A recent thread on the John Byrne forum’s kicked off with those involved taking “Action Comics” inker, Nelson, to task for redrawing some of Byrne’s pencils. Now, while I’m more or less in agreement that when you’re using a name like Byrne on a book, it seems odd to risk pissing off your fanbase by having your inker change the pencils. However, the pencils posted by Byrne are, quite frankly, not the best work I’ve seen the man produce, so I could see why the editor might have asked Nelson to clean things up a bit. The redrawn faces are still kind of funky looking, but are still an improvement on the original pencils.
But beyond all of that, most everyone in the thread is going off without all the info. Byrne is doing his typical driveby posting where he gives just enough info to rile people up while maintianing that he’s too professional to actually comment on other creators. Meanwhile, blame is being shovelled on the editor, on Nelson and whoever else they can point fingers at, all without having more than a fraction of the story. I don’t pretend to know what’s going on here, but it seems to me that most of the people complaining about a few alterations in some random panels here and there would, if asked 6 months ago, have been 100% behind oh, say, Karl Kesel for redrawing an entire issue of Rob Liefeld’s pencils if the editor had asked him to, no questions asked.
I hate Byrne, but I think his original pencils look better than the new stuff.
Truth be told, a good inkist would have known how to work those original pencils, to make the finished page better without compromising the penciller’s original artistic intent.
HG -
To be fair, it doesn’t look like Nelson’s changing Byrne’s intent. Yeah, he’s redrawing (some would argue “fixing”) the head and the body here and there, but the basic layout of the panels is unaffected. It really looks more like editorial direction than random changes for the sake of changing. I really don’t see how any of these examples have compromised Byrne’s overall vision for the book.
It’s mostly with the first panel that I have trouble with. The inkist displays a horrible sense of proportion when it comes to head/body ratio. Look how big his head is… and that hair is ridiculous. Jeebis crispy.
I love Byrne, he is one of my favorite (if not the) comic book artists and writers. But I agree that the new work does look better, I hope that he’s not losing it, with age.