Attempting to summarize the career of John M. Burns, who died on December 29, seems impossible. The man had been drawing comics for nearly 70 years, starting all the way back in 1954 as an apprentice at illustrator Doris White's Link Studio in London. His first published work, according to biographer Paul Duncan, was in 1958’s Champion the Wonder Horse Annual, based on an American cowboy television show; he was 19 years old. The final pages published in his lifetime, forming the last episode of the long-running science fiction serial The Order, ran in 2000 AD #2329 (26 April, 2023), when he was well into his 80s. In between was pretty much everything possible for a British comics artist.
There is no complete bibliography of Burns to consult, in part because so much of his work, spread across many different venues, precedes the norm of crediting artists in British comics. Just a short list of notables from the 20th century would include: starting in the '60s, Wrath of the Gods (first for Boys' World, then the boys' comics institution Eagle), his Wuthering Heights adaptation (for the girls' comic Diana) and The Seekers (a widely-syndicated strip for the Daily Sketch); starting in the '70s, Countdown (the eponymous serial for a lavish television tie-in magazine, followed by numerous features for its successor, TV Action), the saucy strip George and Lynne (for The Sun, among the few good things to come out of that rag) and a brief stint on Modesty Blaise (for the Evening Standard, a troubled run I will back without hesitation); starting in the '80s, The Fists of Danny Pyke (for the relaunched Eagle) and a revival of the damsel-in-distress newspaper strip Jane (for the Daily Mirror); and starting in the '90s, Judge Dredd (which he didn’t like doing, but did well) and Nikolai Dante (among the most popular new 2000 AD features as the century neared its end).
Burns worked in seemingly every genre possible, from lovely little children's tales wrought with the magic of innocence to epic war stories filled with blood and thunder, all the way to full-blown pornography via his contributions to the short-lived Penthouse Comix, which really stand out in terms of sheer craft. Burns is among that rare breed of cartoonists, like Stan Sakai or Sergio Aragonés, who are amazingly prolific but also extremely steady in quality. His style is characterized by a strong realistic bent—especially notable after he moved into full color paints—with plausible renditions of everything from the idealized human body to fantastic machines. Part of this surely came from his extensive work in television adaptation; no small number of mainstream British comics in the '60s and '70s were spun off from popular shows.
For strips such as UFO and Mission: Impossible (for TV Action) and The Bionic Woman (for Look-In), Burns needed to capture the likenesses of the actors and the general style of the program, which he certainly did. A lot of comics of that ilk can appear stodgy, like short recaps of stories you regret missing on television, but Burns' bold dynamism was present even there; his work didn’t feel like a supplement, but rather a thing by itself. Sadly, due to rights issues, many of these comics remain out of print, although there is an occasional effort made, such as Chinbeard Books’ recent publication of The Tomorrow People in two volumes.
This lack of reprints is a subject I have written about before. Despite his popularity, despite the appreciation of the critics and fellow artists, and despite the populist appeal of his work, so much that Burns has done remains inaccessible, so that the work of his available to the general public is but the tip of a spear, represented mostly by 2000 AD despite his already being an established name when the magazine first launched, and taking quite a while to get there.
His first work for that magazine was a Judge Dredd short, “Garbage Disposal” (6 July, 1991), with several longer serials to follow, including “Raider” in 1992 and parts of “The Exterminator” in 1994. This was the post-Simon Bisley era, painted comics were all the rage, and Burns fit right in with the younger generation of artists trying their hands at this style, with one major difference: he knew how to do it well. The '90s weren’t a particularly good time for 2000 AD, with a lot of badly painted tosh that tried to obscure basic storytelling failures with a lot of razzle dazzle. Not Burns, though; a proud traditionalist, his stories were easily recognized for their clarity and understanding of storytelling principles, while also boasting some great dramatic images. This came in spite of his lack of enthusiasm for the character or the world of the Dredd strip. “If you stick to the original uniform, you can't move, you can’t make the character anatomically correct if he’s wearing all that gear,” he said in 2020's Illustrators Special: The Art of John M. Burns. He did the best he could, which was quite a lot, but it was obvious his heart wasn’t in that gig; it probably didn’t help that most of the scripts, some from a young and inexperienced Garth Ennis, were of a lesser order, though even John Wagner's pieces felt like they were casting around for direction at that time.
Salvation came from an unexpected source. The ribald adventure serial Nikolai Dante (created in 1997 by Robbie Morrison & Simon Fraser) needed a pinch hitter, with Burns volunteering a 1999 two-parter involving pirates on the high seas. While also a science fiction effort, the world of Nikolai Dante was decidedly retro, evoking 19th century adventure stories with a pinch of SF jargon on top. Sure, there were robots and aliens, but more prominently a swashbuckling hero dangling from a chandelier while wooing the ladies.
Burns fit right in; Nikolai Dante was among his favorite jobs. He was called back for more and more work on the series, and by end was as much responsible for its tone as its creators. As Fraser remarked to 2000 AD: “You have to understand that as a young and somewhat insecure artist I was simultaneously in awe of Burns and also nervous of him. It was like being a jazz pianist and Thelonious Monk sits down at the piano stool, right next to you.” This was the type of thing Burns was born to do, from massive scenes of battle with hundreds of soldiers charging on the field to intimate moments of characters confessing their love and sadness. Nikolai Dante's grasp of Russian culture and history was certainly on the Hollywood side, so it was probably good that Burns drew it like King Vidor’s War and Peace. It wasn’t perfect, but it had perfect moments. Moments drawn by John M. Burns.
