John Lindley Byrne is a British-born American comic-book writer and artist. Since the mid-1970s, Byrne has worked on many major American superheroes. Byrne's better-known work has been on Marvel Comics’ X-Men and Fantastic Four and the 1986 relaunch of DC Comics’ Superman franchise, the first issue of which featured comics' first variant cover. Coming into the comics profession exclusively as a penciler, Byrne began co-plotting the X-Men comics during his tenure on them, and launched his writing career in earnest with Fantastic Four (where he started inking his own pencils). During the 1990s he produced a number of creator-owned works, including Next Men and Danger Unlimited. He scripted the first issues of Mike Mignola's Hellboy series and produced a number of Star Trek comics for IDW Publishing.