Is This Thing On? XX
Everything Old is New Again
You're not imagining things -- this is 20th Century Refugee, the semi-occasional newsletter of Glen Cadigan, author of both fiction and nonfiction. Some of you might be visiting for the first time, whereas others might be regulars. If you're new here, there are archives just a click away which are easy to find if you poke around. They're mostly about my career and things I've done, since I figure that's what people want. All the boring, personal stuff is left off the table, like when someone drove his car through my fence last month and both tore up my lawn and hit a tree. I know, I know... you want the deets on dealing with insurance companies because that's what really gets your rocks off. And who could blame you? But this is a family affair, so on to the news!
Back in Back Issue!
When Keith Giffen passed away a little over a year ago, I reached out to Back Issue! editor Michael Eury and suggested he should do a tribute issue on the iconoclastic creator. Turns out, Michael was thinking along the same lines. I offered up my interview with Keith from The Legion Companion, done years earlier, and he said yes! TLC is a book that is now long out of print, and as it was an interview which covered more than just his Legion career, I figured it'd be right up BI!'s alley.
That forced me to go back through a binder of CD-ROMs to find the disc that contained the original transcript, and that necessitated finding the binder. The interview was originally divided in two for publication, so some of the contents were shifted around to form a more logical grouping. But for Back Issue! # 157 (shipping January 15th; order yours today!) it'll appear as it happened, more or less.
(I add the disclaimer because I called Keith back later to ask some follow-up questions, and they were edited into the interview so seamlessly that I can't remember which happened when without going back and listening to the original tapes. There is one original Q&A that was left on the cutting room floor, and I mentioned it in a previous edition of this newsletter, so if you have the patience to go back and look for it, you won’t have to wait until January to read it!)
One aspect of his career that I didn't get to cover was his return to the Legion in 1988 for the last year of Paul Levitz's second run as Legion writer. (For those keeping score, Mr. Levitz had three.) It wasn't for lack of trying -- every time I brought it up, Keith just zoomed ahead to his infamous "Five Years Later" run on the book, completely leaving a personal favorite of mine in the dust. I tried both times I had him on the phone to get him to talk about it, and both times he glossed over it in favor of the more dominant impressions left by his controversial run as author.
I was mentioning this to Harry Broertjes recently because, unbeknownst to me at the time, Keith Giffen had already gone on the record about that short run, and to Harry, specifically. You might know Harry from his tenure as the second editor of The Legion Outpost fanzine (after its founder, Mike Flynn), or an original member of Interlac (more on that later), or as the former secretary of his condo board down in Florida. Back in the day, Harry interviewed Keith for Interlac, an amateur press association (APA) devoted to the Legion. You can Google APAs if you're unfamiliar with them, but the long and the short of it is, the print run is defined by the number of members, as the members print their own contributions for the other members to receive in the mail. Interlac had a membership cap of fifty (50), I believe, so that interview is very, very rare. He reprinted it after Keith's passing, again in Interlac, and these days, Interlac's membership is about half that. So less than a hundred people have seen it in total, counting non-members like myself who have been the beneficiaries of Harry's kindness over the years.
I expect that number to increase precipitously now because Harry suggested I reprint it here, and like Michael Eury before me, I know a good idea when I hear one. So this installment of 20th Century Refugee features the first part of what is now a multi-part interview with Keith Giffen, conducted in 1988, shortly after he returned to The Legion of Super-Heroes. Think of it as a primer for what you're going to get in January; if you like this, you should head on over to the TwoMorrows webstore and order up a copy of Back Issue! # 157 (where you can also read a free preview of the issue itself), or get your local retailer to set one aside for you.
If your memory needs refreshing, this is the run where he changed all of the costumes, the one that ended with "The Magic Wars," the one where he reunited with Paul Levitz after an absence that felt a whole lot longer than just four years. When he started, Ken Stacey was the cover artist; when he finished, Steve Lightle was back up front. This is ground that isn't covered in Back Issue!, so it works nicely as both a companion piece and an appetizer. And might I say, it is an excellent interview, one worthy of finding a larger audience.
Before we begin, though, a commercial interruption!
The Strawman arrives 03.25.25
As existing subscribers to this newsletter are aware, I have a book coming out next spring called The Strawman. The cover copy reads thusly:
One year after a woman disappears, a group of college students attempts to make a movie about a local legend called the Strawman. What do they find, and what finds them?
It's got surprises and scares and twists and turns, and it won't be long now before you can preorder it yourself. Think of it like a Christmas present that won't arrive until Easter!
