John Byrne's Fantastic Four

[McMurphy]

I have always thought that the Marvel superhero team The Fantastic Four had to be one of the lamest groups invented.

With the exception of runs like that of John Byrne's that turned the magazine into tales of science fiction rather than that of super combat, that is. One of my favorite Fantastic Four issues was "Central City Does Not Answer!" (#293), which was Byrne's final story under his original writing run. The story felt like a classic Twilight Zone episode: a large black dome suddenly appears around a huge city and, when the team passes through the barrier to investigate, they find that time has sped up within the isolation, ten-fold.

It seemed that Byrne's run helped inspire some later writers to continue the trend of using the Fantastic Four comic book as a place to construct science fiction yarns, but, mostly, the series reverted back to lack luster comic action. I remember a particular good exception when the team travels into a future where the USSR won the cold war.

Did anyone else enjoy Byrne's Fantastic Four run? Or the writer in general? At his best, he seemed to bring a legitimate science fiction element to every series he takes part in....whether it be retelling Superman's origins or sending a raging Hulk through a staggering number of distant fantasy worlds.

[knivesout]

Originally Posted by McMurphy

Did anyone else enjoy Byrne's Fantastic Four run? Or the writer in general? At his best, he seemed to bring a legitimate science fiction element to every series he takes part in....whether it be retelling Superman's origins or sending a raging Hulk through a staggering number of distant fantasy worlds.

I'm most familiar with his DC work - I was never a huge Marvel fan apart from Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, and the inevitable phase of X-Mania. ALthough it's become quite fashionable (and in some cases, perhaps justified) to revile Byrne's art, stories and personality (which is frankly irrelevant to a discussion of his comic work) I have to say he brought in a new touch of realism to most comics he worked on that didn't throw away all the Silver Age sense of wonder and fun that the characters he worked on had. He may have eliminated needless 60s/70s creations like the extended Super-family and Kandor, for instance, but he also brought a new depth and focus to Superman's alien heritage, and re-invented Lex Luthor as a brilliant, wily business magnate - perhaps the most succesful aspect of this reboot.

His Wonder Woman work didn't impress me so well. More recent work, like his JLA - The Tenth Circle series and Batman and Superman Generations are fun, exciting if sometimes illogical stories that entertain marvellously well without beating you about the head with grime and violence and postmodern anguish. He's a very good re-interpreter of traditional superheroic values and characters basically. He does tend to be rather opnionated, and to re-create each property he works on to an extent that can make fans of an earlier creator's run unhappy - for instance, his work on Doom Patrol which seemed to undo all of Grant Morrison's cool work on the series.

Still, I've come to realise that I'd prefer read Byrne taking liberties with a favourite character than, say, Brian Azzarello, much though I enjoy the latter's non-superhero work.

[Shoegaze99]

I was a huge, huge fan of Byrne’s work on Fantastic Four, which is, when coupled with his Man Of Steel series, the pinnacle of his career, in my opinion. All I can do is echo your sentiments, McMurphy, because all the reasons you give for liking his run are the same reasons I have: the focus on “science adventures”, the family dynamic and so on. Great art throughout, and great writing, too. The Visionaries series of trade paperbacks are a great buy for someone who never read his work on FF.

As a writer Byrne is, well, pretty hit or miss – with more misses than hits, but very strong hits when he’s on the mark. But I really enjoyed his Superman work, Alpha Flight was fun for a brief time, and Next Men was really solid.

As an artist, Byrne is pretty much superb, drawing the definitive images of several characters in my eyes (Superman among them). I feel like he’s sometimes a bit stale – his reinvention of Spider-Man really bored me to tears – and from the pages I’ve seen of his recent work he seems to lean too hard on goofy tilted panels and the like. Way too gimmicky for me. Still, the guy is a workhorse, churning out consistent work over a long period of time. He deserves credit for that. He has a very recognizable style that screams “traditional superhero comic book” to me – and I mean that in a good way.

And as a side note, his message board is unintentionally hilarious. It’s pretty quiet there now, but there are spurts of insanity that are a delight to behold – insanity driven by John Byrne himself. It seems he’s something of an irrational, hypocritical curmudgeon. Great fun to see when some bit o’ hell breaks loose. Watch as he takes shots at Erik Larsen and Peter David, swears The Incredibles were a grave and terrible insult to the nobility of superheroes, and slams his own fans for being so callous as to refer to Batman as “Bats”.