Hey, it generated the title of my new comic, "Subsequent Guys."

Make sure the last line in the comic is...

"Lawson...I'm cold."

Yeah, it's not like DKR wasn't a future dystopia from the first issue, with punks keeping the populace in fear and the authorities being corrupt. But Byrne only perceives a "darker tone" once the superheroes are involved in that corruption. It's all part of his ideosyncratic notion of what a pure superhero is supposed to be. Humans can be degraded all you want, but besmirch the honor of his beloved long-underwear characters, and you've gone beyond the pale.



Agreed.

The weird thing is that he adamantly insists that there's no reason to think Watchmen is innovative, unless that thought is based on ignorance. And sure, if someone thinks Watchmen is innovative because it's got dark superheroes, then yes, that had been done before.

Problem is, the plot isn't what's so innovative about Watchmen. The plot on its own is kind of weak. It's entirely about the execution, which is layered and sophisticated in a way that even now most most superhero comics don't even try. (Let alone when Watchmen was first printed.)

A while back on this board, Larsen described Byrne as "a dumb guy who thinks he's a smart guy." Hoo boy, if that ever applies, it applies here. It's like Byrne only read Watchmen on a superficial level, and doesn't get what the big deal is, since those superficial elements were already in the air. Which would be fine if he wasn't going around saying that people who do see past those superficial elements are ignorant.

That's just bizarre. It's like saying, "I don't get this, so you're dumb."

Yeah, I think the bee up Byrne's butt about Watchmen has to do with what he perceives as Moore's attack on the sanctity of super heroes (don't you dare call him Supes!) In this case, I agree with him to an extent. Watchmen was incredibly innovative in form and structure and pushed the envelope of what comics could do as a story telling medium. Every detail of every panel seems to have been thought out and connected in some way to some other element of the story--just amazing stuff. The problem is that Moore decided to use the super hero genre to carry that incredibly dense structure. Most of the time, the genre groans under the weight, and so the book ends up highlighting some of the more ridiculous elements of super heroes that we gleefully look past when we're little kids. I think Watchmen probably would have worked much better as a straight up sci-fi book, kinda how Miller approached Ronin, rather than a the super hero book it was.

But Byrne's tirade against Watchmen is silly. It's almost as if he took the book as a personal attack against his own worldview.

Hi JB

I am working on some projects and thought wow I wonder what JB would think of this...

Godzilla versus Fat Oprah, wrestling over a stick of butter. Who wins?

What brand of butter?

since I live in the Land of Lakes, Land of Lakes brand butter.

They're doing the Hidden Years book club over there (which I bought at the time they were coming out monthly) and I noticed that Magneto looked like a ghost for a bunch of issues and it never really said why. Byrne revealed in one of those book club threads (I don't have time to look. maybe later)that Stan Lee did something with this one time. So Byrne took this aspect that was never fully used and made it a huge storytelling device with Mags.
Also, I didn't appreciate at the time Palmer's inks over Byrne. Now I do. Go figure

I'm reading MARVEL MASTERWORKS: UNCANNY X-MEN, Vol. 2, which includes the stories where John Byrne and Terry Austin took over the art chores from Dave Cockrum, Tony DeZuniga and others.

And good grief, I didn't realize how awful the art was until Byrne and Austin arrived.

No sarcasm, I mean it.

Cockrum's art on the earlier UNCANNY X-MEN issues had looked OK to me. But later on, the inking or something made his drawing very inky, blotchy and scratchy -- and DeZungia, who must have admired Vinnie Colletta, was invited to butcher some of the art, too.

Obviously, Byrne/Austin was a breath of fresh air.

If Byrne and Austin hadn't landed that gig, I bet the then-bimonthly comic would have been canceled in another two years.