And Now For Our Feature Presentation
Below is not only the interview, but Harry's ramp up to it, as originally published in Interlac. I'll let Harry take it from here… and in case there are any lawyers watching, this interview is © 1988, 2023, 2024, and any other year it appears, by Harry Broertjes, all rights reserved. It appears here with his permission.
Welp, Keith’s back, and The Legion #50 is out, so what better time to plug in the tape recorder and find out what’s rumbling through the head of the guy who over the years seems to have aroused more passion, both pro and con, among Interlac members than anyone else during the apa’s 12-year history?
The interview that follows was actually Keith’s idea, and I was more than happy to follow through on it. Some folks’ worst fears to the contrary, he does care about what we think of his work, even if he takes exception to some of our opinions — sometimes to the point of going out of his way to prove them wrong.
We did the interview by phone on May 22, 1988. It lasted about two hours. I didn’t try too hard to play Mr. Hard-Ass Journalist here; my goal was to let Keith express himself and convey a notion of where he’s coming from rather than debate him. In a more-formal medium, the Q&A could have been condensed without losing too much crucial information — but I think there’s something to be gained from reading whatever can be glimpsed between the lines instead of sanitizing it of any subjective impressions that might be found.
Along the way, Keith talked about: his return as the Legion’s penciler and how in that role he interacts with Paul Levitz; the Pocket Universe (he thinks it’s a dumb idea); the notorious Subs Special; the Comics Journal swiping allegations of a few years ago; the Legionnaires’ costumes; and The Legion #50, which he ranks somewhere in the vicinity of Chernobyl on the scale of unnatural disasters.
HB: By the time everybody sees this interview, they’ll have already read The Legion #50. You told me the other day that you thought it was the Plan 9 From Outer Space of comics. Want to explain why?
KG: I keep going through it and keep trying to figure out who I should turn on, but there’s really no ready target. In terms of quality control, it just seems to be a case of where a lot of things that could go wrong most absolutely, definitely did go wrong.
HB: What things went wrong?
KG: Well, there are stats missing, there are mistakes in the coloring, word balloons going to the wrong people. It’s kind of a disaster. I look at it [in terms of] what it could have been. I think that other than the most obvious, glaring error in there — and that is the fact that one of Duo Damsel’s bodies is missing during her death scene [page 20, panel 5] — a lot of other people probably just won’t catch the things I caught. But you see, I keep catching things and saying, “No, that doesn’t belong there! No, that belonged there!” and quite possibly, when they see the Time Trapper looking into this mirror-like object [page 2, panel 4], they might wonder what the hell he’s looking at, because there’s nothing there. Those are the two painfully obvious ones.
The other ones are just things that really shouldn’t have happened but somehow did. One of the things that bugged me the most was the fact that Ultra Boy, who was supposed to be dressed in black leather, is now in this nice, tawny kind of a shade of tan [pages 3-5]. He looks like he’s wearing buckskins, for God’s sake. And I figure that really hits the button when it comes to encapsulating Ultra Boy’s whole personality, right? Now all we need is fringe.
It’s just a deep personal disappointment for me. The funny thing is that the odds are people are gonna go through the issue and go, “Keith’s gone back to doing what he used to do!” and be more pleased about the issue than they would have been if everything had come out picture-perfect. But there are certain things that just can’t be avoided, and I think it’s important to know that I don’t think any of this was done out of any malice toward the book.
I can’t speak beyond the immediate team [Keith, Paul Levitz, Mike DeCarlo, Carl Gafford and Karen Berger], OK? But there are other people working on the book [whose names aren’t part of the credits] who just say, “Eh, it’s the Legion, fuck it.” I talked with DeCarlo, I talked with Gafford, and I know Paul is absolutely appalled with the whole thing. And everyone is really giving to the best of his ability. I’m not mad at anyone specifically — I’m just mad at the overall end product. A lot of people are putting a lot into the book, and these things just shouldn’t have gone through. There are extenuating circumstances, sure, but...
HB: It sounds like the extenuating circumstances all ganged up on this one book.
KG: It happens. It’s just, it happened with such unerring consistency that I was blindsided by it, totally surprised. And in hindsight, I can say that [initially] I overreacted viciously.
HB: Well, it’s natural. You re-debut on a book and...
