I used to post on the John Byrne board when he’d go off on another one of his inaccurate rants about me. No point nowadays. Not only does the merest mention of my name cause denizens to cry “Off topic” or tremble in fear that a fight might break out and disturb the peace), but John announced that he now has the power to lock up threads and delete posts to cut down on some of the “twaddle.” The hilarious bit was that he announced it in a thread titled “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.” It is gloriously ironic that he quoted the famed Shelley poem “Ozymandias,” a cautionary parable about the futility of egomania and the emptiness of self-aggrandization. It’s the most unintentionally self-revelatory thing John’s said since he used a quote from a fictional Nazi as his sig line.
In any event, John–who never hesitates to castigate others for proclaiming to be mindreaders, but doesn’t hesitate to put forward his opinions on my state of mind as fact–claimed, “PAD is evidentally one of those people who cannot separate himself from his work, and so has taken each of my comments as a personal attack, responding with personal attacks, including most unprofessional “commentary” in the comic books he writes.”
Well, no. I’ve pointed out that some of his critiques of my work were wildly inaccurate (for instance, holding up Spidey 2099 #1 as an example of how to do a first issue wrong because the hero never appears in costume…except he does, for eight pages. Later John admitted he hadn’t actually read it, but stood by his opinion nonetheless.) And I’ve taken his personal attacks as personal attacks (for instance, his claiming that I advocated the concept of people standing by and doing nothing while policemen were beaten to death.) But I’ve written quite a bit more than John has, and separating myself from the work has become pretty easy. Unfortunately, John doesn’t quite seem to be able to reciprocate. For instance, he obviously thought the sequence in “Captain Marvel #2” in which Rick Jones laughs at the Hulk Annual was some sort of retaliation directed at John. No. I would have done the same sequence no matter who wrote that idiot annual, presuming the editor let me.
Jeez. Jack Kirby created Funky Flashman and HouseRoy, obvious Stan Lee and Roy Thomas pastiches. What an unprofessional that Jack Kirby was. And hey, how about that story featuring a superpowered character visually based on Jim Shooter, right down to the acne scars as I recall, blowing off his own foot with a blast beam. Who is the unprofessional person who drew that story? I’m trying to remember…
PAD
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