been thinking about doing the Doom Patrol for, oh, 30 years or so, but only when the book was finally handed to me did it become apparent that a reboot was the best approach. So very, very much had been piled onto the concept since the Drake/Premianin days. (8/24/2004) Was it always JB's understanding that the DOOM PATROL reboot would tie into INFINITE CRISIS?

JB: INFINITE CRISIS was barely a glimmer in anybody's eye when I was approached to do DOOM PATROL. Mike Carlin and I discussed how to approach the project, realizing it would probably take six issues or more just to "rebuild" the Patrol to their proper shape -- something we did not want for the start of a new series. It was Mike who said "Do you want to 'MAN OF STEEL' it?", and I said "Yeah!" (3/16/2006)

On the cover of DOOM PATROL #1, you say the group is "together again for the first time." What does that mean?

JB: The reboot works exactly as did MAN OF STEEL, BATMAN: YEAR ONE and WONDER WOMAN -- everything old is new again. What distinguishes it from MoS and YO is that it is an in-continuity reboot, like WW, not a flashback.

When you took over the Hulk's series, did you intend to stay beyond the six excellent issues you did, or did you find that those six stories said pretty much everything you wanted to say with the Hulk?

My adventures with THE INCREDIBLE HULK came about by a rather sad and curious route. I'd always liked the Hulk, but felt -- and this will shock and astound everyone, I'm sure -- that the character had drifted too far from his beginnings, and a "back to the basics" approach was necessary. To this end, I mentioned what I thought should be done with the Hulk to the Editor-in-Chief, and his response was "That's great! You should take over the Hulk book at once!" Well, I was up to my ears in other stuff at the time, so taking over the Hulk seemed unlikely -- until I realized I really had said all I had to say with ALPHA FLIGHT. So I called Bill Mantlo, who was writing HULK at the time, and asked if he would care to trade. Ultimately we did, and I set about doing all those things I had told to the E-i-C. Whereupon the very same E-i-C began saying "You can't do this! You can't do that!" Realizing I had been bushwacked, I took the only course available, and left the book after six issues. (1/18/98)

JB: The animated "Batman" really showed everyone how to do superhero cartoons right -- so naturally Marvel Animation defaulted to "GI Joe" style for "X-Men". I was very disappointed. I received no payment -- didn't expect any -- for the adaptations of my work on that show, and I don't think there was a screen credit either. Subsequent versions of the characters, including the big budget movies, have been at least as disappointing, and in the case of the movies even more so.

Question: Are you planning on your initial estimate of around 20 issues (to #50 for the ending) or are you going to let it ride longer?

John Byrne: I'm going to allow the story as much time as it needs -- which is pretty much how I operated before on JBNM. 20 issues was an estimate. Might work out more, might work out less. Certainly "targeting" the 50th issue for the last makes sense.

Rita is almost like the mom of the group, looking after them and adding a little touch of normalcy to this team of "freaks".

JB: Rita Farr was always the ringer, I felt, in the whole "Freaks" concept of the Doom Patrol. While Cliff and Larry clearly had no choice about being what they are all the time, all Rita had to do to not be a "freak" was not use her power! It's not like she lived in a world where what she did was all that extraordinary, after all (altho, granted, the original Doom Patrol existed in something that was not yet truly a "universe", and altho characters would meet in each other's titles, the editors tended to operate as if the books were mostly independent, most of the time).

In the more clearly defined "universe" in which the "new" Doom Patrol operates, there is no reason for Rita (or anyone else) to think of her as a "freak". (9/8/2004)

Question: Any plans on getting the great Gary Cody back for the painted covers?

John Byrne: Not in the foreseeable future. Gary is a tad too busy with his own career!

JB: My original run on FF, as penciler only, was never intended to be long-term, and was also not a whole lot of fun. When Marvel started playing Musical Writers, I took that as the indication my time of departure had come. (12/04/2005)

JB: When Howard Mackie, who was then editor of IRON MAN, called me up to ask if I would be interested in taking on the writing chores on that title, I was at first resistant. For one thing, the previous team had quit after solicitations had already gone out for their next storyline, so we were stuck having to produce something called "Armor Wars II" or Marvel would have to accept the book as returnable. I had not given much thought to what I might do with Iron Man, so the idea that I would have to start out with a retread of someone else's idea was in no way appealing. Then Howard said JRjr would be drawing it, and I said "Let me think about it."

The next day I called Howard and said "Okay, I have three Iron Man stories -- but only three. I'll sign on for those and see what happens."

What happened, at least at first, was the great pleasure of working with JR -- but, as noted, that lasted only 7 issues. He had his own, er, issues when it came to Iron Man, and apologized profusely for leaving. Paul Ryan came on in his stead. Paul is a solid artist, very skilled, but the magic was not the same. And then Howard left, too. So the project started out very well, but petered out rather quickly. (3/13/2005)

JB: POWER MAN AND IRON FIST was created primarily so that Chris and I -- who were yet to link up for X-MEN -- could continue as a team. Unfortunately, when the idea was hatched I was starting to find myself close to the end of my interest in Danny Rand and his doings. I hoped that the infusion of Luke Cage and his cast would reignite my interest, but this did not happen.

Years later, mind you, Iron Fist had been so messed up by a string of very bad ideas being shoehorned into him, that I saw a lot I could do in the way of a "rescue mission", and so picked up some of his threads for NAMOR.

Can't see myself returning to him, Cage or their team on any sort of permanent assignment, tho. (10/20/2005)

JB: When I was asked to come up with a new "take" on She-Hulk for another try at a series, one of the first things Mark Gruenwald handed me (it was he who had done the asking) was the plot for a She-Hulk graphic novel that was in the works. Mark asked me to read it over and see what needed to be done to bring the plot into line with where I would be taking the new series. Dutifully, I read the plot and discovered that it pretty much missed the whole point of the character. Not only that, but it got huge chunks of Wyatt Wingfoot's history wrong (had him in the wrong tribe, for instance). It also got huge chunks of the real world totally wrong! In other words, pretty much of a mess.

I wrote copious notes thruout the plot, pointing out all the things that were wrong, and sent it back in. Frankly, I thought it was pretty much unsalvagable.

I started work on SENSATIONAL SHE-HULK and everything seemed to be going fine, until I discovered the editor assigned to the book was ignoring my notes on the graphic novel and was, in fact, actually rewriting my stuff to bring it into line with the G.N. I complained to the EiC who told me he "didn't want to be like Shooter" and so in any difference of opinion between editor and talent he would "always support my editors".*

So I was fired off SENSATIONAL SHE-HULK.

*This was the same EiC who "supported (his) editors" by rejecting an AVENGERS WEST COAST storyline the editor had completely approved and that had been in the works, as subplots, for several months. (12/11/04)

I'm currently re-reading the Comics Interview book that collected various interviews with you, and in it they have your cover to SENSATIONAL SHE-HULK #9 with "Roger the Robot". Since you left the book before that issue, can you share what your story idea was for that issue?

JB: I'd planned to introduce a very ROG-like golden robot as Jen's butler. She was going to meet him when she found herself prosecuting him for murder in a story I could not resist titling "Who Framed Roger Robot?" (4/11/2007)

I was wondering if JB had any tips on how to properly draw Ben Grimm.

JB: The most important thing to keep in mind is that the Thing's hide should not look like cobblestones (as it is often drawn, modeled and these days colored), The "plates" are flat or slightly concave, like mud on the bed of a dry river. They are also different sizes and depths, so that the surface is uneven. Think in terms of the larger plates being on the large parts of his body, like his torso, the smallest plates being around points of motility, like wrists and ankles.

Question: I'd forgotten how evil Hilltop was in #28. Argh, I really want him to get his comeuppance but we know he survives until 2112 don't we???

John Byrne: Do we?

JB: Sue makes herself, or other objects, invisible by bending light rays. I stated this in so many words several times during my run on the FF. In effect, it is not unlike gravity lensing, which can cause a star to appear to be in two places at once, when viewed from Earth. The light flows around Sue, like water flowing around a rock in a river. It arrives at the viewers eyes as if it had traveling in an straight line without Sue being in the way.

As to how she sees herself, when invisible, she needs only a very tiny amount of light, in terms of physical area, to be able to see. This much light she allows thru to her retinaes. If one was standing very close to Sue, and she was not moving, it might even be possible to see the small, dim patches on the backs of her eyes where the light was touching. (1/31/2005)

Wonder Woman and Jack Kirby's Fourth World Well, I've finally managed to receive a near complete run of JB's JK4W, and I was just wondering if anyone knew why this great series was discontinued?

