John Byrne Was Not Fired From Avengers West Coast

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, discover whether a conflict with one of John Byrne's issues led to him being fired off Avengers West Coast

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and fifty-third installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

Marvel fired John Byrne from Avengers West Coast over the controversy involving the Scarlet Witch and Wonder Man in his run

STATUS:

False

Something that comes up a lot in legends are when causation and correlation are mixed together. In other words, Thing X happens, then Thing Y happens right after that, and so people begin to believe that Thing X is the reason why Thing Y happened, even if they were unrelated incidents.

The funny thing about this particular legend is that I've covered both sides of this story separately in past legends, and yet they are still somehow merged together into one new story (One I saw on Twitter just recently, "He was fired from West Coast Avengers, and moved to She Hulk due to the fact Byrne had Wanda in a preprint rape Wonder man aka Simon Williams"), and so I guess I'll debunk that one, too!

To set the scene, during John Byrne's run on Avengers West Coast, he had the Scarlet Witch go through a bit of a bad time. First, her husband, the Vision, was taken apart from the government and now had no emotional bond to her anymore. Next, even more devastatingly, she discovered that her two children with the Vision were actually created by her power and did not actually exist. She was in such bad shape that it is unsurprising that she had a mental breakdown and became a bit of a villain for a time...

An image of Scarlet Witch Attacking the West Coast Avengers

In her mentally unbalanced state, she decided to torment Wonder Man (who was in love with her but she did return the sentiment)...

Now, that is how the issues appeared when they were PRINTED, but when they were drawn it was a different state of affairs all together.

Here's what the page ORIGINALLY looked like...

Clearly, Byrne was trying to heavily imply that Scarlet Witch was doing some sort of sexual stuff to Wonder Man with her mouth, without, you know, explicitly showing that. As he explained in an old Comic Book Legends Revealed, assistant editor Len Kaminski felt that it could not see print as it was, despite the issue being rubber-stamped by other people at Marvel who just didn't notice it (Byrne's comics rarely needed to be checked, after all, as the guy was a total pro).

So Kaminski pointed it out out to the editor of the series, Howard Mackie. Ultimately, Kaminski made the edits so that the page was printed as seen above and as Len noted,

Book fixed. Goes to printer. Ends up funny story, no hard feelings, everybody laughs. Howard and John remained pals. As it turned out, some people got the wrong idea anyway... we got outraged, horrified letters from folks that thought what was happening on the page was Wanda CASTRATING Simon. Some days it just doesn't pay to chew your way through the leather straps...

However, the following issue, Avengers West Coast #57, ended up being Byrne's last issue on the series, with him departing mid-storyline.

Years ago, I detailed in a Comic Book Legends Revealed what Byrne originally intended to do in that storyline. Well, as it turned out, Byrne and Mackie had initially offered up the storyline (where Immortus helped to alter the Multiverse) to Marvel as an option for a company wide crossover (much like the similar Multiverse altering events like House of M and Age of Ultron became), but it was turned down. As it turned out, Marvel's Editor-in-Chief, Tom DeFalco, apparently believed that by turning it down, he was telling them not to do the story PERIOD, while Byrne and Mackie believed it to simply be that he didn't want to use it for a company wide crossover.

When DeFalco found out that the storyline was occurring anyway, he told Byrne and Mackie to stop it, but Byrne felt that that was unfair, so he quit the book in protest (with Mackie's blessing). Roy Thomas was then brought in (after some fill-in issues) to then quickly wrap the story up as it was without going into the expansive aspect of Byrne's storyline, which would have included the whole history of the Marvel Universe being temporarily altered (here's an unused cover sketch Byrne did for this unused story)...

So no, Byrne's departure from the Avengers West Coast had nothing to do with the Scarlet Witch edited scene. That scene didn't matter at all in the long run, it was simply a whole other conflict between Byrne and editorial that led to Byrne choosing to leave the book himself. No one fired him from the comic period. Over the years, though, people have put two and two together and ended up with five, and believe that Byrne was fired from the book for the edited scene. It did not happen that way at all.