Else When, John Byrne and a happy story.

Hello my friend,

I grew up in a generation where John Byrne, George Perez, and Walter Simonson were our comic book idols. Many would say that those three artists are in the top ten if not five greatest comic artists in American superhero comics history and I would still place them in the top 10 for international artists, that’s my opinion purely. George unfortunately is no longer with us, Walter Simonson is and I hope he’s working on a new project for all of us to enjoy, that leaves John Byrne and Else When.

John Byrne hasn’t been very active over the last few years in mainstream comics, but if you were looking around you would occasionally see a page pop up here and there featuring the X-Men for a story that he was serializing on his website byrnerobotics.com. I would come across these pages, and I would think these look like classic X-Men pages, which is something we hadn’t seen in a while. I like many others would wonder why hasn’t Marvel picked up on this yet? From various sources we’ve all pretty much heard that they (Marvel) couldn’t come to terms with John. Now here comes Abrams books along with Chris Ryall to bring us a fully realized version of Else When in 3 volumes. I finally got my signed copy about 2 weeks ago, from Mid-Town Comics and I read it over the course of two weeks, taking my time to savor the story and art, and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. Now is this super peak Byrne, no, although I do think there could be an argument for the story being peak Byrne, the art is good and, in some places, excellent which I would say is most of the time.

Now mind you this isn’t Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns, what it is, is a very fun entertaining comic. Byrne isn’t breaking the mold, he’s not setting a trend for the next 40 years, but he’s produced a comic that can be enjoyed for the next 40 years.

If you enjoy old school comics from the 80’s you will probably enjoy this, so if you get the chance get yourself a copy and rejoice :D

Now onto the happy story, it happened a while ago, when a group of friends and I went down to Pittsburgh Comicon, and who would happen to be there, John Byrne, two of my friends, were really big fans and they wanted to go talk to him. One of them was Matt Lunsford, and we had just gotten the copies for Dream Weavers #2 in time for the show. So, Matt snatched up a copy and went over to see Mr. Byrne with Donny, another great friend and burgeoning artist. The two of them returned to our table about 20 to 30 minutes later, and the two of them were floating on air, these two tough guys from the hood were as happy as two people could be, and I asked, what happened?

They were both ebullient, and Matt went on to say that the line to see John Byrne was short, so they got to him quickly. Matt and Donny told John how they were big fans and Matt gave him the copy of Dream Weavers #2 and John flipped through it and told Matt how he liked it, and he asked Matt to sign it for him. Byrne then asked them if they had anything for him to sign? They explained to him that they didn’t know he was going to be at the show, so they didn’t have anything for him to sign. Without missing a beat John reached under his table and pulled out 2 copies of Fantastic Four 232, which he told them a retailer had given him a case of the books before the show started. He signed them and off they went, floating back to our table. That’s my happy John Byrne story I fall back on whenever I hear someone saying something negative about him and his conduct at a show. He made two of my good friends really happy and that will always make him a good guy in my book.

That same book Dream Weavers #2 has been remastered and is now in color with issue #3 now on Kickstarter, so if it’s good enough for John Byrne, well go check it out and see for yourself at :D http://kck.st/4uTBFNL

And please check out my other title The Oswald Chronicles: We Were Just Passing Through #1, which has less than 48 hours to go: http://kck.st/4eWs7eO

Thank you for spending this time with me.

JD Calderon