In an odd way, I was responsible myself for the charges of "no backgrounds" sometimes leveled (with very little accuracy) against my own work, as it was in the 70s/80s that people like George Perez, Michael Golden, Berni Wrightson, Marshall Rogers and I started concentrating as much on the backgrounds as on the figures set in front of them. It didn't take long for fans to expect -- nay, demand! -- this as the "norm".

At first, I did full pencils, as I had on UNCANNY X-MEN, and sent them in to Marvel, along with my scripts, to be lettered. These were sent back, and I inked them. One day, I realized I really wasn't adding anything in the inks (this was in the early days on FANTASTIC FOUR), and asked editor Jim Salicrup if he had any problem with me switching to breakdowns, and sending those in for lettering. He didn't, so I did.

Unfortunately, at the same time Marvel started dicking around with the schedules, so I found myself losing time even tho I was continuing to produce one issue per month. (This was on FF and, later, ALPHA FLIGHT). Eventually, to try to regain lost time, I decided to start inking the pages as I penciled them, indicating space for the lettering, or even leaving the background blank to fascilitate the letterer's job.

At some point, unconsciously, the latter method started to take over, so more and more panels were being drawn without backgrounds, just so the letterer wouldn't have to work with my "best guess" balloon and caption shapes. It's during this period that there is a serious lack of backgrounds in my work.

It didn't last long, fortunately, as I got far enough ahead that I was able to turn the inking over to others again, and, eventually, I started doing my own lettering. That was the best of all possible worlds.

The period without backgrounds went largely unnoticed at the time, at least in terms of fan response (nary a letter commented on it), but it must have created some kind of subliminal resonance in the minds of the bashers (of which there were already a few, seething from my betrayal of them when I left X-MEN), as I began to hear more and more "Byrne never does backgrounds." (Always in the absolute, of course. I pointed out more than once that all I needed to do to disprove this statement was produce a single panel with backgrounds. Of course, I was producing many more than that.)

Typically, this became a fantra (fan mantra), and was chanted by the unthinking masses long after it was even remotely true. There were even instances where these sad boys would go thru an issue with, say, 120 panels, find 12 with no backgrounds and cry "See!!", as if they had won some major victory. Do a similar count of a Kirby book, picked at random!

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This is something many fans (and some artists) really fail to appreciate. In comics, we are producing the closest thing to movies that can be found on a printed page -- but it is, in the end, a printed page, and we lack many of the things that are taken for granted in movies. First and foremost among these is movement, of figures, objects, or the camera itself. We can't pan. We can't zoom in or out. So we have to use other kinds of shorthand to achieve approximations of the same effects. One of these is dropping backgrounds when we "zoom in", thus emphasizing the foreground obects.

Conside this panel, from Jack Kirby's first issue of THE DEMON:

Amusing Story: Writers, when they concern themselves at all with the backgrounds, often ask for too much detail, not too little. Legend has it that Denny O'Neil parodied this in a script he wrote for Neal Adams on GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW. Listing who and what was to be in a particular panel, Denny included "two rhinoceroses". So Neal drew this: