Beats me. You're asking the wrong guy. It usually takes a comics pro at least five years of work for me to notice his name. Within five years, most of these hot young thangs will have moved onto whatever -- video games, I guess.

I'd rather get Nick Cardy's signature -- or hell, Byrne's for that matter -- than nearly anyone drawing nearly anything at DC or Marvel this month.

Streamline it, like Byrne's suggested Fantastic 4Ever — Q4JB. Or possibly 4QJB.

Name some names. Most of the prolific guys weren't very good — Ron Frenz, Al Milgrom, Bob Layton, Joe Staton, Dan Jurgens, etc. The people who were good will be remembered, even if they weren't prolific — Dave Stevens, Kevin Nowlan, Bill Sienkiewicz, Bernie Wrightson, Paul Smith, etc. Byrne is sort of an anomaly, insofar as his work being both as abundant and as good as it was.

For starters, I disagree with you about Joe Staton. Some of Staton's work was really good. I just don't think he was always placed on the right book for his cartoony style.

Name some names? Well, I can only report on shows I've attended or shows my friends attended and reported back on. Old-time artists who didn't get much attention at these shows in their later years include Jim Aparo, Nick Cardy (I saw this one with my own eyes), Curt Swan and one of the guys you mention, Bernie Wrightson (again, saw it with my own eyes).

Now, regarding Wrightson, I should note in fairness that he was listed as a "guest of honor" at this particular show (Baltimore, two years ago, if memory serves). He had a panel all to himself. But his panel was at lunchtime Sunday -- not much of a crowd by then -- and at his booth on the floor, he didn't draw much of a crowd. I was able to walk right up and say hello to him.

I don't remember the Hot Young artists whose booths drew a lot more attention than Wrightson's, but I assure you, they weren't half the artists that he was/is. I can't imagine any comics show at which Wrightson doesn't have fans waiting to meet him and see what he's drawing now. In reality, most of today's fans have forgotten him.

Wow, I go away for a few days, and Paul just spews out a string of arguments from personal incredulity and arguments from repetition.

The bizarre development is Paul now acknowledging that he's using arguments from repetition, and still going ahead with it anyway. As always, Paul's philosophy is, "when it comes down to logic or John Byrne, go with John Byrne."

As for writers/editors, also in Baltimore, I've seen Marv Wolfman, Len Wein and Jim Shooter sitting by themselves at booths for a while. Wolfman at least had the good fortune to sit next to George Perez, who remains popular, so he caught some of Perez's backwash fans. I went to both of them with a copy of THE NEW TEEN TITANS for their autographs.

I cannot understand why middle-aged comics geeks -- which many if not most of us were -- would not line up to meet and chat with Wolfman (AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, TOMB OF DRACULA, FANTASTIC FOUR, THE NEW TEEN TITANS, CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS), Wein (co-creator of Wolverine and Swamp Thing, writer and/or editor of nearly everything at Marvel and DC at one time or another) and Shooter (teen-aged wunderkind at LEGION OF SUPERHEROES and say what you will, but editor-in-chief at Marvel when it was publishing its best work since Stan-and-Jack).

Interesting to note (at least to me!), as I was reading my son's issue of Wizard #255 (he gets the mags not for their comic book content, but for the sci-fi content...go figure), I saw this page for artists to watch. They are Mike Allred, Sean Phillips, Stuart Immonen & Stephane Roux. Guess who got the spotlight?

Wizard is still publishing? I haven't seen it on the newstand in a while.

Ditto.
The issue in question has the A-Team on the cover & my son REALLY wants to go see it. When we passed by the magazines in the nearby grocery store, my son grabbed it up. At first I thought it was just a magazine about the film, but on closer inspection I was surprised to see that it was a Wizard Magazine. I took advantage of the situation & read the articles & found the one I mentioned earlier.

I thought I might just throw out a crazy idea as to why these middle-aged comics geeks are not interested in Wein or Wolfman or Shooter is because there's other people at the convention that they are much more interested in - some hot artist, perhaps, though no one hear can name any. Crazy I know but I think it has merit.

To me Wolfman and Wein were not very good writers, whose work does not stand up. I am not interested in Shooter, he never wrote anything that I can remember reading - sorry, I do, the Korvac saga replete with fill-ins, D. Hands inking, quite a good ending if I remember. Wrightson was an okay artist but Swamp Thing by Moore & co was so much, much better than the "classic" original.