John Byrne FAQ

[samurainoir]

Byrne Robotics: FAQ

Were the first pages of OMAC originally drawn to be used on a Captain Marvel series?

JB: The first page of the second issue of OMAC began its life as the first page of my aborted SHAZAM series. I redrew (completely) the vehicles and removed Billy, Mary and another character, replacing them with Buddy.

*

Did JB ever consider bringing Bucky back?
JB: When Roger Stern and I were doing CAPTAIN AMERICA we flirted -- too strong a word already! -- with the notion of doing a story in which Cap visits a VA hospital, and in one corner of a ward full of damaged survivors of WW2 comes across a legless, armless vegetable who, upon seeing Cap, stirs from his forty year coma and is revealed to be Bucky. We were thinking poignant, painful, pathos, lots of P words. And we realized, instantly, than in two and a half seconds someone else would have transplanted his brain, cloned him, or some other nonsense. Anyone who has any respect at all for the whole story of Cap and Bucky would, ultimately, know it was best to leave Bucky dead.

[samurainoir]

Wolverine's origin

As told by Cory Vandernet, and affirmed by JB:

As*I*remember Roger Stern asked John to set down Wolverine's origin*which would be hinted at but never printed. And as I recall it went something like this....

Wolverine was born in the Canadian West in the 1920s living a rough and tumble life. His mutant healing factor manifested itself in his teens. When WWII rolled around, Wolverine signed up with the Canadian Army (never being one to back away from a good scrap). Distiguishing himself, he was assigned to The First Special Services Force ('The Devil's Brigade'), a joint US/Canada fighting unit and terrorized the Nazis until War's end. After the war he travelled the world until returning home to Canada getting a job as a ranch-hand. One day during a cattle drive the herd got spooked and Wolverine was thrown from his horse and was trampled by hundreds of cattle.

Recovering in hospital Wolverine found out the hard way that his healing factor did not include his bones. Inside his perfectly healed body was a skeleton crushed almost to powder and the medical science of the 1950s had no way to rebuild him and there he lay for some 20 years, bedridden, becoming borderline psychotic, until one day he was visited by the Canadian Military with an offer. They would replace his skeleton one bone at a time with adamantium ones. After he had healed they would operate again and again until his whole skeleton had been replaced causing Wolverine untold agony. (No fused adamantium to bone here, folks!) Unknown to Wolverine the military had added a little extra feature, the claws.

[Bruce Banner]

That's some interesting stuff.

[The Bat]

I disagree with Byrne though...I LOVE the way Brubaker brought Bucky back as the Winter Soldier.

[thunderbolt]

His origin of Wolverine would have been better than the bone claws BS we got from whoever was writing it at the time.

[ctc]

>Wolverine was born in the Canadian West in the 1920s living a rough and tumble life.

I thought the ORIGINAL original story was that he was a mutated animal, and not orignally human at all.

Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #21! | Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources

Don C.

[Godzilla]

Wow, the man got it completely right with Bucky.

[samurainoir]

Last Galactus stoYr conclusion

JB: At the virtual End of the Universe, Galactus is confronted by a Watcher. This Watcher turns out to be the same one who witnessed the "birth" of Galactus in our universe. The Watcher (not Uatu) was eventually driven mad by the accumulated guilt he feels for the acts of Galactus. He has been trying to move galaxies to somewhere Galactus cannot find them, but has been destroying them in the process. Galactus and the Watcher battle -- a huge cosmic confrontation that stretches over centuries, as the universe falls into near total entropy. Finally, to defeat the Watcher, Galactus sucks all the remaining energy out of the Universe. Nothing is left but Galactus and his loyal herald, Nova. Realizing at last what his purpose is, Galactus cracks the seal on his suit, starts to remove his helmet, and in that instant all the energy he has absorbed explodes out of him. He becomes the "big bang" of the next universe, and when the smoke clears, we see Nova has been reborn, as that universe's Galactus.

Incidentally, back when I was first approached about Marvel's "The End" project, I was asked to think about "last issues" for the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. One of the things that occured to me was using this as a way to finally finish the Last Galactus Story. Goes like this:

[johnmiic]

John Byrne's FAQ's are better than any interview ever conducted with him. He has heard all these questions before and put all the answers in one place for all to read.

[madmarva]

I LOVE the way Brubaker brought Bucky back as the Winter Soldier

That quote about bringing back Bucky came years before Brubaker began writing Cap. It was not Byrne's opinion of Brubacker's work on Cap and Bucky.

[GaryPlaysWithDolls]

The Winter Soldier stuff was the first Cap story I read since the Waid/Garney stuff. Top Notch work. The retired Rogers and brought in a replacementad made it readable.

[samurainoir]

Funnily enough, Byrne's was similar to the way Mark Millar's Ultimates showed Bucky as an old man and alive, married to Cap's sweetheart (with grandchildren). Before Brubaker brought him back in the 616.