Who is John Byrne
John Byrne is one of the few creators in comics equally celebrated for writing and drawing, and his fingerprints are on the defining runs of three different franchises. With Chris Claremont he drew and co-plotted the X-Men’s most famous stretch. On his own he created Alpha Flight, reinvented the Fantastic Four, and rebooted Superman from scratch. Born in England in 1950 and raised in Canada, he came up as an artist and grew into a total author of his pages.
First comic work: Rog-2000
Byrne broke in through the small press, drawing the Rog-2000 strip for the CPL fanzine around 1974, then picking up professional work at Charlton in 1974 and 1975. The path from fanzine to Charlton to Marvel was a common one in the era, but few who took it ended up redrawing the look of mainstream superhero comics the way Byrne did within a decade.Uncanny X-Men, with Chris Claremont
Byrne joined [Chris Claremont](/creators/chris-claremont/) on [Uncanny X-Men](/groups/x-men/) with issue #108 (1977) and the pairing became the run people mean when they say "the classic X-Men." Byrne co-plotted as well as drew, and the two produced the Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past, the most-adapted stories in X-Men history. He co-created [Kitty Pryde](/characters/kitty-pryde/), Emma Frost, and Sabretooth along the way.Alpha Flight and the Fantastic Four
Byrne created [Alpha Flight](/groups/alpha-flight/), Canada's national super-team, as X-Men antagonists in #120-121 (1979), then spun them into a series he wrote and drew. His [Fantastic Four](/groups/fantastic-four/) run (1981-1986) is regarded as the best since the original Lee-Kirby era, a full writer-artist reinvention of Marvel's first family.The Man of Steel
When DC rebuilt its universe after Crisis on Infinite Earths, it handed [Superman](/characters/superman/) to Byrne. His six-issue The Man of Steel (1986) restarted the character's origin and continuity, trimming the Silver Age excess and recentering the human Clark Kent. It defined the modern Superman for almost twenty years, and its first issue carried the first variant cover in mainstream comics.John Byrne’s Impact on Comics
Byrne is the model of the superstar writer-artist: a creator with enough control over both halves of the page to impose a complete vision on a title, and enough range to do it on Marvel’s mutants, Marvel’s first family, and DC’s flagship in turn. The X-Men keys from his Claremont collaboration are heavily chased, and his Man of Steel marks the line between Silver Age and modern Superman continuity.
