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.

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