KG: You want everything to be perfect. There’s that ego that comes into play because you look at the credits and say, “Well, the only thing different is my name.” And the people out there who are reading the books, they’re not going to be aware of anything like this. They’re going to look at the book, and if it’s worse than the issue before, they’re going to look for what’s different. Well, there’s one new name in the credits. The problem with the majority of the fans is that they honestly believe that they know so much, and they’re actually so grossly ignorant as to how the business is run and the incredible number of things that can go wrong. So I’ve seen fans scream and yell about the pencils on a book when it was actually the inker who was to blame or the colorist who did it. It’s really tough to point the finger. And I guess I overreacted, too, and said, “My God, they’re all going to be pointing a finger at me!”
HB: Did anything go wrong with #51?
KG: Well, yeah. There were a few gaffes in there. No pun intended [a reference to colorist Carl Gafford, better known as “The Gaff”]. But nothing to compare with 50. With 51 it’s tough for me to say, “Well, this is wrong, that is wrong,” because I put a note on the bottom of a page saying, “Get out the Maalox, Paul, I’m digging in on this one.” I think if any issue is going to cause the shrieks of indignation from fans that I dearly love, it’ll probably be 51. Most of the Legionnaires do spend their time in street clothes, but I’m basically getting rid of the leftover 1950s and ‘60s haircuts. I’ve started playing with the costumes viciously, although I know that the Ultra Boy costume is going to cause all sorts of problems.
HB: What’s going to happen in #51? Ultra Boy’s going to be back in black leather there?
KG: No, in 51 he’s still the pretty boy. By his next appearance, I would hope, he’ll be in black leather. I’m going to have to really hammer that point home. It’s an attempt at encapsulating the man’s personality and his visual appearance. Like Phantom Girl — we worked up a whole new costume for her. I mean, it’s the Thirtieth Century and she’s still wearing bell bottoms! And this [decision to change] came directly from Karen Berger. Nobody likes Phantom Girl’s costume, but nobody could come up with something new. So I devised something. It’s like a Thirtieth Century version of a jogging suit or an aerobics class kind of thing with a light jacket. [And when I saw the colored pages] the jacket was colored red. The first thing that crosses my mind when I see the word “phantom” is red, right? But that’s not something that is etched in stone. The way we will work that out is that we will simply show that she’s got a whole closet full of these tunics to put over the actual pants, all of them in different colors, and we’ll slowly work our way around to white again, and then break.
It’s always bothered me when I’ve seen Legionnaires walking around in street clothes and they’re basically wearing variations of their costumes adapted to street clothes of the same colors. Doctors on their days off don’t wear white. If I spend my entire working day in some kind of a weird orange overall, I’m not going to go home and put on orange clothes.
HB: Well, we know the reason why that was done. It was to aid in visual identification.
KG: Right, but there should be other ways of getting across visual identification, like maybe the fact that each Legionnaire looks different. That each has different body language. That there are smaller identifying factors. One of the problems I’ve had with Sun Boy is that he’s a standard comic book pretty boy. That’s the way he was drawn, and that’s the way he should have been drawn because that’s the way he’s been handled. He’s the playboy, and I was groping around, trying to get a handle on it. I was gonna go back to the hair that looks more flamelike, but that’s been done to death. So I gave him an earring. The red hair is enough, but even if they color it wrong, the earring will say, there he is, that’s Sun Boy. If you have five characters standing in a room and you silhouette the man, the silhouette should be distinctive enough so you can say, “Well, yeah, that’s this person and that’s that person.” Even something as simple as Chameleon Boy’s antennae would say, “That’s Chameleon Boy.”
There should also be something to differentiate each of the other characters. Even if one has a slightly spiky hairstyle, the other one’s got a crewcut and the other one’s bald. There has to be that instant identification. If you can get that down pat, then you can really get away from the [fallback argument of saying], “There’s Timber Wolf in his street clothes — we’d better color him orange and gray.” You can just move away from that. And it also saves Paul the hassle of having to do the Mort Weisinger-type captions. “Timber Wolf said to Sun Boy...” Sometimes you’re stuck doing that because I know it’s Shrinking Violet and Paul knows it’s Shrinking Violet, but if he just has her talking there’s no guarantee the readers are going to know it’s Shrinking Violet.
In a way, it’s almost like saying, “Expect the worst because the odds are it’s going to happen.” You know you’re going to get the letter saying, “I love the issue, but gee, who was that Legionnaire that Gigi was talking to in page 5, panel 3?” because she wasn’t wearing this light green outfit or because she hasn’t become distinct enough a character.
HB: Even in a case like that, if you do make her distinct, you still have the first-time readers to take into account. Or do you take them into account?
KG: I didn’t used to. I used to think, let the book evolve, let the book grow. But now it’s been hammered home to me. It seems that the fans today, your really hard-core fans, either want the book to remain in stasis and never change or they want the books to progress and be new and keep going on. Let’s have real aging, they say. OK, let’s have real aging. But why should I rob my son of the joy of discovering the Legion or Superman or Batman just because a handful of fans out there want the comic books to keep up with them?
