[PhoenixRising]

You weren't? When did you start reading comics?

And I see FF shrunk my pic yet again.

[sum1]

1981.

[PhoenixRising]

Okay. That's around the time I stopped reading comics because my parents were going through a divorce and I was too depressed. So when did you start reading Thor?

[sum1]

That gets complicated. I read different things at different times.

[PhoenixRising]

Okay, I won't ask then. I know how complicated that can get when you just start reading different comics at different paces. I also don't always remember what I read at what times.

[sum1]

This is the first Thor comic I read, I think, and I read it in a UK reprint in the mid '80s:

http://comicbookdb.com/graphics/comi...1855_large.jpg

http://comicbookdb.com/issue.php?ID=26960

1970s, Len Wein and John Buscema. That's classic Thor to me.

[PhoenixRising]

Yeah, you're right. That is an old one from the 70's. I didn't start reading Thor until the 80's.

[sum1]

And you never read any back issues?

British Marvel in the '80s reprinted a lot of classic stuff from the '60s and '70s. I grew up on stories like the original X-Men vs the Mole Man, the Fantastic Four's first encounter with Ronan the Accuser, Thor going into the land of the dead to look for Odin, Barry Windsor Smith's Conan, etc.

[PhoenixRising]

Ohh, I see. Yeah, I guess it makes sense that Marvel and DC comics in Europe would get a lot of reprints of back issues, kind of like how we get BBC programs years after their original airing.

I did look up back issues, but only of the comics I was into, like Spider-Man, Avengers, Fantastic Four, etc. I didn't get into Thor until the late 80's, and by then I was buying so many comics a month I couldn't spend too much on extras.

[sum1]

I don't get the big appeal of Spider Man and Fanastic Four was past its glory days once Byrne had left.

Speaking of Byrne, here's an Irish-American politician called Byrne who has a face strkingly reminiscent of a John Byrne drawing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda..._(cropped).jpg

Notice the broad face with the square jaw, the round eyes even-set under the straight brow, the prominent cheekbones and the sturdy mouth. I told you John Byrne draws people like his people.

[PhoenixRising]

Damn, you're right. And I was mostly a fan of the FF during the 70's and early 80's, until just after the time that She-Hulk joined the group in place of The Thing. I lost interest in the FF in the 90's.

Well, Peter Parker, Hank Pym, and Scott Summers to me are all hard-luck cases that I have extreme empathy for. They keep getting made into punching bags by writers who don't want to plug themselves into those characters and write them properly at times, or who just wanna torture them all the time.

[sum1]

Look at the Brendan Byrne pic. He's straight off of John Byrne's artwork.

[PhoenixRising]

I did look at the pic, sum1. That's why I said, "damn, you're right." He does look like a Byrne character.

[sum1]

I bet he has county Wicklow ancestry. That's where the Byrne heritage goes back to, though often via Dublin. John Byrne is really drawing on his ethnic background. I bet he doesn't even realize it. Artists often do that kind of thing instinctively. Like JRJR draws people looking Italian.

[PhoenixRising]

OMG, you mean when Byrne draws characters, there are people who actually look like that? I thought he was exaggerating.