John Byrne has always been one of, if not my all-time favorite, comic book artist. There was always just something about his dynamic lines and grand page compositions that just worked for me. Unfortunately, there's a big difference between Byrne the man and Byrne the artist, and over the years the highly opinionated Byrne has gotten the reputation of being something of a closed-off prickly pear. He routinely bans people from posting on his website byrnerobotics.com for having the audacity to simply disagree with one of his opinions on comics, movies or pop culture.
Regardless, the man is a legend for many things but his work on the "X-Men," "The Fantastic Four," "Alpha Flight" and "Superman" has certainly stood the test of time. It's his work on the X-Men, especially the character of Wolverine, that a piece over at Comic Book Resources focuses on. It seems that Byrne's inspiration for the character (and which pretty much set the template for the character to this very day) was a little-known actor named Paul D'Amato who played "Dr. Hook" in the seminal 1977 hockey flick "Slap Shot" which starred Paul Newman.
In an interview in "TwoMorrows' Back Issue" #4 with Peter Sanderson, Byrne revealed the "muse" for his depiction of Wolverine during his fabled run on "X-Men" with Chris Claremont. Byrne explained: "My Wolverine is an actor whose name I don't even know, who's on camera for all of five minutes in a Paul Newman hockey movie called 'Slap Shot.'"
Check out the clip below and you can definitely see what Byrne was thinking with casting Wolverine in this mold. It's also very interesting to note the creative "spark" of a true genius...taking a part that small and shaping into a character who went on to become a wildly popular phenomenon.
