Robserecaps Thirty Three – Comic Book Feuds! Byrne Vs. McFarlane!

Posted by Joe on Jan 9, 2023 in Robserecaps | 0 comments

So, only four and a half months and we’re back. Around October, the Rob had a falling out with his podcast guy and took a hiatus in December. The Rob returned in January, moving the hosting of the feed from Word Press to Transistor dot FM, but never linked the new feed to his old site. Sigh. So, with John Byrne trending this weekend and the Rob fighting with his fans over it on Facebook, let’s see what season five of the Robservations brings!

• new era of the Robservations and we have new theme music!
• Byrne is a SUPERstar of the 80’s but Todd is a MEGAstar of the 90’s
• We are heading into a fourth year of the podcast, but this is the start of season five
• We start with the Rob being happy that 2022 cinema was NOT all about comic book movies, the Rob will always be a comic BOOK guy first, the rest of his extended family only cares about the movies
• the cinema of 2023 is not gonna be good for adult minded fare
• Like the old TV networks, one hand written letter is like 1000 people, the Rob treats one negative remark the same way
• The Rob states he has not be challenged on the facts and receipts he has laid out here. People are not doing any manner of research, like the Rob does
• We’re talking about the NFL and the Rob’s kid playing high school football right now
• at 21 minutes in, we finally get into our main topic
• The Rob puts over Byrne’s influence with the X-Men and Superman, there is no other creator the Rob owns more original pages of their art than John
• While looking up a quote from ‘the Art of John Byrne’ the Rob gets distracted by the art
• The Rob gets very “sniffly” here and for the rest of the episode
• Reading the interview from 1981 with Byrne, at 13 years old, the Rob could tell Byrne was full of himself
• The Rob cites an editorial from Entertainment Retailing in 1994. The Rob is VERY proud that he has back issues of this book
• Byrne was reading a book called “Comic Rebels” (not looking for his name) but determining who WAS a comic rebel (Stan Lee, the Elfquest creators Wendy & Richard Pini, Frank Miller) and who was NOT a comic rebel (Siegel & Shuster, Kirby & Simon) to move the goalposts, but THE ROB KNOWS TOO MUCH COMICS HISTORY
• Byrne claims that Image was created with no risk to the original seven founders since it was built on the money they made at Marvel to make books that looked like Marvel to steal Marvel’s fan base
• While the reward was high, there was great risk of being blackballed from the industry if Image failed
• Fabian Nicieza told the Rob and Jim Valentino that Image wouldn’t last a year
• in the forward for the first Next Men collection, Byrne lamented that the first issue only sold 200,000 units, his fourth recorded breaking sale mark, but Youngblood #1 had initial pre-orders of 650,000 and finished over a million units
• The Rob feels it odd that Byrne singled out ‘the Toddler’ as the object of his vitriol, as all the Image founders were big fans of John
• Just because the Rob does a very insulting impression of Todd, he is a fan. BUT, the Rob is not a fan of Todd first 12 issues on Spawn. The fact that the TRUE Todd, not the one who does finishes over someone else’s layouts is gone forever
• “Being late has become associated with some feeble witted fans means good” per a quote about Todd by Byrne from 12 years ago to try and spin Todd saying monthly comics aren’t good
• There are very few writer/artists today (Daniel Warren Johnson and Chip Zdarsky off the top of my head) and they do not hold a grudge against the Image founders because they paved the way
• The Rob recites a list of every inker that has ever worked at Extreme Studios
• More football analogies, getting us prepped for the next episode about Barry Windsor Smith, citing an interview that will ‘throttle’ us
• the Rob has talked to five different SoCal retailers who told the Rob there is currently no book, no character, no series, nothing that are ‘putting butts in seats’
• the Rob ends the episode reading five star reviews from iTunes, you know how I feel about that, specifically from someone calling themselves a ‘the Rob Respecter.’ Call me when you are a ‘the Rob Understander.’

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