Earlier this week, Rich Johnston published a pair of chat transcripts that had been floating around the internets over the last few weeks, causing Byrne to kill the chatroom function on his website. My curiosity got the better of me, as it always does in things Byrne related, and I downloaded them. Originally I planned to read them, but I soon realized that there was only so much I could take, so I resorted to scanning through them instead. For those of you who don’t even have the patience or time for that, here’s the most interesting piece of information buried in the transcript.

John Byrne gets MAD MONEY for his commissioned pieces. Around a thousand bucks for a single figure, and as much as 5-6000 dollars for group shots with backgrounds. No wonder he’s not crying about not having any current comic gigs – that’s way more than any page rate he’d get in this day and age! Even better (for him), you can tell he’s phoning in the work on most of these, what with characters showing up with extra fingers and poses that are contorted to Liefeldian proportions. I just wonder at what point

This is the piece that purportedly cost $6000 – $5000 for the X-Men and another $250 for each additional character. Is it worth the price of a big-ass LCD HD television? You be the judge.

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