More from that 1980 Summer Special -- aka Comics Journal 57 :)

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CATRON: Do you think there's room for subtley in comics?

BYRNE: Oh, obviously. I think so. Shooter told me once that I did the best quiet drama of anybody in comics. Let me give you an example. Dave Cockrum is one of my all-time favorite artists, so this is not a dig at Dave, understand that! Dave did the cover sketch for "The Day the X-Men Died" [X-Men #114]. The sketch he did was basically the same as the cover I drew... except that in the sketch, Professor X was holding his face and there were effect lines coming out to show that he was grieving. Big dramatic pose, right? "Oh, God, the X-Men are dead!" But to me, it looked as if he'd just been shot in the eye with a BB gun. I looked at that and said, "No, that's not quite grief. Grief is head slunk forward, arms at rest. The man is so stricken with grief, he can't even move." That's what I meant by subtley. And there it worked. Shooter came up to me and said [slips into an approximation of Jim Shooter's voice], "Best cover we've done this month. Possibly the best cover we've done this year." Sometimes, of course, it doesn't work, but it's important for me to try to convey emotions the way real people convey emotions. I made a kidding remark about George Perez's work one time--somthing to the effect that he must live in a world where everybody argues with their faces slightly contorted, with one hand up in the air and the other hand just to the side of the face. [Byrne demonstrates a Perez pose] But people don't really argue that way. People argue by leaning forward and gesturing. The way real people react is a much more subtle thing, you can't always pull it off in comics. When I first started drawing super-heroes, I overdid the subtlety number. I said, "No, no! Real people don't leap about with their legs four feet apart!" And that's true... but super-heroes do! It took me a few issues of Iron Fist to learn that. You look at those early issues I did, and they're real snorers! But, when you do it right, both sides of the coin can work in the same book. The super-heroes are big and dynamic, and they leap all over the place, punching through walls-- but Joe Blow on the street walks around and reacts in a much more down-to-earth manner.

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I must have tried 20 times to capture the hand-to-the-face shot that Dave had done, in his sketch, and each time it came out as a BB shot to the eye. Finally I said "F**k it!" and did the cover you see above --- which, as noted, elicited an entirely different response from Shooter.

(Remember what I have said in the DOCOR WHO threads, about one of the writing quirks I don't really like on that show is when they tell us "This is how it is, this is how it has always been, and this is how it shall ever and always be ----- except this time!"? That was what it was like working under Shooter's regime.)