boyajian@akov68.DEC (JERRY BOYAJIAN) (10/10/85)
> From: gsg!kathy (Kathryn Smith) > ... I have since > heard a rumor which may or may not be reliable that Byrne is going > over to DC. Anybody know for sure? The rumor that I heard was that Byrne's contract with Marvel was coming up for renewal soon, and that DC was trying to woo Byrne with big bucks, plus the opportunity to write and draw Superman. A recent AMAZING HEROES reported that DC was negotiating with Byrne to do Superman, but that if Byrne took it on, it would be in addition to his Marvel work (how Byrne would be able to write and draw three monthly books is beyond me). I haven't seen a COMICS BUYER'S GUIDE in a while (I get mine as hand-me-downs), so I can't say if they've reported anything further. --- jayembee (Jerry Boyajian, DEC, Acton-Nagog, MA) UUCP: {decvax|ihnp4|allegra|ucbvax|...}!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-akov68!boyajian ARPA: boyajian%akov68.DEC@DECWRL.ARPA
moriarty@fluke.UUCP (The Napoleon of Crime) (10/14/85)
In article <773@decwrl.UUCP> boyajian@akov68.DEC (JERRY BOYAJIAN) writes: > I haven't seen a COMICS BUYER'S GUIDE in a while (I get mine as >hand-me-downs), so I can't say if they've reported anything further. They haven't. My Mac is supposed to be back from the Macintosh Resurrection center this evening, and I'll summarize some of the news that has gone on over the last few weeks... "When in doubt, tell the truth." Mark Twain "When in doubt, book 'em." Steve McGarret, Five-O Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer ARPA: fluke!moriarty@uw-beaver.ARPA UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, allegra, sb6, lbl-csam}!fluke!moriarty <*> DISCLAIMER: Do what you want with me, but leave my employers alone! <*>
mcewan@uiucdcs.CS.UIUC.EDU (10/16/85)
It is no longer a rumor. According to CBG 623, Byrne will be taking over as
writter and artist as of July, 1986, with Superman volume II, #1. The following
is quoted directly from the CBG article. Statements enclosed by [] are comments
by me.
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The familiar cast of characters (including Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Perry
White) will be re-introduced, with alterations. "Lana Lang," Byrne said, "comes
back in a substantially altered form," and Superman's foster parents, the
Kents, will still be alive. [I'm surprised that he's keeping Lana. I always
associate her with Superboy or those silly 60's stories. Sure, her personality
has gone through 4 or 5 revisions since then, and she's dating Clark now, but
that's just because of "Superman III" (hard to believe they thought they had to
make changes to be compatible with that turkey). I assume that Byrne intends
to make Lana a totally different character, and Lois will be restored to her
proper position.]
The relationship between Superman and The Batman (which Byrne begins in
his fourth issue) will *not* be the chummy friendship of past decades ("Vastly
different backgrounds, vastly different motivations"), and The Justice League
"will have a role, but they are basically formed to take care of things that
Superman is too busy to take care of."
Drawing his inspiration from the original characterization of Jerry Siegel and
Joe Shuster, the classic Fleisher cartoons of the 40's and the first of the
Christopher Reeve motion pictures, Byrne stated his preference for "a Superman
who has to *sweat*."
Byrne said, "My whole approach is that the *man* should be more important than
the *super*, and he *has* to be. If he's just a supremely powerful guy who
never screws up, then who cares? I mean, I've got The Bible if I want to read
that kind of stuff. Superman has to comprehensible in mortal terms."
... Byrne rejects the notion of recent years concerning Superman's feelings
of alienation. "This guy was raised as a human being; he doesn't know from
alienation." [Right on!] Planning to save the character's discovery of his
native heritage for the 50th issue in 1988, the artist maintains that "as
far as Superman is concerned, he's a human being who just happens to be
better than everybody else.
My first six issues are a compressed history of the character, to fix him up,
bring him up to date. We proceed from there. The first six issues will hit the
stands on a bi-weekly basis, and the first issue will be 30 pages, no ads.
There will be no Superboy, no Supergirl, no cats, bats, rats, dogs, aardvarks,
elephants, monkeys, orangutans, no Phantom Zones [I never could figure out why
the Phantom Zone was considered a good place to put criminals. You commit a
crime, they stick you in this place were you don't have to work, you don't age,
you can't die or get sick, and you can see and hear into anyplace in the
universe (which ought to eliminate the problem of boredom); after a few years
they let you out; you haven't aged a day and now you can make a fortune
blackmailing prominent Kryptonians.], no Survival Zones, no
Kandor, no Krypto. The key phrase for Superman is 'Sole survivor of the doomed
planet Krypton.' Nobody else walked away from that."
[Good riddance. The DC universe has become so overcrowded with Krypton
survivors that I was beginning to think that only 3 or 4 people actually
died when Krypton blew up. I hope somebody blows up Daxam(sp? - you know,
Mon El's home planet). There are just too many superpeople around.]
Byrne received the assignment from DC Executive Editor Dick Giordano, who
learned that Byrne had recently become a freelancer. "They took everything
that I said I wanted to do with the character, all the fixes and changes -
even the supreme egotism, on my part, of having my first issue being #1!"
