Is This Thing On? XXIV
The Future's So Bright
Welcome back to 20th Century Refugee, the it-comes-out-when-it-comes-out newsletter of Glen Cadigan. If you're reading this on the planet Earth, it's technically spring where you live. And what better time to announce something new than with spring in the air?
On Deck
I've been promising a big announcement for a couple of newsletters now, and there's no better time than the present to lay it on you! My next comics-related foray will be a three-part interview with Joe Hill, to be published in Comic Book Creator #'s 44-46. Originally the first part was planned to go on sale one year from now, but with the Diamond bankruptcy and the switch to a new distributor, that means it won't happen until June, 2026, which isn't exactly around the corner, but it's already been announced elsewhere, so you might as well read about it here, too!
Joe is, of course, a best-selling New York Times novelist with multiple adaptations of his work on both the big and small screens. But I think of him as the Eisner-award winning author of Locke & Key, the Netflix-adapted comic book series that's one of the best things to arrive in comic shops this century. If I know my audience, you probably haven't read it yet, and that's to your disadvantage. Hopefully you'll check it out before the interview appears so that you'll be able to follow along!
Up Next
The Strawman is still scheduled to go on sale on September 30th, and you can preorder your very own copy here. I think it's worth the money, and hopefully, you will, too!
Who is Harry Broertjes?
This is it -- the final part of Harry Broertjes' Keith Giffen interview! When we began this journey last year, I imagined it wrapping up before now, but there's no rushing a good thing. And as I reread each installment, I'm reminded of what a great thing this interview is. It goes into the kind of detail that I like, and it's cut from a moment in time that's one of my personal favorites. I've gone on and on about how it complements my Keith Giffen interview (recently reprinted in Back Issue! # 157), but what I haven't done is discuss the man who brought it to us. Exactly who is Harry Broertjes?
A quick Google search shows us that he was born in 1882 and died in 1930.
Wait... that was probably his grandfather. Our Harry was the editor/co-editor of The Legion Outpost fanzine of the 1970s (along with Mike Flynn and Jay Zilber, depending upon which issue you read), and it was in that capacity that he rediscovered Jim Shooter living in Pittsburgh, washed out of comics in his early twenties. Harry interviewed him and encouraged him to head back to New York to give comics another go, and that brought Big Jim back to the industry we all know and love. After that pivotal role, he was one of the original members of Interlac, the Legion APA. But you probably know him best for being part of the mash-up that is Legion of Super-Heroes superfan, Flynt Brojj (the other key ingredient being Mike Flynn, although Mike says Flynt looked a lot like Jay Zilber).
Outside of comics, Harry worked at the Miami Herald for eons before he retired just before the newspaper industry fully imploded. Inside of comics, you might know him from his introductions to The Legion of Super-Heroes Archives Volume 3, as well as 1987's The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told. I have a soft spot for another Shooter interview he did, the one that appeared in The X-Men Chronicles back in the day. You know the issue… it has that great painted cover by Dave Cockrum. Harry also did some text pages for Defiant (or was it Broadway?) Comics in the ‘90s -- I think he knew the guy running the company or something. Here's a recent picture of Harry [insert pic of Proty II here].
Back to Keith Giffen: if you want to refresh your memory, Parts 1, 2, 3, & 4 of the interview are in the archives. My interview with Keith is available here, and if you've still got some money left over, you can consider spending it here, like I suggested earlier.
HB: What’s your favorite comic book out right now? Aside from the ones you’re working on.
KG: Um...took me by surprise on this one. [Long pause] I read Lone Wolf and Cub, but that’s reprints. [Long pause] Oh, this is embarrassing, Harry. Sinner, of course; everyone’s going to go, “Yeah, sure, Sinner, of course.”
HB: What’s Sinner?
KG: Reprints of [Jose] Munoz’s European and South American work — Fantagraphics albums, so I’m supportin’ ‘em. I read Eddy Current and Transit when I can find these. Raw magazine, I pick that up religiously. That’s really all that I’ll pick up and deal with. I flip through almost everything just to be aware of what’s going on, but that’s about it.
HB: What about books without pictures? What are you into there?
