Is This Thing On? XXI
Christmastime is Here Again
This is 20th Century Refugee, the suddenly seasonal newsletter of Glen Cadigan, whose books you may have read, given that you're here. Last time out, I presented the first part of a 1988 interview with Keith Giffen, conducted by Harry Broertjes. This time around we'll get to the second part, but before we do...
Ho Ho Hold the Mail
Up here in Canada, the post office went on strike in November, so that means no Christmas cards this year. Couriers picked up the slack, but even they had to pump the brakes to deal with the backlog, so Santa will be working overtime to deliver the goodies tomorrow night. But that got me to thinking about the brief time when I was on DC Comics' Christmas card list, so I thought I'd share one here:
I didn't survive the inevitable cull that followed, so that's all you get.
The Year in Review
As far as publications go, there were two this year. First up was the sequel to Tall Tales, Fairy Tales, and Bedtime Stories (For Former Children), the aptly titled More Tall Tales, Fairy Tales, and Bedtime Stories (For Former Children)! And since it's the holiday season, don't let it be said that you only received coal in your stocking. If you click this link right here, it'll take you to the entire first story in the book, for free (plus some of the second).
Next up was my biography of Edmond Hamilton which appeared in Alter Ego # 187. I was hoping that it would make more waves than it did, especially in the science fiction community (where it was all but ignored, except for a picture on Locus' Instagram page as part of their new arrivals posts). But the people who did see it liked it, and that has to count for something. Technically, it will be eligible to be nominated in the Best Related Work category of the Hugos next year, which means it probably won't. But don't let that stop you from reading it, if you haven't already!
The Year in Preview
If you're here for the Keith Giffen interview, this'll be right up your alley: on January 15th, Back Issue! has my interview (not to be confused with Harry's) with Keith, originally presented in The Legion Companion. But since it's been a long time since TLC was in print and lots of people haven't seen it, if you're one of the ones who missed out, you'll want to read it when it appears just three short weeks from now. (And if you have read it before, there's a whole new layout with lots of pretty pictures you'll enjoy, plus more about his career than just his Legion work.) You can check out the preview to see if it's worth your hard-earned cash!
And I've mentioned this here before, and I'll keep mentioning it until it comes out: my novel The Strawman will be in people's hands in 2025. If you want to know what it's about, here's a tease:
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?
And here's an even bigger tease: the prologue and first chapter can be previewed at my personal website as an exclusive for my newsletter subscribers. Membership does have its privileges, especially around Christmastime!
Keith Giffen: The Sequel
Some people say that sequels aren't as good as the originals, but I don't know. Terminator 2, The Empire Strikes Back, The New Testament, The Odyssey... there are a lot of great sequels out there, and this is one of them! What follows is a continuation of Harry Broertjes' interview with Keith from 1988, and, as before, Harry owns it lock, stock, and barrel. But nice guy that he is, he's letting all of you read it here, for free! (The first part, for easy reference, can be found here. The next part will appear in the next newsletter, probably around the time BI! # 157 hits the stands.) Remember, this covers the era that Keith and I didn't discuss, so it's the perfect supplement to BI! # 157. And if it wets your whistle and you want to learn about the rest of Keith's Legion career (up to 2003, anyway), get on over to the TwoMorrows' website and order your copy today!
KG: The one book that I actually plotted for the Legion was the Subs special. And that was a deliberate attempt at just doing a full-tilt humor book with no connection to continuity at all.
HB: There were some incredible cries of outrage about that, too.
KG: Sure, because these clowns are determined to force it into their sacred continuity. It’s not a book that stands in Legion continuity. It does not exist. It never happened. It’s just a story that we wanted to do, and we figured, let’s do it. Why can’t we do it? It’s a dream, or whatever you want to call it. How could it fit into Legion continuity when the way the Subs got onto Bismoll was by editorial decree? It’s like, “Come on, people, open your eyes.” I thought they would read it and say, “That’s amusing,” and get back on with their lives again.
HB: Would you like to do another Subs special?
KG: Ty Templeton would give his left nut at this point to be able to do a Substitute Heroes story. [And he did — Secret Origins # 37 — Glen.] I’m sure that if another Subs idea comes up and we say, “Gee, this sounds interesting, let’s go,” we’ll try that again. It’s like Legionnaires 3 — the idea hit and we asked permission to do it, and we got it. So I had just as much to do with Legionnaires 3 as I did with the Substitute Heroes Special, and Legionnaires 3 was no laff riot. Same with Cosmic Boy, but that one was basically Paul’s idea. Those two can be put into the continuity that the Subs special was never meant to be in.
