Keith Giffen RIP

[Oh, Nobody]

THE BEST. A great writer, an amazing artist (took some flack for copying Jose Munoz in the 80s but he was a bundle of influences, and often mocked himself in his comics for this) and a champion of obscure characters.

Mostly a DC company man to the end but he dabbled elsewhere, notably a Guardians of the Galaxy reboot that heavily influenced the movie version.

This thread may end up just being me popping in every time I remember another great comic of his but hopefully some of you have some memories of his stuff. Here's a few recommends of the top of me head:

-JLI probably his most famous run on a comic, it's just great character work. The plots swing wildly between murderous alien rampage to con-artist japes but it's the interactions between characters that's the gold here.

-LOBO Most of the best Lobo stuff was by Alan Grant but the first mini (Giffen & Grant) is essentially the Blues Brothers and has a great punchline. Lobo's Back goes all-out and has a great/gross running gag about a guy's brain tumour growing, it's amazing people read this and still didn't realise he's a parody character. Giffen only wrote one issue of the Lobo ongoing but it features a page that's just a repeated panel of Lobo stomping his dog to death so you know it's good.

-AMBUSH BUG All Ambush Bug stuff is great, many have tried to do similar stuff (She-Hulk, Deadpool) but nothing comes close. Son Of Ambush Bug has a surprisingly emotional ending while still being darkly funny. Ambush Bug Nothing Special is one of my favourite comics of all time. There's still an unpolished issue languishing in DC's vaults (rumours abound on that one)

-L.E.G.I.O.N Modern day Legion of Superheroes comic explaining how the team begins (sort of), an intergalactic police force headed by a complete bastard. There's an issue drawn by Giffen about the character Stealth giving birth on a prehistoric planet which I think was one of those 'not approved by the comics code authority' comics. Seems to be largely forgotten which is a shame.

-TRENCHER I suspect this was a rejected Lobo pitch as it would fit after Lobo's Back (where he gets banned from Heaven and Hell), a bounty hunter reclaiming 'accidentally reincarnated' souls. Yes there's an Elvis issue. Different, wilder art style in this that I loved but a lot of people find hard to follow. Love all the SFX speech bubbles (drawing of somebody blowing a raspberry, that kinda stuff). Much like a lot of his shorter-lived comics this set something up that was never resolved but hey. Trencher Vs Blitzkreig The Manic Mandrill (Blackball Comics #1 ) may be the greatest dumb comic ever created. There's also a 3 issue Shadowhawk Vs Trencher where Image's own HIV positive Batman knockoff comes into conflict with Trencher, includes a scene where he has to climb up the side of a building using Trenchers intestines as a rope.

-VEXT Great little series about an obscure god living in the city, no stakes to it, practically a romcom.

-HORDAK when DC had the He-Man license Giffen wrote and drew an origin of Hordak special, very Kirbyesque. I don't care about He-Man in the slightest but it's nice to look at.

-THE DEMON #25 Another Alan Grant collaboration as Etrigan the Demon fights an 800 year old fundamentalist christian. Nice dark ending to this one, wish he'd done more Demon stuff.

-BOOK OF FATE There was a not-good extreme 90s reimagining of Dr Fate and this was a follow on series trying to save that character, I enjoyed it. There's a story with Alan Grant where he's tracking down the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse disguised as people at (I think) a UN gathering that was fun. Ends with him going on a pub crawl with Lobo which annoyingly is NOT drawn by Giffen but is fun nonetheless.

-THE HECKLER IS THE BEST COMIC DC PUT OUT IN THE 90S BUT THIS POST IS TOO LONG ALREADY!

[Oh, Nobody]

Oh fuck I forgot this! They weren't lying, it's a damn classic!

Hex was a weird post-Crisis comic with Jonah Hex stuck in a Mad Max future somehow, the final issue

Spoiler alert

has him finding his stuffed corpse (the old comics had a story where his corpse is paraded round in a Buffalo Bill style Wild West show, dressed in a ridiculous outfit) and being like "Huh. Guess I get home some time at that" and it's fucking great.