JB: We're far enough away from the events now that some behind the scenes stuff can be revealed. Paul Kupperberg was planning on leaving his editorial position at DC (he was in charge of both books I was doing at the time, WONDER WOMAN and JK4W), and since my contract on both was coming to an end I thought it might be better to leave than to re-up for a year and find myself burdened with an editor I did not want to work with. So I wrapped up my stories on both titles, and went elsewhere. Paul's plans were a secret at the time, so I was not able to give any reasons for my departure other than "end-of-contract".

As it turned out, Paul did not leave editorial for quite a while (eventually he moved upstairs -- literally -- to Special Projects), so I could have stayed on both titles another year. Ah, well!

I just finished the 20th anniversary FANTASTIC FOUR #236 with the wonderful celebratory cover. Stan Lee's there, as was appropriate for the occasion, but Jack Kirby isn't. Why?

JB: Kirby was on the cover, but Shooter had him removed. (04/06/2005)

John Byrne: In 1990, Stan Lee contacted me and asked me if I would like the be "editor-in-chief" of a whole new line he was going to create at Marvel -- a line which would be set in Marvel's future, unconnected to the Marvel Universe as we knew it. As it happened, I had been giving some thought to a "Futureverse" of my own, and, being flattered by Stan's offer, I suggested that what I had come up with (but at that time thought I had no place to develop) would fit the bill for his project. To this end I plotted (Stan was to script) and drew a 64 page "pilot".

When Stan saw the pilot pages he asked for more specific MU references. I'd tried to keep the thing "clean", so as not to turn the whole MU into a Superboy story, but Stan thought we SHOULD at least HINT at what had happened to some of the folk we knew from the present continuity. Fortunately, since my story was told in the 64 pages, this meant only adding some 12 additional pages and some bridging material to make them fit. Thus, when I took the project back it was, luckily, not a case of re-writing or re-drawing, but simply of removing pages I had not wanted in there in the first place. I'd taken a set of concepts, bent them slightly to fit Stan's needs, and then had only to "unbend" them to get back to my own original material. Stuck with 64 pages and no thought of where to put 'em -- I did not want to offer the book to DC, since that seemed vaguely scabrous somehow -- I mentioned my dilemma to Roger Stern, who suggested I give DarkHorse a call. I did. They accepted the proposal with open arms. I also pitched NEXT MEN, which had been floating in my brain for a while, and which they also liked. I then realized the tiniest bit of tweaking in the dialog would make my graphic novel -- now titled 2112 -- into a prequel/sequel pilot for JBNM. (3/28/1998)

I believe you were the first to return to the original way of drawing the Watcher (skinny body, outsized head). Just wondered what you thought of Kirby's bulkier Watcher from FF #48 on, and why you decided to revert back to the original appearance?

JB: FANTASTIC FOUR 13 was something of a seminal event for me. The Kirby art. The Ditko inks. The amazing images of the Blue Area of the Moon. (After the first time I read it, I waited for Moonrise so I could go out and check. When I could not see any "blue area" I decided it must be my eyes that were at fault.) Most of all, there was the Watcher. What a great character! And so weird looking!

In his second appearance, he was pretty weird looking, too, tho he was starting to get a little more human. By the time Galactus arrived, he was just a bald fat guy.

I'd seen this happen before with Kirby characters. Clearly, Jack did not keep or refer to copies of the earlier pages. Sometimes, even in the same issue! (Look at the first appearance of Kuurgo, Master of Planet X. Compare how he looks on the splash to how he looks the next time he appears in the book.*)

So, when I got to do the Watcher -- and had complete "control", since I had done him before and drawn the fat guy -- I went back to Jack's original version. (10/07/2005)

Why did you change the FF costumes after their adventures in the Negative Zone?

JB: For a mechanical reason -- comic panels looks stronger when there are solid black areas in them. This is called "spotting blacks". By making the FF's uniforms black and white, I was able to spot the blacks automatically. (1/26/2006)

When Ben Grimm remained on the Secret Wars planet, I always assumed that was your idea -- that you were at least trying to make the whole stupid thing have some impact on the characters. Was I wrong?

