I had nothing else to do this morning......

The earliest one, above, the one I used to call the "top hat and monocle" autograph, I stopped using when Tony Tollin told me he was getting credited with a lot of my fanzine work.

The shape of my current version came about when I decided to sign only "BYRNE" (as the cosmic balance, perhaps, to having spent a few years signing only "JOHN"), and set about designing a kind of "palindromic" version. Note that the B and the E are almost mirror images of each other, as are the stylized Y and N.

Eventually I added JOHN back into the mix, and so was born what I call the "squashed spider" version. That's not so evident, of course, when JOHN and BYRNE are on the same line.

What he was referring to was that the spine of the B is the last stroke each time. For some reason he was reading that as "crossing out" the signature.

Bit of a stretch, no?

(Years ago, at a Chicago con, there arose a discussion of how I had changed my autograph over the years. On a napkin, I scribbled versions of some of the changes that had occurred up to that point. I finished with my "real" signature, noting "This is how I sign checks." A fanzine writer asked if she could have the napkin, to illustrate an article. "Sure," I said. "Just don't use that last one!" "No problem!" she said -- and then not only used it, but used the "how he signs checks" line! To this day, I don't know why I didn't just cross it out before I handed it to her. Silly little thing called "trust", I suppose.)