John Byrnes artwork

[Super Monkey]

For Tomorrow greatest sin was overstocking hospitals with new coma patients.

[Uncle Mxy]

For Tomorrow greatest sin was overstocking hospitals with new coma patients.

But it was a PRETTY coma, at least for the most part.  It reads better if you don't look at the words or try to interpret anything.

[JulianPerez]

This is the one where the FF were also involved too, right?  The Avengers Annual was inked by Kyle Baker, and the FF Annual that year had a few similar pages but that annual was inked by Joe Sinnott.

Yeah, that's the one. Funny how Byrne's art looks the best when paired with a writer like Roger Stern. I second everything Nightwing said about the Roger Stern/Byrne CAPTAIN AMERICA. Cap's decapitation of Baron Blood, out of mercy...was really powerful stuff.

And Julian, I'm glad you like Quicksilver.  To me he was never anything better than annoying.  Sort of a cross between Johnny Quick and "Reggie" from Riverdale.

That's the point! He's supposed to be a jerk! 

I'll say this about Quicksilver: he may be the first character in comics to be from another culture, and characterized differently because he's from another culture. If you look at the Legion kids from all those diverse alien planets, they talk and act like sixties kids: "Chuck the chatter! Listen to that guy's spiel!"

[JulianPerez]

That being said. Alan Moore was in the running for rebooting Supes but lost out to Byrne (which is sorta like DC giving Loeb the superman book after Morrison asking for it...oh wait that did happen).

I hear many contradictory things about what Moore's involvement was to be in the Superman books, post-Schwartz.

The version I've heard from Marty Pasko, which is the version I'm most inclined to think is true, is that Alan Moore was brought on by Schwartz to finish his tenure on the Super-Books with a bang, and Moore wasn't going to stay on post-Schwartz. This has the veracity of being from someone that was there, and also it's true: Moore DIDN'T work on Superman after Schwartz left.

The other idea I've heard, more as rumors...was that Moore was going to be on the new incarnation of DC COMICS PRESENTS, a book called SUPERMAN PLUS (insert guest-star here).

Moore left, from what I hear, because he was told to work on Byrne's plots. Which prompted his dry English retort, "well, only if he can ink on my pencils!"

The reason I doubt the veracity of this SUPERMAN PLUS story is this:

1) the only places I see it written about are hearsay. I can't find anyplace that gives Moore himself, or someone around at that time, talking about the project.

2) DC never did a Superman team-up book post-Schwartz! (Unless you count the brief period when Byrne wrote ACTION COMICS as a team-up book.)

3) The title SUPERMAN PLUS is also attributed to aborted projects by both Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison as well! This leads me to believe there's some garbled history.

The idea Alan Moore was in the running to try a Superman Reboot is a new one on me, and frankly, I doubt if it's true. I've heard stories from people that were there that say Cary Bates was in the running, as was Frank Miller.

Also, I wouldn't compare Morrison to Moore. For one thing, Moore can do characterization amazingly well...of his generation, only Levitz, Alan Brennert, and Busiek are better at telling character-centered stories. On the other hand, characterization is Morrison's great weakness.

[TELLE]

In retrospect, Byrne was always better with a writer other than himself.  I came in late to the X-Men but the seminal Wolverine Alone/Hellfire issue, seen by many as the beginning of the end, was a very potent image for me, as was the first issue I ever read, where Magneto had the team trapped in a circus wagon --those panels are burned on my brain. Previously, I had enjoyed his Avengers stint (but maybe not as much as Perez).  No surprise then that I picked up on Byrne's FF --I loved the FF and had been weaned on the reprints in Marvel's Greatest Comics and the 70s Perez issues.  To me, Byrne on the FF was genius personified.  I see now quite a bit of it was just retreads of Kirby/Lee. Some of the annuals and interstellar epics probably still hold up, though.  I began to lose interest in his FF just as it seemed Byrne did, or maybe his mullet haircut for sue, ugly costumes, and miscarriage storylines were Byrne's idea of "coming into his own" in terms of greatness. 

Anyway, I was well off him by the time Crisis rolled around --his bag of tricks seemed exhausted and the cynical nature of his work had started to bug me (ironically, I was a cynical teenager at the time --like repels like).  Although here and there I gave him a chance just to see what his art would look like on familiar characters (Avnegers West Coast, etc).

[Gangbuster]

Marvel wasn't the only publisher with this problem though...look at what DC did with the Justice League. Puck could have taken out half of the Geffen league by himself. I'm glad that DC finally (albeit slowly) figured out that popular things sell better.

The Giffen/DeMatteis 5 year run was reasonably popular.  It was Gerard Jones and Dan Jurgens few years afterwards where the death spiral really took place.  Remember the likes of Bloodwynd and Extreme Justice?  Ugh.  No one could find a way to maintain the laughs or the sales after Giffen moved on.

You're right about that. The characters were great when they were written like The Tick: a sort of spoof of the superhero genre. It was when the league was written as serious action/adventure that they sucked terribly.

Even when Giffen and DeMatteis came back to the characters a few years ago and wrote "Formerly Known as the Justice League," those were great stories. In the seriousness of the Jurgens era or Infinite Crisis, though, the characters were completely out of their element.

[Sword of Superman]

For me the right man for a Superman revamp was Perez.His job over Wonder Woman is still amazing even after all this years,put new ideas but still truly respect for the past of the character.

[SteamTeck]

[
Much of the same with Rucka with his two-year long muted rehash of the Death of Clark Kent which made use of numerous power-draining devices and more mind-control. The little gem about Supes not caring about civilian lives as long as he got his revenge against DD cemented in my mind that this hack shouldn't be allowed anywhere remotely near the Superman titles ever again. But, the hack gets the chance to damage Supes some more thanks to idiot extraordinaire Eddie Berganza.

For Tomorrow may have been boring, but atleast it didn't include any of the above.

No it had Supes as a selfish smaller than life character with no moral compass, no resolve  or fortitude andcausing tons of horrible things to happen by inaction like some bad parody of Hamlet. You can name the downsides  of the byrne run all you want but personally I find them infinitely less offensive than the tiny little man Superman became later. ( Insert 10 page  rant here).