KG: Well, I’ll pick up Stephen King out of inertia. It’s not so much that I say, “Oh, boy, Stephen King, I’ve gotta have all his books!” He’s good for a read like McDonald’s is good for an eat. Clive Barker. He’s sort of replaced King as the guy that I’ll follow. Tom Clancy’s books, Red Storm Rising, The Hunt for Red October. And then, on the other end, there’s stuff like Tales From Times Square by Josh or Drew Friedman, one of them wrote that.
I always have to have something to read, and they fly by so fast that I usually wind up lending them out to people all over the place. I tend to like the action-adventure, intrigue kinds of things. And I like a good horror read. I read a lot of horror fiction. Not much sci-fi. I crawled through [L. Ron] Hubbard’s first Battlefield: Earth book, and it was a painful experience, but I was determined to hit the end. I don’t really care for biography, although I did find Wired [Bob Woodward’s biography of John Belushi] to be a real interesting book. I love [John] Irving’s books — [The World According to] Garp, Hotel New Hampshire and all those.
HB: What about TV? What do you watch?
KG: Very, very, very, very, very little. I absorb a lot because my wife and daughter are TV fanatics. I’ll sit down and watch It’s Garry Shandling’s Show because he’s doing with TV what I was trying so hard to do with Ambush Bug, and that’s break down that “wall.” Fawlty Towers is my all-time favorite. Monty Python, Late Night With David Letterman. And I’m getting a kick out of a new show called China Beach. But that’s about it. Those are the only shows that I’ll watch. And every so often, I like to sit down and put my brain on hold and watch Edward Woodward walk through The Equalizer to see how they can abuse a women this week, which is what, basically, this show is all about. “What will we do next after the rape and this and that?” “Smother me.” “OK, we’ll do that.”
I’m not much better with movies. I don’t really get to them that often because there’s not a heck of a lot of movies out that I feel ambitious enough to get out of the chair and out of the house to see. The VCR has destroyed my movie-going. There aren’t really any contemporary films that have blown me away recently, although the one that came the closest was Near Dark. The films I keep going back to — the ones that you buy, you know, to watch over and over again — are films like Ruling Class, Mishima, Amadeus — that was probably the last one that really blew me away, that I raved about to everybody. My guilty pleasure is my collection of hardcore splatter movies.
My guilty pleasure with music is Meat Loaf. When I’m working, I just put on WNEW — it’s not Top 40. It’s the only contemporary rock station — it’s not progressive rock, I won’t call it that anymore — and it’s nice background noise. I can work and not really pay attention to it, but every so often something will catch my attention and I can relax a bit.
My tastes just fall where they may, it seems. I’ll love a book like Thriller but not be that crazy about Swamp Thing. The last time I fell for, “Oh wow, you’ve got to see it, you have to go see it,” was with Aliens. I made two attempts to see it, and I fell asleep twice. Then I picked it up for the VCR, played it through, and it’s no wonder I fell asleep. The only thing missing from that film was Sybil Danning. It was like Rambo in space. “Mood? What’s that?” The more people that rave about a film, the more I usually back away from it. Sometimes they’re right — with Amadeus, they were right — sometimes, like with Aliens, Jaws, The Exorcist — one of my 10 top comedy films — they’ll be dead wrong, horribly wrong. But then, I hate Star Trek.
HB: The new one? The old one? Both?
KG: Both of them. I loathe the old one. The new one I get a kick out of because they deliberately went out to make a show with no likable characters in it, and I thought, “Well, that’s new, that’s unique, to put out a show that is designed to self-destruct.” But the old one — no, I hated it. I hated the first runs when I saw them, I hated the reruns. I hated the movies.
HB: What is it you hated about them?
KG: I don’t know. It’s just a knee-jerk reaction. I don’t like the characters. I just don’t like it at all. I don’t like the look of it. Maybe it’s the actors. I’ve never been [William] Shatner’s biggest fan, and [Leonard] Nimoy gives me gas. Walter Koenig is like the pro-abortion poster child. I just can’t deal with these people.
HB: When did you start out in comics?
KG: The Bicentennial year — ‘76.
HB: How did that come about? I know that you were doing stuff [outside the comics business] before that, so it wasn’t like you came straight out of high school and went up to DC and got work immediately.
