Fantastic Four 256 JOHN BYRNE FULL-TEAM SPLASH

Oh, all right, OA hobby. If you keep dangling even 2nd-tier vintage Byrne Splash Pages in front of me, I'll eventually find a way to pull the trigger.

While very, very impressive in person, this is, of course, from a collecting perspective, still not a 'perfect' Byrne FF splash page.

The entire team has its collective backs to the reader, the better to show off the 'Negative Zone Baxter Building' which will shortly bring them home.

For that matter, the page gets additional demerits for not being executed fully in drawing negative space. JB clearly started, realized what a pain it was going to be to draw it that way, and instead left it to the Bullpen to generate a 'negative stat' (reversing the blacks and whites on a photocopy) and patch together all story elements on another page. Can you blame him? I've generated a photoshop version of what that long-discarded stat-page might have looked like.

I've found two versions of the printed version of the page, and it's astounding how much detail is lost. The printing technology for comics back then was just garbage.

Lastly, printed out a high-rez version of the Photoshop file to hand-color with Copic markers. Not too bad.