All other Superman titles will be done in concert with the main series.
... Byrne has made it clear that he will continue to chronical The Fantastic
Four and The Incredible Hulk, adding, "there are a half a dozen DC titles that
I'd like to play with, but unless something happens to affect the work I'm
doing at Marvel, I won't have the time. Three books a month is as much as I
can handle."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm looking forward to this. It's about time that SOMETHING was done to
revitalize Superman, and I agree with most of the things that Byrne wants
to do. The article doesn't say if Byrne intends to make his belief that
Superman's powers are psionically based explicit in the book. I hope not.
I do hope that he gets rid of some of Supes more ridiculous powers (super-
ventriloquism, super-breath).
Scott McEwan
{ihnp4,pur-ee}!uiucdcs!mcewan
"There are good guys and there are bad guys. The job of the good guys is to
kill the bad guys."cgf@infinet.UUCP (Chris Faylor) (10/18/85)
{}
Am I the only one who gets an awful pang of sorrow when I hear about the
"revitalization" of the Superman mythos? I grew up with things like the
Phantom Zone and Krypto and Supergirl... And I always liked the idea that
Superman and Batman were friends. It didn't make a heck of a lot of sense,
but in the old days, it didn't have to.
I am not convinced that the changes had to be so sweeping. I will buy the
fact that Superman has become too powerful, even though he supposedly lost
fifty percent of his powers in the early 70's (you might remember, that
was a radical period - Clark Kent actually started wearing green jackets
and STRIPED shirts). I will also buy the fact that there are too many
survivors of Krypton hanging around. But, why get rid of Superboy?
And, especially, why resurrect the Kents? Having Jonathan and Martha
(or Eben and Sara or whoever) around is not part of any version of
the Superman story that I am aware of. I was also sort of interested
in seeing where the half-hearted attempts at a continuing relationship
between Superman and Lana Lang were leading.
Oh well, maybe I'll just have to consider the Superman I grew up with
as having died in Crisis #10. It should be interesting to see what
Mr. Byrne does with his successor, even without the creative guidance
of his mentor, Jim Shooter. :-)
--
-cgf-
I feel more like I do now than I did when I first got here.
decvax!wanginst!infinet!cgftim@k.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA (Tim Maroney) (10/20/85)
This article just goes to show how literarily impoverished Byrne is. The
Bible is hardly full of infallible characters; in fact, only Yahweh and Jesus
are supposed to have made no mistakes. Another in the seemingly endless
list of Problems I See In Comic Today is that people think they can write
comics if comics are all they know. Not a chance; not well, anyway.
I predict Superman will be another Fantastic Four: a years worth of good
stories as Byrne works out the ideas inspired by the novelty of the
characters, then a long, slow slide into total mediocrity as he runs out of
new ideas.
-=-
Tim Maroney, CMU Center for Art and Technology
Tim.Maroney@k.cs.cmu.edu uucp: {seismo,decwrl,etc.}!k.cs.cmu.edu!tim
CompuServe: 74176,1360 My name is Jones. I'm one of the Jones boys.jsdy@hadron.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao) (10/24/85)
Effectively, continuity died in the Crisis. I don't see why
Superman has to change so much; but, then, this will be Byrne's
artistic effort. Consider this: when some of us fix a small
bug in a program, we fix the bug and maybe a little of the
infrastructure. Others of us will rip any program to shreds
and re-write it to suit our tastes (Berkellions!!!). Then again,
the latter approach is needed if the program is intrinsically
buggy, or if it is internally artistically offensive. (;-))
Anyway, yeah, this will be a new Superman. Let's give Byrne a
chance and see what happens.
But I thought the way they broke up in "the last World's
Finest" was incredibly stupid.
--
Joe Yao hadron!jsdy@seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}moriarty@fluke.UUCP (The Napoleon of Crime) (10/24/85)
In article <607@k.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA> tim@k.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA (Tim Maroney) writes: >This article just goes to show how literarily impoverished Byrne is. The >Bible is hardly full of infallible characters; in fact, only Yahweh and Jesus >are supposed to have made no mistakes. Another in the seemingly endless >list of Problems I See In Comic Today is that people think they can write >comics if comics are all they know. Not a chance; not well, anyway. I don't think that's what Byrne's problems have been. I still think he's able to handle dialogue and characters adequately; his plots are the problem (at least lately -- I agree that the first year-and-a-half of the FF was quite good, and that he has paled to sporadic good issues). He seems to have a sense of "dredging nostalgia", in that he looks at how the character was done XX years ago and trys to take this basic premise and revitilize things through this. However, you can bring The Skrulls back just so many times. The reason I look forward to his work on Superman is that the comic has been (to me) a consistent mediocrity for so long; I never collected it, even in those forgone days that I used to buy bloody anything. I don't think it'll be that much of a challange -- it would be tough to make them less interesting than some of the recent Cary Bates stories. "Actually one of the biggest reasons I have for doing Cerebus is to give wives and girlfriends of comics fans at least one comic book they can read." -- Dave Sim Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer ARPA: fluke!moriarty@uw-beaver.ARPA UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, allegra, sb6, lbl-csam}!fluke!moriarty <*> DISCLAIMER: Do what you want with me, but leave my employers alone! <*>