KG: No, I went straight up to Marvel and got work immediately. I was working as a hazardous materials handler and took a week’s vacation. I took my portfolio around. It was sitting there in John Romita’s office and Bill Mantlo took a look at it and said, “Give this guy a book.” I was in. John turned to me when I was in the office and said, “Don’t quit your day job, man.”
There were rough times there. Any problems I had with people like Jim Shooter and any of the other people back then, even Paul Levitz, were my own fault. I came and I wouldn’t listen to anybody. Totally wrong attitude. And then I had to bomb out of the field for a couple of years and I went down south, where I repossessed things.
HB: Down south where?
KG: South Jersey. You can tell I’ve lived in Jersey all my life, right? South is South Jersey. There is nothing beyond the cape, man. For all I know, you’re in another country [in Florida].
HB: The Pocket Universe of America.
KG: Don’t get me started on that! I did odd jobs, sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door, and then moved back up to North Jersey and decided to give it a shot again. This time, I did it right. I was willing to listen. The “Dr. Fate” backups were what finally led to me being taken on The Legion, and from then on it was just making up for lost time. And people are pretty much aware of what I’ve been doing since then. There have been mistakes made. I still haven’t learned how to handle it all perfectly, or even sometimes professionally. But at least I’m learning.
For a while there, before Justice League hit, I was on the last couple of issues of Hex and I practically had one foot out the door. And I’d say Justice League was the saving grace. It came along at the right time. It sort of proved that I can go into the DC universe, jump in with both feet and not embarrass everybody. I spent three years on The Legion, three damn years on The Legion.
Then I did one year’s worth of Ambush Bug books, and all of a sudden I was the loony artist. I was typecast from Ambush Bug, not The Legion. So Justice League came along and broke that, and I’m kind of pleased. Right now, I’m in a better position than I’ve ever been in up at DC, and I’ve really never been happier with the company — with the exception of [Legion] #50.
HB: I’ve got to ask you, since you reacted to it: What about the Pocket Universe? Lemme get you started on it.
KG: First of all, I can’t see how DC could have possibly done that to Paul. Here he is on The Legion, and they remove the linchpin that holds it all together. They take Superboy away, they take Supergirl away, they take everything away and then, after Paul has struggled and fucked around to redo everything, Supergirl’s back!
If they were going to do it, they should have gone all the way, and that should have been that it wasn’t a pocket universe, it was like wherever the Time Trapper thought that they’d go, he just created it out of whole cloth. My original idea was that Smallville and the Earth they’ve been going to all along in the Twentieth Century was all inside the paperweight on the Time Trapper’s desk.
I think it was just poorly conceived, and executed even worse. If they are going to bring back Supergirl, they owe it to Paul and to the Legion book to give her to us. Paul and the Legion should have been the ones who said, “OK, since you took her away from us, here’s the story.” It shouldn’t have come from another source. It shouldn’t have been explaining Superboy to help Superman’s book. It should have been explaining Superboy to save the Legion’s book, and that’s not the way it was approached. I might be wrong, but I’m going on the same information the average fan has. I didn’t like it. I was kind of appalled.
HB: You had some problems with the Time Trapper in the original four-parter [the original Pocket Universe story] too, as I recall.
KG: Yes. For the living embodiment of entropy, with nothing under the hood, why was he always wearing rubber monster gloves? Why didn’t he wear regular gloves? He was always wearing these big rubber monster gloves.
Again, it was just the lack of communication. I’ve always believed that the reason they came up with the English language was so that people could communicate ideas to one another. It doesn’t work for some people. So, yeah, I was a little bitched off about that, but that was seeing as how we took Legionnaires 3 to revamp the Time Trapper — incredibly overused word in comics, “revamp” — to salvage the character, to undo the whole — with Paul’s blessing, by the way — to undo the whole Time-Trapper-as-Renegade-Controller storyline. Paul had to nix them; they wanted to turn the Time Trapper into Rip Hunter. Paul said, “Jesus Christ, we go through all this stuff to give you a good villain again and now you want to do this?” God bless you, Paul, for killing that one. I had trouble with the whole thing. But then, I wasn’t involved, so I had no right to open my mouth.
HB: Well, they stuck you with that, and now you and Paul can run with that new twist.
KG: From my point of view, I’d like to get more information on ol’ Dev-Em now, and I definitely want to draw the Emerald Empress again. She’s probably my favorite character out of that entire slice of life.