[close]

[13 schoolyards]

Giffen is great, he's one of the rare mainstream "funny" writers who actually was funny. It's annoyed me a bit in hindsight that I first encountered him via that Comics Journal expose that he'd swiped a little too much of his then very ink-heavy art style from Jose Munoz in the 80s - if that hadn't put me off him for a few years I probably would have picked up Ambush Bug, which seems like something I'd really like.

[bgmnts]

Seems he did a fair amount of stuff, where would I start? Would enjoy to read a properly funny comic book.

[Wentworth Smith]

So saddened by this, a great creative mind. JLI is one of my favourite things, caught it at just the right time. So many bits stick with me. I know a lot of it comes down to JM DeMatteis and the dialogue but I would genuinely say they wrote the best version of almost every character they regularly used (not all, obviously. Their Batman is great but no one would say it is the peak of the character). They wrote super heroes as real people better than anyone. 'ONE PUNCH!' might be the greatest single superhero page ever created.

The late '80s legion of Super-Heroes he plotted and drew is also great (with a few caveats such as the total 9 panel grid and a lot of the characters looking the same). It deals with a huge cast with mad skill and some real emotional heft: not read it for a while but remember the Sun Boy stuff being incredible.

[Oh, Nobody]

Giffen is great, he's one of the rare mainstream "funny" writers who actually was funny. It's annoyed me a bit in hindsight that I first encountered him via that Comics Journal expose that he'd swiped a little too much of his then very ink-heavy art style from Jose Munoz in the 80s - if that hadn't put me off him for a few years I probably would have picked up Ambush Bug, which seems like something I'd really like.

There's an Ambush Bug with a Comics Journal parody including a story that Giffen is going to start swiping Charles Schulz (with Snoopy style Ambush Bug pic)

[Oh, Nobody]

Seems he did a fair amount of stuff, where would I start? Would enjoy to read a properly funny comic book.

I'd say JLI is probably the best place to start, it's probably his most accessible comic (Ambush Bug is funnier but a lot of it is inside jokes and references). DC have got three collections in print which covers just about half of the run, hopefully the rest is coming:





There's two big hardcover omnibuses but annoyingly they don't complete the run either (about 15 issues short)

[Oh, Nobody]

The late '80s legion of Super-Heroes he plotted and drew is also great (with a few caveats such as the total 9 panel grid and a lot of the characters looking the same). It deals with a huge cast with mad skill and some real emotional heft: not read it for a while but remember the Sun Boy stuff being incredible.

I love that version of the Legion, at least until the 'Legionnaires' become part of it and it gets more like a reboot. It was still alright but the depressing 'five years later' stuff was the gold to me.

[bgmnts]

I'd say JLI is probably the best place to start, it's probably his most accessible comic (Ambush Bug is funnier but a lot of it is inside jokes and references). DC have got three collections in print which covers just about half of the run, hopefully the rest is coming:





There's two big hardcover omnibuses but annoyingly they don't complete the run either (about 15 issues short)

Cheers!

[Wentworth Smith]

I love that version of the Legion, at least until the 'Legionnaires' become part of it and it gets more like a reboot. It was still alright but the depressing 'five years later' stuff was the gold to me.

Yeah, I would agree with that, it just kind of tapered off. Still, even at its worst it was better than what came later with the million reboots... I wonder if the Legion are a completely ruined thing now. I read a Bendis version a few years ago and it was insufferable.

[Magnum Valentino]

Volume 3 of the JLI Omnibus is out in May.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Picked up Hero Squared today in a charity shop and am looking forward to reading it when I finish Top Ten, it's something I hadn't heard of before but it's both Giffen and DeMatteis and the quotes on the back cover are very positive so I hope I'll like it.

[Kenkun]

Reading JLI and the '5 Years Later' Legion were massively formative for me, not just in comics but in my tastes in culture in general. I was genuinely gutted when I heard the news, so finding this thread was very cathatric.

JLI always felt the most 'realistic' of all the superhero books; by having the characters be funny also made them act like actual people. Batman taking out Guy Gardner in one punch was funny, but it was the other reactions that made it great (especially Black Canary's horror in having missed it).