JB: You're half wrong, or half right, if you prefer! Writing MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE and, later, THE THING I very quickly realized it was hard to come up with a good Thing story which was not, by definition, a good FF story. So I had Ben stay on the Beyonder's BattleWorld so that he could do some stuff he couldn't do on Earth, and thus justify (in my own mind at least) why he had his own book.

In FANTASTIC FOUR #263-264, the character Alden Maas has similar theories on the Earth's expansion to Neal Adams. Was using an anagram of Neal's name a way of acknowledge the source of the "growing planet" theory?

JB: Sort of. I figured everyone would "guess" that the character was supposed to be Neal (even tho originally he wasn't) so I thought I might as well add "attributation" in the form of the anagram. (11/15/04)

What were the circumstances of changing Susan Storm Richards from the Invisible Girl to the Invisible Woman?

JB: Seemed to me that someone who is married and has a child would not be likely to think of, or refer to herself as a "girl". (1/22/2005)

At Reed and Sue's housewarming party in FANTASTIC FOUR #276, I see some familiar faces from the newspaper comic strips, but I don't recognize all of them.



Back row: Hi, Lois, Sue Richards
On the couch: Joe Palooka, his wife Ann Palooka, Dick Tracy
Middle row: Mr. Lockhorn, Mrs. Lockhorn, Skeezix (GASOLINE ALLEY), Jiggs (BRING UP FATHER), Henry Mitchell (DENNIS THE MENACE)
Front row: Blondie, Dagwood, their neighbor Herb Woodley (all from BLONDIE)

JB: By the time I left the FF I had reached a rythm with the characters that I was literally making it up as I went along. Letting the characters "tell" me where the stories were going to go, with very little actually plotting out beyond the issue I was working on. General ideas of where I needed to end up, but nothing specific.

Because of this, I did not know when I left if I would actually have had Johnny and Alicia get married. I suspect not, but I don't know for sure. The characters themselves had not yet "told" me the way it was supposed to go! (8/12/2005)

Was it John's intention to have a Skrull masquerading as Alicia Masters when Johnny Storm fell in love with her or was that Tom DeFalco's idea?

JB: DeFalco. Undoing the Johnny/Alicia relationship was, of course, the prerogative of any writer(s) who followed me on FF. My only complaint: I wish DeFalco had not chosen such a clumsy and "comic-booky" (in the worst sense of the term) way of doing it. (8/12/2005) DeFalco wrote some of the best Spider-Man of the post-Stern years, but he seemed totally out of his depth on the FF. (1/25/2006)

I know that things such as office politics come into play, but why haven't you returned to a book that most fans agree hasn't been nearly as good as when you were doing it -- the Fantastic Four.

JB: There are two reasons, primarily, that I have declined Marvel's offers of the FF (They twice did offer me a kingly crown, which I did twice refuse) -- one is that I really don't like going backwards, and as much as I love the FF, it would feel as though I was doing just that. Second (and more important, really -- I could get over the first one) is how much I dislike setting myself up for comparison to my own earlier work, especially work which, like the FF, has taken on a legendary status far greater than its actually worth. (Second only to Lee and Kirby? Sure, if the space between is about 400 light years!) With each "generation" off the FF since I departed I have looked at the book and thought "Well, okay, I could pick it up from here and go. . .there. . . " but I feel no real urge to do so. Some legends are best left, well, legendary! (4/18/1998)

Did Marvel originally ask you to start the FANTASTIC FOUR with their new issue #1 or issue #4 after Lobdell/Davis left?

JB: Both. They asked me to do the return, then they asked me to take over after Scott got the boot. Ironically, as I noted in the FF folder, had I accepted the second offer, my first issue would have been #5 -- the first issue of the FF I read.

What about working on the X-MEN series with Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio so soured you on the idea of working on that series even without Jim and Whilce? If the X-MEN spot were open and Jim and Whilce were not involved, why wouldn't you take it?

JB: Apart from the logistical nightmare working with Jim and Whilce turned out to be, the characters themselves had moved so far away from anyone I knew -- or wanted to know! -- I found absolutely no connection to them.

Whose idea was it for MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE to end, and for the Thing to get his own series?

JB: I forget who first suggested it, but it seemed to me like a good idea. As I was writing the Thing's book at the time, I quickly realized any story that required him to "team up" was, almost by default, an FF story -- just without the FF! By losing the "team up" element, we were able to concentrate more on Ben, and do stories that served him better as a character. (9/17/2005)

Is there any reason why John Romita, Jr.'s name was put before yours in the credits?

