John Byrne

Biography

John Lindley Byrne (/bɜːrn/; born July 6, 1950) is a British-born American writer and artist of superhero comics. Since the mid-1970s, Byrne has worked on many major superheroes; with noted work on Marvel Comics's X-Men and Fantastic Four. Byrne also facilitated the 1986 relaunch of DC Comics's Superman franchise with the limited series The Man of Steel, the first issue of which featured the comics' first variant cover. Coming into the comics profession as a penciller, inker, letterer, and writer on his earliest work, Byrne began co-plotting the X-Men comics during his tenure on them, for story arcs including "Dark Phoenix Saga" and "Days of Future Past", and co-creating characters such as Kitty Pryde (Shadowcat), Emma Frost, Sabretooth, Shadow King, and Rachel Summers. Byrne launched his writing career in earnest with Fantastic Four, also serving as penciler and inker, and included She-Hulk onto the team while writing a solo series for The Thing. While working on X-Men, he created the Canadian superhero team Alpha Flight, and later wrote and drew their own series. Moving to DC, Byrne established the modern origin for Superman in The Man of Steel before writing and drawing two monthly titles and various miniseries for the character. Byrne then returned to Marvel, introducing the Great Lakes Avengers, and wrote and drew the humorous fourth wall-breaking series The Sensational She-Hulk. He also co-created the Marvel characters Scott Lang and James Rhodes. During the 1990s he produced a number of creator-owned works, including Next Men and Danger Unlimited, and was one of the founders of the Legend imprint at Dark Horse Comics. Revisiting X-Men as a writer, Byrne co-created Bishop and Omega Red. Byrne was the writer and artist of the Wonder Woman series for three years, creating the second Wonder Girl, Cassie Sandsmark. In addition, he co-created the DC character Amanda Waller. He scripted the first issues of Mike Mignola's Hellboy series and produced several Star Trek comics for IDW Publishing. In 2010, Byrne revived Next Men to conclude the series. Hailed as one of the most prolific and influential comic book artists ever, Byrne and his X-Men collaborator Chris Claremont were entered into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2015.