John Byrne

John Lindley Byrne (born July 6, 1950) is a British-born American writer and artist of superhero comics.

Byrne was born on July 6, 1950 in Walsall, Staffordshire, and raised in West Bromwich, also in Staffordshire, where he lived with his parents, Frank and Nelsie, and his maternal grandmother.

He was an only child.

His father was a town planner and his mother was a homemaker.

His first encounter with Marvel Comics was in 1962 with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four #5.

He later commented that "the book had an 'edge' like nothing DC was putting out at the time".

Jack Kirby's work, in particular, had a strong influence on Byrne and he has worked with many of the characters Kirby created or co-created.

Besides Kirby, Byrne was influenced by the naturalistic style of Neal Adams.

Byrne has named comic books, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek: The Original Series as his greatest influences.

Despite drawing comics as a youth, Byrne intended to have a career as a commercial artist.

Since the mid-1970s, Byrne has worked on many major superheroes; with noted work on Marvel Comics's X-Men and Fantastic Four.

In 1970, Byrne enrolled at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary.

He created the superhero parody Gay Guy for the college newspaper, which poked fun at the campus stereotype of homosexuality among art students.

Gay Guy is notable for featuring the first gay superhero.

While there, he published his first comic book, ACA Comix #1, featuring "The Death's Head Knight".

Byrne left the college in 1973 without graduating.

Before finding success with comic books, Byrne spent three years designing billboards for an advertisement company.

He broke into comics with a "Fan Art Gallery" piece in Marvel's promotional publication FOOM in early 1974 and by illustrating a two-page story by writer Al Hewetson in Skywald Publications' black-and-white horror magazine Nightmare #20 (Aug. 1974).

While that was Byrne's first published color-comics work, "My first professional comic book sale was to Marvel, a short story called Dark Asylum' ... which languished in a flat file somewhere until it was used as filler in Giant-Size Dracula #5 [(June 1975)], long after the first Rog story."

The story was plotted by Tony Isabella and written by David Anthony Kraft.

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, during which he created 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.

He then began freelancing for Charlton Comics, making his color-comics debut with the E-Man backup feature "Rog-2000", starring a robot character he'd created in the mid-1970s that colleagues Roger Stern and Bob Layton named and began using for spot illustrations in their fanzine CPL (Contemporary Pictorial Literature).

A Rog-2000 story written by Stern, with art by Byrne and Layton, had gotten the attention of Charlton Comics editor Nicola Cuti, who extended Byrne an invitation.

Written by Cuti, "Rog-2000" became one of several alternating backup features in the Charlton Comics superhero series E-Man, starting with the eight-page "That Was No Lady" in issue #6 (Jan. 1975).

After the Rog-2000 story, Byrne went on to work on the Charlton books Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch, Space: 1999, and Emergency!, and co-created with writer Joe Gill the post-apocalyptic science-fiction series Doomsday + 1.

While living in England, prior to his family emigrating to Canada when Byrne was 8, he was first exposed to comics, saying in 2005,

"[M]y 'journey into comics' began with [star] George Reeves' [Adventures of] Superman series being shown on the BBC in England when I was about 6 years old. Not long after I started watching that series I saw one of the hardcover, black and white 'Annuals' that were being published over there at the time, and soon after found a copy of an Australian reprint called Super Comics that featured a story each of Superboy, Johnny Quick and Batman. The Batman story hooked me for life. A couple of years later my family emigrated to Canada (for the second time, no less!) and I discovered the vast array of American comics available at the time."

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.