There are two pages from the series I will carry with me forever. The first is in the short story “Requiem for Lost Love” (2000 AD #1150; 23 June, 1999). Dante is taking on the executioner Andrei Volk; though Dante's Weapons Crest (a sort of talking personal computer, always a reliable vehicle for banter) urges him to use his powerful bio-blades to finish the battle quickly, Dante refuses; he will fight not like the noble he is, but with his bare hands like the poor scoundrel he used to be. The fourth panel of that page is extraordinary, the look in Dante’s eyes as he bores into his soul to understand what kind of person he is - his own man, or a tool of his lineage? He makes a choice that defines the rest of the series.
That is a moment of triumph, the other is a moment of loss. Toward the end of “The Romanov Empire” (11 July - 3 Oct., 2001), the final segment of the long-running “Tsar Wars” storyline, Dante smashes his banner after a devastating loss. It’s a moment of sheer pathos, bracingly honest and melodramatic for a series otherwise filled with lewd sex jokes straight from the lad mag era. It should be a horrible tonal clash, mawkish and tacky - and drawn by any other artist, it would be. But Burns forces it through; he makes the series into something worthy of the word ‘epic.’
Burns was in his 70s when Nikolai Dante wrapped in 2012, and you might have expected him to retire, or at least slow down. It’s not easy to draw the way he does, certainly when one insists on being the last of the old school and still do everything by hand. But Burns moved on quickly to another long-running 2000 AD series, The Order, which he created with writer Kek-W in 2015. An odd time travel and universe-hopping adventure series that starts with Teutonic knights meeting a robot and ends with universal destruction across the whole of spacetime, it was a series that thought big, and needed a big artist to draw it.
Like many British artists, Burns also reached out to the U.S. market on occasion - sadly, not often to successful effect. His style was not just old school, but the British type of old school, a tradition few in the States understood or respected. A stray issue of the Eclipse SF series ESPers (#5, Apr. 1987) was well-made, but in the wrong place at the wrong time. A James Bond miniseries for Dark Horse, A Silent Armageddon (1993), was cut short after two issues. An espionage adventure series for Marvel, 2006's Sable & Fortune—was there a better person to draw sexy spy intrigue?—saw a different artist switched out for the fourth and final issue, resulting in a horrible tonal clash. Is it possible his best American work was the Penthouse stuff? The cheekiness of George and Lynne and Modesty Blaise easily translated into the full-on horniness that venue demanded.
He did better on the European continent, teaming with the Dutch writer Martin Lodewijk for Zetari, a Métal hurlant-like swords and fantasy strip with a fetching heroine that ran in various magazines and albums in assorted languages in the 1980s. In Germany he drew the strip Julia for a mainstream newspaper, Bild, in the late '80s. He also illustrated some early '90s episodes of Spanish comics mainstay El Capitán Trueno, a straightforward action-adventure series featuring a 12th century knight and his group of loyal companions. Oddly enough, he did not appear in the English-language Heavy Metal magazine until 2014, where he began a short run of what his Wikipedia page charmingly refers to as “Various sexy spy stories.” I’m not sure that Burns would object.
All this, and I have barely touched his other 2000 AD work (such as The Banditti Vendetta, a 2002 creation with Robbie Morrison), his other newspaper strips (such as Danielle, a SF strip from the Evening News collected in the U.S. as a graphic novel by Ken Pierce Books in 1984), as well as odd one-offs such as his contribution to the 2017 Will Eisner centennial The Spirit anthology from the Lakes International Comic Art Festival… there’s just so much of it. Thousands of pages, maybe more, and because of how the British did things, these are dense pages. If you stood atop his mountain of labor, you would be looking down at the clouds.
And yet Burns never seemed to treat himself with any sort of reverence. Here is how he opened a 2004 interview with the Judge Dredd Megazine (issue #224): “It sounds silly, but I don’t like drawing all that space-age stuff… And I’ve spent most of my life doing just that.” He admits to disliking many of the strips he's had to draw, from Modesty Blaise to UFO, but you wouldn’t know it for looking at them. He wasn’t trying to be an artiste; he was working class, a child of poverty from the East End, taking whatever jobs came through the door - but whatever he thought of the subject matter he treated it all with same sober seriousness. A Burns page is always a worthwhile object to consider.
When Burns announced his retirement last October, just a few short months ago, it felt like something had shifted in the world of comics. There are still a few artists of that generation around, fewer still working; the aforementioned Sergio Aragonés has had about as long a run, back to the days of true ephemerality. It seems so counter-intuitive, so difficult, so demanding. And for what? A couple of color pages that would be thrown away and forgotten after a few minutes? Yet no matter how disposable the medium of comics, no matter how shoddily the owners and editors treated their artists and the art—and in Britain, they often treated them very bad—the art of John M. Burns is so solid as to feel untouched by time. I hardly needed to reach into my personal library to find the comics I was thinking of for this article - the images just popped into my head, self-evident. They could not have been drawn otherwise.
There is some good news to be had. Book Palace Books and Rebellion will soon bring some of Burns' earlier boys' comics work back into print via collections of, respectively, Wrath of the Gods and Kelpie the Boy Wizard; a final 2000 AD serial, Nightmare New York, will run sometime this year; and there is that biography, announced a few years ago and still going forward. Burns will not be forgotten. He cannot be forgotten. The work it too strong! As the heroes of The Order knew, even time itself can be vanquished.
The post John M. Burns, 1938-2023 appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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