John Lindley Byrne (; born July 6, 1950) is a English-born American comic book 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 first variant cover in comics.
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, 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 added 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. 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.
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. 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.
Byrne was born on July 6, 1950 in Walsall, Staffordshire and grew up 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. While living in England, prior to his family emigrating to Canada when John was 8, he was first exposed to American 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.
John Byrne's 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. In 1970, he 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). 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). 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.
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. Byrne additionally drew a cover for the supernatural anthology The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves #54 (Dec. 1975).
Byrne said he broke into Marvel comics after writer Chris Claremont
...saw [his Charlton] work and began agitating for [him] to draw something he had written. When [artist] Pat Broderick missed a deadline on the 'Iron Fist' series in Marvel Premiere, [production manager] John Verpoorten fired him and offered the book to [Byrne]. ... [Byrne] turned around the first script in time to meet the deadline, and so started getting more work from Marvel, until [he] was able to leave Charlton and focus entirely on the Marvel stuff." Byrne soon went on to draw series including The Champions (#12–15, 17 1977–78) and Marvel Team-Up (#53–55, 59–70, 75, 79, 100). Byrne first drew the X-Men in Marvel Team-Up #53. For many issues, he was paired with Claremont, with whom he teamed for issue #11 of the black-and-white Marvel magazine Marvel Preview featuring Star-Lord. The Star-Lord story was inked by Terry Austin and lettered by Tom Orzechowski, both of whom soon afterward teamed with Claremont and Byrne on Uncanny X-Men.
Byrne joined Claremont beginning with X-Men #108 (Dec. 1977), which was later renamed The Uncanny X-Men with issue #114. Their work together, along with inker Terry Austin, on such classic story arcs as "Proteus", "Dark Phoenix Saga", and "Days of Future Past" would make them both fan favorites. Byrne insisted that the title keep its Canadian character, Wolverine, and contributed a series of story elements to justify Wolverine's presence which eventually made the character among the most popular in Marvel's publishing history. With issue #114, Byrne began co-plotting the series as well as penciling. Claremont recounted that "at that point in time John and I were, in a very real sense, true collaborators on the book. It was with very few exceptions, difficult, for me, anyway, to tell in the actual gestation of the book where one of us left off and the other began – because it involved one of us coming up with an idea and bouncing it off the other ..." The "Dark Phoenix Saga" in 1980 is one of the most notable stories in the title's history. Comics writers and historians Roy Thomas and Peter Sanderson observed that "'The Dark Phoenix Saga' is to Claremont and Byrne what the 'Galactus Trilogy' is to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. It is a landmark in Marvel history, showcasing its creators' work at the height of their abilities." Byrne has repeatedly compared his working relationship with Claremont to Gilbert and Sullivan, and has said that they were "almost constantly at war over who the characters were." Byrne created the characters Alpha Flight, Proteus, and Kitty Pryde/Shadowcat during his run on The X-Men. A new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, led by Mystique, was introduced in the "Days of Future Past" storyline (#141–142, Jan.-Feb. 1981) in which a time-travelling Kitty Pryde tried to avert a dystopian future caused by the Brotherhood assassinating Presidential candidate Senator Robert Kelly. Byrne plotted the story because he wanted to depict the Sentinels as a genuine threat to the existence of the mutant race. Byrne left The X-Men with #143 (March 1981). During his tenure on the series, The X-Men was promoted from a bimonthly to a monthly publication schedule as sales steadily increased—a trend that continued long after Byrne left.