The Legion is a perfect book. It is a whimsical book — sci-fi whimsy, not hard sci-fi. These guys are talking in space, right? So the older fans of the Legion, the ones who were there when [Jim] Shooter was writing it and when Curt Swan was drawing it, they want the book to keep up with them. That would mean we’d have to leave the kids behind, because if we keep up with them, we’ve got to keep intellectualizing and adding layer upon layer of complications to keep their interest. Which loses the kids — it drops the bottom right out on them.
One of the great things that Paul is doing right now is that he’s scaling down the Legion. I mean, Brainiac 5 leaves, Dream Girl leaves, and Mon-El is a piece of Sizzlean. He’s mostly getting rid of the overused characters so that he’s forced to focus on some of the characters who, basically, have been mostly standing in the background going, “Wow.” But also, it scales it down so it’s more understandable, so that the first-time reader picking up the book can get an understanding of the book.
Paul does this wonderfully with the way he does captions. He can give the same information five, six, seven times, and it sort of bamboozles the long-time reader [into thinking it’s something new and different]. Because “Metropolis, capital of Earth, big city” — how many times can you say that? Well, you can say it by quoting from the Metropolis Department of Tourism, or from the Encyclopedia Galactica. See, he’s got all these different reference sources, so he can give the same information to the readers in different ways. He can give it a little twist, he can be a little sarcastic if it’s like a Metropolis Tonite review column, or he can give it straightforwardly — “Here’s what it’s all about” — if he’s doing it from the Encyclopedia Galactica. This helps the new person assimilate the information. But I don’t think someone can just pick up an issue of The Legion and immediately know what’s going on.
HB: I don’t think you can do that with any comic. I couldn’t do that with the Legion when I started reading it back in 1964.
KG: But you shouldn’t. There should be something in the book to grab your attention...
HB: ...and to make you come back and find out more about it.
KG: Now if you cheat the guy and never explain some of the background, then it’s your fault, because he’s going to get too confused and pissed off, and he’s going to drop the book. But if you can keep coming back, cycling back to the same thing in different ways — “Lightning Lad is from Winath and he’s had bad luck,” and so forth. I choose that because that’s probably the most oft-told story. The Luck Lords, the spotlight on Lightning Lad though the eyes of his brother or sister, the original stories. Sure, if you’re a long-time reader you’d say, “Oh my God, this story again!” Well, there are a lot of people out there who have never read that.
HB: And you’ve got to give them some of that background. There was a time when it seemed that Paul wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to that — there were entire issues that never established that this was going on in the Thirtieth Century.
KG: Paul writes to the artist. He’s told me that a hundred times. He gets a handle on what the artist likes to do, doesn’t like to do and is capable of doing or can pull off, and he will write to those strengths. Every so often, he will toss something else in there to see if the guy is flexible. I’d assume he’s not going to straitjacket himself, but if he’s got an artist who’s just good at straight-ahead action, he’s going to give him straight-ahead action. You’ll sometimes have a string of issues on the book wherein the artist really doesn’t belong on the book; this happens on almost every comic on the market. When that happens, any background information you’re getting is the writer’s doing, because the writer’s got to sneak it in whenever he can.
I read Paul’s plots for the three issues before #50, because I was supposed to come in on issue 47, and then they decided no, let’s make issue 50 a double-sized issue and then sabotage...no! *heh heh heh* So I read these plots and I saw the pencils. Now [Pat] Broderick and [Greg] LaRocque both like action. So, of course, Paul is going to focus more on the action sequences. It’s a real song and dance. It’s a real delicate operation to get in there without stopping the story dead. So half of the time, instead of fans turning to the writer and saying he’s just doing Mickey Mouse work, maybe they should look at how the info is being relayed. Is there time for that information, or did it have to be snuck in there?
You might look at a book and say it was all just action, action, action. Maybe that’s all the writer has gotten from the artist. And then fans complain about how the characters talk so much in combat. Maybe sometimes they have to. It depends on the individual writer’s or artist’s approach to the book, so it’s really hard to point that finger. It does aggravate me when I hear fans saying, “Oh, on this issue he really screwed up because they are talking through the fight scenes.” I’ve been in real fights before, and I didn’t have time to talk. But the information has got to be relayed, man — it’s a comic book, so give us a break. If you don’t get it while they’re sitting around, chewing the fat before the fight scene, you’ve still got to get the info across. So where do you get it? It has to come across in the fight scenes.
