Trust me if he was offered work he would take it (at least from DC).
Byrne's bridge burning at DC isn't quite as dramatic as the nuclear bomb he dropped over at Marvel.
Byrne's last projects at DC were completely under-whelming lukewarm fare. No one was talking about his Demon book and his swing at the New Gods.
Lab Rats and the
Doom Patrol were flat out bombs. Even higher profile projects like Wonder Woman and a couple of fill-in's on
Action Comics failed to capture even a tenth of the attention Rob Liefield got by doing two issues of the Titans. When DC put together the highly anticipated reunion of Byrne and Claremont for a JLA arc, the end result was a drab lifeless story that utterly failed to re-capture the glory days of the X-Men. It was very obvious that Byrne's name and ability... as diminished as they were... no longer sold books. DC was losing interest in offering Byrne creative projects.
Once Byrne's good friend Paul Kuperberg left DC, Byrne lost his last remaining advocate and ally. He found himself in the company strangers and "young turks" who had minimal interest in him ...and as we all know, that's not where Byrne likes to be! At the end, Byrne was doing fill-ins on the new Atom book. The Atom! That's lower than Aquaman... and it wasn't even the REAL Atom. It was that oriental pretender! Byrne must have been galled. DC stopped calling him shortly afterwards and Byrne recognizing the writing on the wall, stopped calling them. This way, he can safely claim to have been the one to walk away.
As much as his ardent fans would like to believe that if it was up to Byrne, he could still be at DC churning out the one hundredth issue of
Lab Rats or possibly that most self-indulgent of fan fiction, the endless
Generations series, it's just not true. Byrne was proving unable to produce well-selling attention grabbing books and what's worse, he was taking to his Internet soap box and calling DC double crossers at every turn. When he started lashing out at DC Hall of Famer, the beloved Dick Giordano, over creative decisions from twenty five years earlier, Giordano's friends and proteges still at DC had had enough of Byrne's big mouth and nasty disposition. They made certain his name was off their speed dial.
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