HB: I suppose a lot of people would have been a little happier if there had just been two little words on the Subs special: “Imaginary Story.”
KG: But why should we have to? I figured I was doing fandom a favor by not using Night Girl. I figured I’d give them that much, because of Night Girl’s connection with Cosmic Boy. I could hear the shrieks that would have gone up. But it’s still treated like this piece of garbage. Why is it a piece of garbage? Because of what it did to the Subs. Well, forget the Subs — how did you like the story? I haven’t heard much about that, although there was one guy who wrote in a comment saying, “I, too, agree that what Keith did to the Substitute Heroes was a sin and a crime against God and man, but it was a funny story anyway.” That’s all I’m asking. Was it or wasn’t it a funny story? Forget all the baggage and the continuity and the stuff you’ve been dragging around for years. Just sit down and read it clean.
HB: Although I presume that’s not the attitude that you bring to the regular Legion stories that you do.
KG: No, with the regular Legion stories you’ve got to take into account the rich traditions of the team and of the book as well as pushing the story forward. No, I’m not going to come in and say to Paul, “Let’s give Lightning Lord a prefrontal lobotomy and turn him into a humorous character.” It doesn’t work. It’s like there are certain things you have to back away from.
HB: It did work with Guy Gardner...
KG: But the Justice League is a whole different kind of book. I’ve always said that each assignment that you get dictates the approach. All right, I guess that’s why I get into so much trouble — because I don’t use the same approach for each individual assignment.
HB: No, you confuse people by doing that. People are used to the consistency of a Jack Kirby or Curt Swan.
KG: Both wonderful creators and artists in their own right.
HB: But they are also very predictable.
KG: You know what you’re getting when you pick up a book and it says Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, whoever, on the cover. I don’t want that to happen with me. I want people to pick up the book and say, “Oh, Giffen is doing Superman. I wonder how he’ll approach Superman.” Or, “He’s back on the Legion. I wonder how his approach will be different from the first time around,” and not to say, “Oh my God, he’s going to do the Legion the same way he did ‘Dr. Fate.’” That’s ridiculous. The approach I used on “Dr. Fate” would not work on the Legion. I learned that from experience. The book has different parameters.
When you come on a book, there are some parameters you have to work within. You can go anywhere you want within that space, but if you try to push it too far, you’re going to hit the wall. I usually can’t go any further. Now what I object to is when the parameters are too tight. “You’re coming on the Legion and you can do this, this and this, but you can never change Ultra Boy’s costume.” If the editor and Paul and everyone agrees, who says I can’t change it? But then, there are the parameters with the Legion like you can’t have them all decide to join the army and do the Legion as a military book, because it would violate the whole concept of the series. It’s like what Steve Englehart is doing with the Fantastic Four is a violation of the whole concept of the Fantastic Four.
HB: And what was he doing? I haven’t been keeping up with it.
KG: He changed the membership. Fine. But now there’s two Things in there now, and it’s just incredible. It’s not the Fantastic Four. If you’re going to do that, take some of the Fantastic Four’s powers and make a new team. This is not the Fantastic Four that I grew up knowing or that I’ve been familiar with for years. Now I’m not saying you can’t change it at all, but keep in mind which book you’re working on. I’m not going to come onto the Legion and turn it into the Justice League. They’re two different books. “Oh, no, it’s going to be a funny book!” No, it’s not going to be a funny book! It’s the Legion. Yeah, there are going to be more humorous pieces in there, because I believe in the midst of all this cosmic seriousness you’ve got to have a little bit of comic relief. Shakespeare did it.
HB: And people do act like that. People don’t go around being solemn all the time in real life.
KG: Right. The one thing I loved about my first run on the book was that there was a camaraderie. The characters could joke and laugh with one another. It was a group of people who got together, and there were personality clashes and everything — and some of them were humorous. I don’t want everything to be dead serious and gloom and doom. There’s got to be a little bit of relief in there, and if people don’t like it, all I can say is, “Don’t buy the book.”
HB: What kind of arrangement have you and Paul set up now in producing the stories? Let’s go through it step by step.