HB: What strengths do you think you have that Paul has been playing to?
KG: My love of the book. I just really, really like the book. Paul and I both really enjoy handling these characters.
HB: In terms of the kind of story you like to do.
KG: My ideal kind of story is the one I plotted for the Justice League moving day issue [JLI #8]. I admit to the need for combat and I admit to the need for bombastic action, but my favorite stuff is the characters just getting together and relating to one another. Bouncing something off the characters and seeing how they react; the characters’ body language, the expressions on their faces. And making sure the characters are being consistent.
Paul doesn’t have to explain Brainiac 5’s personality in the plot, because he knows I know what it is. All he’s got to do is update me on certain things. When I left Shrinking Violet, for example, she had just gotten out of a containment unit and she was reacting violently to everything. So Paul updates me on how that’s been refined or expanded on. That’s all he has to do.
I don’t know, but I think he plots his stories for me a lot more loosely, too, because he realizes I like the room to throw in occasional things. And I’ve often told Paul I like the fact that he can roll with the punches. But in a way, I’m doing it to see if I can get a reaction out of him. The most obvious example of that was the original Invisible Kid sitting up in the wreckage and going, “Where am I?” That was sort of a challenge to Paul — “OK, figure this one out, Paul!”
HB: That was something you threw in that Paul hadn’t plotted?
KG: No, I just did it. I thought, “I have all this wreckage here, so let me just draw him in here.” And when Paul saw it he said, “Now what?” I said, “I don’t know — run with it.” That was totally me. It was totally off the wall, and from the venom of the way fans reacted, I’d say I did my job. It’s sort of a way of saying to the readers, “Don’t take me too seriously,” and it’s also a way of saying that you are no longer reading a “safe” book. Things can happen and will happen. Just because five Legionnaires go off on a mission, there’s no guarantee five are going to come back or that they are going to come back in the same shape that they left in.
HB: Which we are going to be seeing more of...
KG: By the time this is printed, they’ll know, so I guess I can talk more about #50 a bit more. I didn’t kill Duo Damsel. That was not me. That was Paul. The characters who went out [to battle the Time Trapper] in #50 — Mon-El, Brainiac 5, Saturn Girl, Duo Damsel and Rond Vidar — they all come back changed. Saturn Girl comes back bearing all these physical wounds; Brainiac 5 is carrying around emotional wounds, although they are not readily apparent; Mon-El is trashed. This man looks like a burn victim, like he was yanked out of a burning car. I think Paul sort of agrees with me that he’s not going to look any better. Remember handsome Mon-El? That’s nostalgia, man. Burn tissue is ugly to look at, right? What about invulnerable burn tissue? It doesn’t go away.
So they all do come back changed. They’ve gone up against a major menace, and they’ve paid the price for their presumption. Yeah, they defeat him, but there is that price to be paid. They don’t come back the same people. There’s cause and effect.
HB: It’s interesting that you brought that up. There seems to be a line of thought with some folks in Interlac — and to some extent that belief is unjustified — that doesn’t give Paul enough credit. There were a number of comments from people about how Keith is coming back and everything is going to change, as though you were the driving force, totally, behind the book now that you’re back.
KG: I read those, too, and in a way I feel bad for Paul because of the feeling out there that Paul needs somebody to feed ideas to him. He’s infinitely more knowledgeable about the Thirtieth Century and all of its various locations and lore than I could ever be. The only thing that my coming on the book has changed is that now Paul is working with somebody he knows will go a bit further. He doesn’t have to be afraid of asking for a Thirtieth Century version of a strip-mine, because he knows he’ll get it [without having to write an elaborate description of one].
Now I’ll sit down with Paul and say, “Wouldn’t this be a great idea,” and “Wouldn’t that be a great idea,” and I’ll throw little things in there. But the stories are basically Paul’s. All I do is toss ideas at him. Paul hands me the typewritten plot. He still steers this book, but I’m allowed to come in and do little weird things here and there.
That's it for this time. Substack has limits on how long a newsletter can be, so you'll have to come back next time for Part Two. A good way to ensure that you won't miss it is to subscribe by clicking on the button below. You can always unsubscribe later, once the serial is through. (Hopefully you won't, but wish in one hand, am I right?)
When will that be? This is a semi-occasional newsletter, so I’m not committing to a definite date. It'll happen when it happens, but it won’t be too long. There are always the archives to peruse until then, and if you've got a ring with a 'L' on it, I'm sure there's something there that you’ll enjoy.
'Til then,
Glen