I’m sure someone has mocked the pro-athlete comparison before, but here’s mine anyway: Byrne makes the secret identity a critical part of being a superhero, yet athletes don’t have secret identities.

And the uniforms/gear/golf clothes, gaudy as they may be, also need to be practical in terms of the particular sport. With superhero costumes, the visuals sometimes trump the practicality (capes being the most obvious example).

By Byrne’s criteria, Buffy Summers should wear a costume. Explaining why she doesn’t should be part of the debate.

I’m all for superhero costumes in superhero titles, but the “athlete” comparison is pretty thin.

Is it okay to emphasize psychological problems as a dominant driving motivation for John Byrne?

I realize now that the Astonishing line was from Cyclops to Wolverine, sort of as anathema to Prof X’s move against superhero costumes in NXM.

Old news – people have been saying this for years (Byrne included). I’m in full agreement, btw – it’s pretty sad when writers have the characters voice their own contempt for the genre (even though they’re fine about using same genre to pay them megabucks – Warren Ellis’ so-called ‘Year of Whoredom’ has been going on for how many years now?). Worse still is when they ignore the fact that it flies in the face of decades of characterisation – it sounds dumb when Wolverine complains about being forced to wear a ‘stupid’ costume…
…that he’s chosen to wear, of his own volition, for the best part of his comics appearances… :rolleyes:

Regardless of personal opinions on Byrne as both a person and an artist, he’s got a good point here, but it seems that people would much rather ignore it, and switch into ‘Byrne-bash autopilot’.

I think Byrne is right, and dead on. Super Heroes is a genre, just like anything else.

In “Westerns”, it would be like having a tv show about the Wild West, but instead people complaining about wearing hats and six shooters or having a gun fight. Not every character has to have a hat or outfit like that, but so goes the same in comics. It is totally weird to have a classic hero say “why are we dressing up like superheroes?”

Ugh.

I think Beast was dissing the costumes cuz he got stuck wearing the girdle. Plus, he’s a lounge-around-in-speedos kind of mutant so anything other than a banana hammock’s just getting in the way. Especially with all that fur.

JB’s just reading WAY too much into all of this.

What Byrne is missing is the rest of the conversation in that story, which is about how they were Students, not super-heroes, and it was a “back to the basics” idea of taking the X-Men back to being a school instead of being a super-hero team.

Weird. I thought Byrne was all about getting back to the basics. Guess Morrison’s stories were just over his head because they had people talking before the big fight instead of cracking wise during the big fight.

And Byrne dislikes the idea of psychological problems as the dominent motivation for a super-hero? No wonder hje did such a bad job on Spider-Man (motivated by guilt) and Batman (motivated by abandonment).

Byrne Hates Morrison. Byrne Hates Marvel Entertainment. Film At Eleven.

You’re all missing the best part. I mean, the very, very best and most delightful part of his whole bitter screed, the part that made me laugh out loud. His opening.

“This line (or something very much like it), spoken by the Beast to Professor X in an issue of, I think…”

Wow. I would trade five years of my life for an existence so utterly carefree that I have nothing more important to bitch about than some three-year-old line of dialogue that I can’t quite remember, but I THINK it MAYBE goes something like this, and I WANT TO SAY it was in some X-Men comic, but I’m not SURE, so I’m just going to create my own interpretation and context out of whole cloth and then argue THAT at the top of my lungs. Top THAT, internets!

Hrrm. “Should NOT be parodies of themselves.”

I type too fast.

Byrne starts off with an interesting topic and follows it with some good logic, then, as per usual, it all goes to hell in a handbasket, ultimately devolving into a thinly veiled rant about him not being able to find any work in comics. In other words, the usual.

Waid V. Byrne: Advantage: WAID!

Also, if Byrne really was talking about the exchange in Astonishing, wasn’t that editorially mandated anyway?

Scott

I think deconstruction is a healthy thing that we need every once ever few Decades (DKR and Watchmen did it in the 80′s, and Kingdom Come did to an extent in the 90′s), but I don’t think it’s antithetical to love of the Genre; There is a clear love of the material evident even in WATCHMEN, which is the ultimate deconstruction of the entire archetype. Though you can’t trust anything any of the characters say in that story…Hollis Mason’s point of view presented in Under the Hood explains every thing I love about the Golden Age, for example.

Of course, that sort of stuff can never fly in an ongoing series, thus DKR, WATCHMEN, and KC as all Elseworld miniseries.

I dunno, V. I’d argue that the reason we revere some minis (as opposed to enshrining all of an ongoing series) is that by its nature, an ongoing is pretty much anthithetical to bringing the story to a conclusion. The status quo can be shaken up a bit, but it can’t ever get to a point to say, Batman winning once and for all. That’s just not good for the longevity of an ongoing.

Sure, you get spectacular runs that work and feel like a complete story, but that’s the exception, not the rule. Sadly.

Oh, and Mark Waid wins, at least until Kurt Busiek turns up in this thread.

John Byrne was one of my favorite writer-artists. I held out giving up on him for a long time. I loved Next Men, Generations, virtually everything he did. But over and over again I am shown egomaniacal rants from the man. I am actually in a position to hire him as a writer for TV and I’ve often thought about doing it, but I just can’t get past this self-centered delusional behavior. There is more than 1 way to write a comic, and John needs to let go of being didactic and focus on being a good writer/artist. There’s room for everyone!

“There’s nothing wrong with superheroes being superheroes, of course, but Byrne fails because he is wrong: The X-Men are not super-heroes. Neither are the Fantastic Four. And I hated Whedon’s excuse for bringing the costumes back, even though it was probably mandated by editorial.”

Ah, but they are superheroes! Another problem with modern realism in superhero comics is that people are forgetting what an amalgous genre the superhero one is and trying to condense it down into one little definition that excludes certain characters. The X-Men are misfits fighting for a place in the world. They are also superheroes. The Fantastic Four are a family of scientific explorers. They are also superheroes. Thor is a god walking among men. He is also a superhero. The superhero genre is more of an encompassing genre than it is an excluding one. After all, the average superhero universe embraces everything from street crime to ancient gods to gothic monsters to alien civilizations to the lost continent of Atlantis. Why try to put the genre in a box like that?

I have no problems the X-Men changing their costumes. Firemen, police, soldiers, none of them wear the exact same outfits that they wore 100 years ago. If a few superheroes feel like they want to try changing their image by associating with a different group, that’s perfectly reasonable within their universe.

I also liked Whedon’s writing regarding bringing the costumes back. Again, Scott was just trying to manage public perceptions. Was Scott right about what the costumes represent? Maybe so or maybe not, but way his opinion seemed reasonable.

Byrne is just over-thinking things. There were people in the early 60s saying that Spider-Man wasn’t a real hero because he had problems and didn’t want to be a hero. That didn’t exactly hurt the industry.

There’s only one problem with that, Cole– everyone feels that way about Morrison. It’s only natural to love that Scot like life itself.