KG: Paul gives me the plot. It’s all typed up. In drawing it, I might add little things. I’ll make sure all the information he wants is on the page, but [in an upcoming issue] he introduces the character that we call the Elemental. He suggested it was like an Oriental humanoid to give it a different look. I made it a Gil’Dishpan. [ Glen here — an Asian elemental character, Harmonia Li, joined the Legion during Levitz’s third run on the series.] That’s something that, if he wants to when he sees it, he can bounce an idea off of, or just continue his plot as if it were a humanoid and I’ll translate it all into Gil’Dishpan terms. When I see him in the office, I’ll say, “How’s this for an idea?” “How’s that for a wild idea?” And if it appeals to him, he’ll toss it into the book. Now I’m pushing him to do a western. Take the Legion to a planet like the wild west. If he can come up with a decent idea for it, I’m sure he’ll do it.
In this latest issue, he mentions Blok is starting to change visually, so when I read that I threw in subtle changes in his facial structure and the design of his body. Paul had put one line there saying it was sort like the silicon equivalent of puberty. So I went to Paul and said, “Let’s really push this. Let’s have him go through kind of a pubescence that a silicon life form would go through.” I envision Blok, when he’s done with this, possibly being 11 feet tall, eight feet wide at the shoulders, massive, slow-moving, nodules sprouting at different parts of his body to give off steam and heat. He will be like this volcanic reactor. The heart of rock is lava. He will become this intensely massive creature. Slow-moving, yes, but very effective as a character. Not the Pillsbury Doughboy in gray. I know full well we’re going to get a lot of letters saying, “You sabotaged him! I loved him!” Well, how come we only get the “I loved him” letters when it’s too late?
HB: Maybe part of it is just the explanation, or lack of one. What’s needed is a comment off to the side to the effect that Blok is going through puberty here, he’s going through changes. Maybe Blok should be saying, “I don’t know what’s happening to me here.”
KG: Well, you know, there is a scene where he’s looking in the glass and going, “Jesus, maybe I’m out of my environment. Am I evolving into something my life form was never meant to evolve into?” But that’s the extent of what I’m doing at this point.
I’ll take an idea of Paul’s and I might push it further than he had meant at the time, like with Shadow Lass. Something happens between Mon-El and Shadow Lass, and I pushed it a bit further to give it a visual point of reference, and Paul loved it. And from out of that he sat down and spewed out this bunch of ideas that related to Talok VIII that he springboarded into a whole story idea. I’m not coming in to Paul and saying, “OK, now we’re going to do this and this, so just write up a plot, Paul.” That’s ridiculous. He’s still writing the book, he’s still plotting the book, he still has final say on what goes down on the typewriter paper. But I have his and Karen’s blessings to play with it a bit. As long as the story that he wants told is getting told, I can do little things like bring Invisible Kid back. Or have Timber Wolf trying to catch a bus and turn it into him going through the roof of the bus. He still caught the bus.
And if I have a bit of space — and sometimes I wonder whether Paul does this on purpose — sometimes I’ll get into the page and think, “Boy, the information on this page I can get into these three panels, and I’ve got a whole bunch of panels left over.” That’s the point where I can sit down and think, “OK, what else can I toss in here? What weird little thing can I put in?” In #50, he had the White Witch vanishing. She vanishes in anger — she’ll be gone, too, for a while — and that’s what Paul called for. Well, I simply added the extra layer; she vanished in a cloud of sulphuric smoke. Polar Boy, who is standing close by, is recoiling — he’s clutching his nose and fanning the air desperately. It doesn’t make Polar Boy look like a jerk; as a matter of fact, I’m trying desperately to make Polar Boy look like less of a jerk.
HB: You’ve got a job ahead of you on that one.
KG: The silly little beanie is gone. And the fur is back. And even Paul has mentioned that he’s building toward issue #52, which is sort of a coming of age for Polar Boy and some other characters. Paul even put in the plot that Polar Boy maybe gets rid of some of the sillier parts of his uniform as he begins to realize that you have to accept responsibility for what you’re doing. You have to accept the responsibility that comes with the position that you’ve accepted, and no matter how much you bitch and whine and moan or slap your forehead or try to act cool, it all comes down to the performance. And that all came from Paul.
That's it for now. Remember, the way to see things before everyone else is to subscribe, and that's what the little button below does. It enlists you in an exclusive club that keeps me from talking to myself.
Happy Holidays!
Glen