I read the Legion stuff pretty much in real time as I turned 13 and before I'd read Watchmen, so it just felt revolutionary. I re-read the Giffen pencilled issues last year and it holds up for me.  They took much-loved and well established characters and turned the universe upside down. There wasn't any exposition as to what had happened in the time skip and no concession made - you just had to keep up (like a sci-fi version of The Wire).

But the thing that really made it for me was the art - it just felt like the future to me; a messy, grimy, lived in future.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Reading JLI and the '5 Years Later' Legion were massively formative for me, not just in comics but in my tastes in culture in general. I was genuinely gutted when I heard the news, so finding this thread was very cathatric.

JLI always felt the most 'realistic' of all the superhero books; by having the characters be funny also made them act like actual people. Batman taking out Guy Gardner in one punch was funny, but it was the other reactions that made it great (especially Black Canary's horror in having missed it).

I know it's generally admired but I think JLI deserves so even more acclaim then it gets, beforehand the Justice League series was a right old mess, Batman made the odd appearance but the team largely consisted of Martian Manhunter, Vixen, Gypsy, Steel, Zatanna, Vibe and Elongated Man (and however fond I may be of some of them, they're hardly DC's big hitters) and even when J.M. Dematteis starts writing it the plot feels pretty dated. But with JLI issue 1 it's instantly got a very different feel, and it doesn't matter that the team isn't made up of Aquaman, Superman or the Flash et al as the characters are so well written, and it's just a delight to spend time with them whether or not they're fighting supervillains.

[Dayraven]

the team largely consisted of Martian Manhunter, Vixen, Gypsy, Steel, Zatanna, Vibe and Elongated Man (and however fond I may be of some of them, they're hardly DC's big hitters)

Team books composed of lots of characters who can hold down their own book face issues with coordinating with other series and not being able to do as much with the characters, which is one reason why there's a drift to lesser names. In this case there was also an emulation of the Avengers' early lineup switch to Captain America, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.

I think Morrison's JLA did a lot to reestablish the idea that the big team is supposed to have all the big guns, and that was post-Giffen.

[Wentworth Smith]

JM DeMatteis in one of the introductions to the collected editions writes that they were told they couldn't use loads of characters in the post Crisis world and only got Batman as the then Bat editor took pity on them with all the losers they had to work with.

Turned out pretty well as I would say the JLI is the best version of the League (even better than Morrisons) and I would argue up there with the best super hero team books there have ever been.

The quality of the character writing in the JLI sometimes makes me doubt whether other writers have ever actually met another human being. The Beetle and Booster of the JLI joking around and wisecracking (as people and friends often do) made most other writers treat them like complete gibbering fools, as if having a laugh was the sign of a lunatic incompetent mind.

[Kenkun]

JM DeMatteis in one of the introductions to the collected editions writes that they were told they couldn't use loads of characters in the post Crisis world and only got Batman as the then Bat editor took pity on them with all the losers they had to work with.

I was going to mention that Introduction as it's more or less burned into my memory from my copy of the original trade paperback (when it was still Justice League and had yet to acquire the I).  They had loads of issues in spinning up that new version of the League and turned them all to advantages. 

It's definitely a run that should be held in higher esteem. It feels like the creators looked at Watchmen and thought "oh, you can make superheroes behave like real people" instead of the "isn't grim violence cool" approach that everyone else seemed to take. 

[13 schoolyards]

I think the problem it's had with being recognised for its greatness is that it never came to a firm ending. It's a bit of a hard one to get (in my case, back) into, because it just keeps going beyond the current collections. Hopefully DC will eventually get around to having a collection of TBPs they can point at and say "that's what you need", because it really is, as Kenkun said, one of the great post-Watchmen superhero series

[Oh, Nobody]

This week's DC comics have this tribute page, which is nice.

But that is a disturbing looking Ambush Bug.

[Small Man Big Horse]

That is a lovely dedication, but yeah, Ambush Bug is way too muscular in it, unless something happened to the character since I last read one his titles (which was in about 1993, so may well have done).