Whatever Happened to John Byrne's X-Men

Just a commentary about the X-Men: whatever happened to John Byrne?

I know that might date me as having been into comics in the 1980's, but I find it interesting that in the current popularity of the X-Men (with the movies and the cartoon series) that usually it is accompanied by a nostalgic reinvestigation of the origins of the popularity.

Note that the X-Men, even though they'd been around since the 60's, really blew the roof off of comics in the 80's with the team of Chris Claremont (writer) and John Byrne (artist) - they were actually the ones who turned Jean Grey into Phoenix, had the storyline about how her power consumed her until she had no regard for human life, and eventually had to be killed - they were also the ones who came up with the idea of setting the Human/Mutant political stage, thereby mimicing and thus being able to comment on the effects of racism and bigotry.

But I don't see any homage to John Byrne. What made me think of this is when I checked on Wolverine in Wikipedia - no mention of Byrne and no pic of Wolverine BY Byrne. Then, the other night my littlest boy comes home from school with a book of the X-Men, from idea to book - which details how comic books are written and illustrated and published - and it has a spread on Chris Claremont, and even touches on the X-Men's 60's origin - but STILL NO BYRNE.

What happened to this guy? He was the pre-eminent comic artist of the 80's - when he was drawing X-Men he was at the top of his game. Now - nothing! Maybe I'm not researching well enough, but it seems to me that if I keep running across Claremont references, the same amount of attention should be given to Byrne, even if Claremont has spend additional decades on the series.

And along the same vein - do the kids today know that the cartoon Teen Titans comes straight out of the Marv Wolfman (writer) and George Perez (artist) comics of the 80's, as well?

Just thought you should know.


And as a side note - to be honest, I'm blogging this because memories are so frail and there is so much informatin in the world and everything moves so fast that if I don't write it down somewhere I'll forget to think about it, and eventually forget it entirely!

So, I'll leave anybody with the invitiation that if you know where these illustrators are today, please feel free to let me know.

Don't let John Byrne be forgotten!!!

VG

Joke Filter

There are so many jokes out there, especially the kind you receive when you are on someone's "joke group" - you know the kind, the people who forward 18 jokes per day to you and about a hundred other people. Sometimes you can't even get through your morning work because you're reading all those jokes.

But you can't help yourself - you've got to read them all - even if you find over time that you don't the majority of them, you hold out hope that somewhere within the morass there will be at least one or two that make you smile.

Of course, that's really just me, and I'm probably projecting, i.e. thinking that everyone else is similar to me in this vein. Perhaps the rest of the world loves every single joke that comes their way, I don't know. But if you ARE like me, then you would probably like to have something called

the Joke Filter.

It sifts through the incredible onslaught of email humour and culls out only the ones that you might find funny, and then you get them in a nice little tidbit toward midafternoon, when you really need a little pick-me-up.

I would like to be the Joke Filter. That would be a cool job. Sure, I know that if it existed it would be done with a program, one that you would install, then enter your personal tastes in humour and then it would automagically pick out the jokes that "fit" in the realm of the specifics that you entered, but still, if it were done by a human,

that's what I would like to be. I'd sit at a computer screen all day, having your jokes routed to me first, then I would read them all, pick out the ones that I know you would like, then I'd send them to you in a personal email, tailor-made to suit your taste. All, of course, for a nominal fee. And if I applied this nominal fee to a fair number of clients, I'd be pretty well set, I'd say.

So, any takers?





Think about it!!



VG