Return to Byrne

While I used to consider myself a devotee of John Byrne fandom back in the day, I haven't found much of his work of late worth checking out, or even remembering. As such, it's been a long time since I've had any desire to revisit Byrne's past body of work but, lacking something shorter to read this evening, I grabbed a copy of The Thing #2 that was lying around and gave it a once over.

Reading the story I was made aware of a number of things:

1) I'd forgotten how many captions and thought balloons they used to use to tell a story back then.

2) I'd forgotten just how much Byrne made these comics feel like updated versions of the Lee/Kirby storytelling style. Everything from panel layouts and the positioning of characters on a page to how the four members spoke to each other, Byrne was channeling something (that something could have been a volume or two fo the Marvel Masterworks).

3) I'd forgotten how colourists used to colour a scene (ie: green to indicate background, blue to indicate foreground and yellow to give highlights where necessary).

4) I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed reading these comic books.

With Ultimate Fantastic Four now on my regular pull-list, the notion had struck me that it might be fun to drag the ol' Byrne FFs out and give them a reread. After reading this issue of The Thing, I'm thinking that's more of an eventuality than a possibility, at this point. Heck, I'm even tempted to track down some of those old Thing issues since I never collected them at the time. If they're all of the same quality as the second issue, you could do a lot worse.

Hmmm, speaking of old Marvels, I'm suddenly getting a strange hankering for some Ann Nocenti/John Romita, Jr. issues of Daredevil. Does anyone remember how cool those were?

Onwards and upwards!

mike