From All the Rage at Silverbulletcomicbooks.com.

"Comicdom’s favorite curmudgeon, John Byrne, has been tapped as one of the pencillers for the new DC universe horror anthology Tales of the Unexpected. The series will feature rotating artists, and Byrne will pencil a few of the Spectre stories featured in the series.

DC was not pleased after Byrne pulled out as the penciller of one of the Superman Returns tie-in books plotted by Bryan Signer. So don’t expect to see Byrne as the writer on any new DC projects soon, in fact, his role will be limited to that of an artist on limited runs or fill in issues. Issue 6, at the latest, will finish his tenure as penciller of the new Atom series."

Ignoring the first three words and DC's so-called reasoning behind its so-called decision, John, is it true that your DC workload has been reduced to the sort of material described? 

If so, how will this impact your schedule in terms of being freed up to produce new material for other companies?  Are you working on pitches to anyone at the moment?  What is in the pipeline, and how long can we expect to see it? 

I wonder why no one bothered to fact check that before printing it? I mean, it's not like John Byrne is hard to get a hold of, I'm typing on an entire site devoted to chatting with the man himself.

I wonder if anything I've read on that site (and sites like it) is really true, because if something is THIS easy to fact check, and it isn't, then what about the real hush hush stuff?

From what I'm able to recall right now, the rumours are always hit and miss - well, that's why they're called rumours and not scoops, right?  Regardless of their accuracy, I still find them reasonably entertaining as mostly everyone else does. 

Still, I probably wouldn't have given it the time of day if I hadn't read a post from John the other day - prior to reading ATR - saying there would be an indefinite period of Byrne-less months at the comic shop.  I have heard nothing of Tales of the Unexpected either, but if it's simply a book in development at DC, I wouldn't expect to; John Byrne not hearing about it - that's a whole other kettle of bananas. 

And thanks again for the reply, John.   

Not playing devil's advocate here, but when I went to the silver bullet site yesterday to read this for myself, a disclaimer appeared that specifically said the information above was offered as "entertainment" and indicated that it was presented as an unsubstantiated rumor.