When I am scripting but not drawing, and unless the editor decides to change it, I always put the artist's name before my own in the credits. I think the artist is more important than the writer in comics. (3/12/2005)

If LOST GENERATION fills in the missing years as they stood at the time of its publishing, does the concept invite more filling-in-of-blanks when we hit, say, 2010 or 2020?

JB: Roger Stern and I were very careful to avoid any dates or allusions to real world events as we got closer and closer to the "present" in LOST GENERATION. The idea was that the earlier stories would be tied to actual history -- like the Apollo XI launch and the Nixon administration -- but the latter stories would be structured so they could streeeeeettttttch to fit the growing gap. (9/1/2005)

Did you design everybody in LOST GENERATION?

JB: Now It Can Be Revealed: You know that double page spread that kicks off the first/last issue of LOST GENERATION? All those images of the various heroes? That was the first time I drew any of them!

Then Rog and I went thru that spread, figured out who they were, and which ones we wanted to hi-lite! (11/28/2006)

Did you ever hear from the rock group Rush regarding the use of 2112?

JB: There's absolutely no connection. At the time I did 2112 I had not even heard of "Rush".

2112 was published in 1991, so I decided to give it a similarly palindromic year as its title. 2002 was too close, 2332 too far away. 2222 just looked odd. So 2112 won more or less by default. (1/13/2005)

Does a current OMAC story get in the way of JB's mini-series?

JB: No. In order to leave Kirby's version undamaged, my OMAC was an alternate timeline. (05/02/2005)

JB: Again I must point out that this is not in CHAPTER ONE.

In CO Peter is seen getting a computer from Ben and May when he appears to be about 10 years old (before he became Spider-Man, in any case). In AMAZING FANTASY 15 the microscope is given to him by Ben and May after he has become Spider-Man. (10/8/2004)

One thing that's notable about the way Peter gets his powers in AMAZING FANTASY #15 is that it happens very, very quietly, in a way that no one but Peter himself notices. The big explosion involved in the CHAPTER ONE origin takes away from that.

JB: You're not the first to raise this particular objection, and my response is the same each time: you're standing too close. Explosion or no explosion, no "special attention" is drawn to the moment when Peter is bitten by the spider. Only you, the readers, see this event, exactly as in the original version. There is no "string of evidence" to be followed that would lead an investigator from the explosion to an assumption that someone there was transformed into Spider-Man, and thence to Peter Parker's doorstep. Howard Mackie and I, in fact, addressed this very point in one of our AMAZING SPIDER-MAN stories -- showing someone who was tracking down people who had been involved in the event to find out if (in a universe were such things were not uncommon) anything "strange" had happened to them. He was not looking specifically for Spider-Man, and had no reason to assume Spider-Man was in any way involved.

The window dressing is made larger, but the event itself remains every bit as intimate as in the AMAZING FANTASY version. Possibly even moreso, since there are no potential witnesses in this instance, unlike the original in which Parker's distress at being bitten (if not the bite itself) is observed and even remarked upon. (6/4/2005)

Norman Osborn behind some of the other villains/threats (which Untold Tales also did, but not with known ones)

JB: A "reveal", not a change. To qualify as a "change" you must first show evidence that points to the contrary.

Norman Osborn related to the Sandman

JB: Again, a "reveal". Nothing in the previous 30 years indicated otherwise.

a big explosion that impacted more than just Peter, and led to Peter being in the hospital for some time.

JB: A change -- necessitated by the updating. Modern readers know much more about how radioactivity works than was the case in 1963. (I wonder what would have been the reaction if I had, as was briefly considered, gone with a genetically engineered spider, in lieu of a radioactive one?)

the explosion also gave birth to Dr. Octopus

JB: That is Ock's origin.

the burglar picked the house, not at random, but because he had a run in with Uncle Ben. This is neither the original or retcon from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 200

JB: The story in AMAZING 200 merely added to the already staggering coincidences. The CO version eliminated them.

he adopted the current continuity of MJ knowing from the beginning

JB: Need an explanation here of how using something already in continuity qualifies as a "change".

With the Chameleon, he did update him by having him with Dr. Doom, not the commies

JB: That, or Parker gets really old. Plus, this fits with the mandate of CO being written as if Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had it all worked out before the first year started.