A look at the letters column from John Byrne's Next Men comic. Updated every Monday.
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"Constantly, in interviews with you, I read of your attempts to minimize you art and that you are a writer more than an artist. Attempting to develop the most efficient drawing style equates to less art, less panels, less backgrounds and less details. John, your fans love your writing, but we want your art."
"Richard, I fear you know not what you ask. When I look back at my work on books like X-Men and Starlord - not one line of which I am ashamed of, since it was all the best work I could do at the time - all I see is the flash and crackle, the bells and whistles I put into the work primarily - though no, I hope, consciously - to disguise just how weak the basic drawing really was..."
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| Uncanny X-men #132 |
""If " is an important work, I think, especially for anyone who wants to write Heroic Fiction, like comics. So, I thought I'd print the poem here. If nothing else, it will give you some insight into what drives John Byrne's brain when he's controlling the words and actions of his characters..."
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"I understand you are an old man. If that's the case, could you make JBNM bimonthlyy so that when you die I will have twice as many issues? Weekly would be great!"
"If Bethany's hair is "indestructible," then how can she pull it out of her head as she did in issue four to slice through her bonds? And I want a good answer, not one of those mamby-pamby cornball "comic book" science answers. I challenge thee!!!"
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"In 1984, shortly after the DNAgents were put under option as a potential live-action TV series, I was doing some work for the in-house ad agency of one of the networks. There, on a composing table, lay a still photo of a group of a group of super-powered characters. They looked a lot like the DNAgents to me. A whole lot. I was fuming, but decided to go home and sleep on it. The next day a call came from a friend who worked for the network. he wanted to know if i'd seen the terrible rip-off his people had done of - the Fantastic Four! A couple of days later at lunch with Stan Lee, Stan was bemoaning the terrible rip-off he'd seen one of the networks was doing of - X-Men! So there you have it. Three different people looking at the same property and all thinking it was a rip-off of three different properties."
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"...Frankly, I don't see your problem. You didn't tear out the certificate. That's your prerogative. No one is holding a gun to your head. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head. If we put 16 covers on JBNM #1 you would not have to buy any more than one. The choice, as always, is with the buyer. Some people will buy multiple copies of JBNM for the certificates, and that's fine by me. Some won't, and that's equally fine - Maybe even better...Removal or non-removal of the certificate will not affect the reading in the least."
"As to Nathan and Danny - well, it seems to me as though you're asking for something rather more than a simple loving relationship, genders notwithstanding. I would not do a romance between, say, Bethany and Danny, since Danny is still very young and - even for the Next Men - innocent. Pedophile is not something I'm particularly interested in exploring in these pagers - unless it to point out how wrong it is."
"...here's an interesting development, since the publication of issue #2: An editor called me the other day to "correct" my misapprehension as to how one artist's drawing of an airplane ended up xeroxed and pasted into the work of another. This was not the doing of the artist, the editor - who will probably prefer to remain nameless - informed me. He had been in on the whole deal, and it was the editor of the book who had authorized the lifting of the artwork, to be pasted into another editor's title. With the approval of the original artist, says my informant. Okay. Except that I only know this story because the offended artist pointed it out to me. Note use of word "offended." Not an artist who felt he'd ever given permission for his work to be used as clip-art."
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"As I was taking my shower this morning - most of my better ideas come to me in the shower - I realized there was a correlation between good comic book art that really gets the job done and the five "w;s" of journalism: Who, What, Where, When and Why. A comic artist who is doing the job properly should be devoting a great deal of energy to rendering the writer redundant. Virtually everything a reader needs to know should be in the pictures, and this is where the Five W's come in."It's an interesting read and good advice to any would be comic artist. That's now. If you read this blog and enjoy it let me know. If you read this blog and think it's stupid you can still let me know.
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"...the absence of the Comics Code leaves you free to portray such gore. My favorite horror movie being John Carpenter's The Thing, I certainly won't complain. But keep in mind that such scenes can often be executed more effectively in a more subdues manner, or even off-panel, as were, for example, most of the classic EC shocks. I think..."
"There will be no "mercy bullets" in my world, nor any sanitizing of the consequence of violence. Frank Miller once joked with me about the amazing daggers Elektra would use in her Daredevil appearances - the ones which penetrated flesh and bone but, at least on the viewer's side, not cloth. You won't find that in JBNM..."
"For years those monthly sales figures represented an important means - indeed, the only means - of gauging the reader's likes and dislikes. (Letters to the editors being routinely discounted, since company policy tended to be that anyone who wrote to a comic book must be slightly off the beam, and there fore unreliable. Really! I am not making this up!) We've lost that important frame of reference, with the advent of Fill-In-The-Blank_Zombies, people who buy multiple copies of the same issue, not because they particularly enjoyed the story and might want some extras for when the much-read copy got dog-eared to read, but because they think these "hot" title will be a good investment. On that basis it becomes impossible to use sales as a barometer of public taste...)"
"Jo Duffy tells a wry tale of overhearing two fans discussing what a creep this guy "Joe Duffy" was. They were referring to Jo, oblivious to the fact that she was standing within earshot. They discussed encounters that had never happened, rude words that had never been exchanged. And you can be damn sure they would be more than happy to continue this discussion with anyone else who was prepared to listen."
"About a year and a half ago, my buddy Roger Stern returned from a convention to tell me the tale of a fan who had accosted him, as a known friend of mine, with the story of how obnoxious and rude I had been to him - the fan - at a convention in Philadelphia earlier that year. Roger, knowing my convention schedule, quickly pointed out that not only had I not been to a convention in Philadelphia earlier that year, but, so far as he knew, I had not been to a convention in Philadelphia ever! The fan immediately corrected his story. The encounter must have happened at some other Con, in some other city. Roger, his Holmesian intellect piqued, at once asked if the fan had ever been to Mansfield, Ohio. No, came the reply. Well, Roger explained - and I've seen the kind of infinite patience Roger can muster when dealing with this kind of situation -the incident could not have happened, since, at the time, the Mid-Ohio Con, in Mansfield, was the only convention I was attending, anywhere, and had for about five years."