HB: There’s a lot that can be done with her, too, that has never really been touched on.
KG: I know there’s a new Fatal Five coming, but this time the [Emerald] Eye’s going to recruit it. It’s going to be interesting to see what the Emerald Eye recruits. Paul’s been hinting to me that we’re finally going to see what that eye popped out of [and get into] the green energy, who this woman is, where she got this thing, why there’s this symbiotic relationship, is she in charge, is it in charge — really get down and explore the character. Again, without violating anything that’s gone before.
HB: Could it have popped out of that big ol’ power battery on Oa in 1987?
KG: The only thing I know is, she is certainly not going to look like Farrah Fawcett any more. I’m going back to the way I drew her when I drew her that one time in that Emerald Empress story I did on Weber’s World. The femme fatale, but regal in her bearing, you know, not this green-haired bimbo running around with a low-cut, Dolly Parton body piece — just don’t exhale, for Godsakes. Jeweled buttons? No, no-no, no-no! It’s the Emerald Empress, it’s not Lady Di.
HB: Who’s your favorite Legionnaire?
KG: At this point? To draw, Blok.
HB: If you were placed in a room for an hour with a Legionnaire?
KG: Oh, Cosmic Boy.
HB: How come?
KG: Don’t know. Just a gut feeling. I’ve always had an affinity for that character’s personality and the way he reacts to things. I think he is the closest to the epitome of the hero that the Legion has. Cosmic Boy is just good old dull plodding Cosmic Boy.
HB: In a way, he’s kind of the embodiment, along with Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl, of the Legion of the ‘60s, the optimistic Legion. Basically, your middle-class kind of guy who’s very good at what he does without being terribly pretentious about it.
KG: He’s Wally Cleaver. No, I wouldn’t go that far. But he is the judge at Brainiac 5’s trial, and it just made sense to use him because he’s got his head screwed much more firmly onto his shoulders [than the other Legionnaires do]. He’s got a new costume, too. Not a new one — a variation on the one he’s got now to get rid of the pink and to put metallic colors on. How’s that for a wild idea? Totally outrageous. I hope we get a lot of hate mail about that.
If you want to know who my least-favorite Legionnaire is, it’s Dawnstar.
HB: Why?
KG: The woman needs a personality bypass operation real fast. She’s just long hair and a great set of tits. That’s it. I dislike the character all the way down the line — visually, powerwise, her personality.
HB: Do you think she’s fixable, or is she one of the Legionnaires, if you could kill one of them in the next five minutes, she’d be the one?
KG: I don’t think there is a single character there that is unfixable. Tellus I’d kill in the next five minutes just because I hate drawing him. Nothing personal.
With Dawnstar, it would have to be a story where she would really be put through the wringer. It might be nice if she acted more like an American Indian. That might be interesting, but again, that’s not for me to say. Why is she there? I don’t know. No one knows.
HB: I think she was there for Mike Grell, originally. I recall Paul saying that she was created specifically for Mike.
KG: It used to be, if you’d asked me the same question, I probably would have said Phantom Girl. But she sort of evened off and turned into a den mother. It’s something about Dawnstar. That character, she bugs the living hell out of me.
One thing I should clarify is, I’m not out to get the fans. Ever since the Ambush Bug story with the fanboy, everybody’s got the attitude that I’m out to deliberately aggravate the fans, that I will go out of my way to piss them off — outrage them. That’s just not the case. I will not kowtow to the fans, and if a good idea comes along and I look at it and say, “Jeez, this is a good story idea, but the readers will probably hate it,” or “The hard-core readers will probably hate it,” I’m not going to back down from it.
HB: But I’ll bet you feel a certain amount of glee, whether you’ll admit it or not, in knowing that you are going to bring about that sort of reaction.
KG: Oh, sure. There are some things that I do out of spite. Some people will piss me off so bad that I’ll do it just to say, “You’re wrong.”
HB: Such as?
KG: Such as Invisible Kid. “Here he is! You’re wrong!” I almost did it with Brainiac 5 — that is, almost took him out of the overalls and gave him a totally different costume. With Ultra Boy, that wasn’t the case. I really thought that [costume change] made sense. It’s not that I just look around and say, “Let’s see now, they think this, this and this is inviolate, so let’s violate it.” It’s more when it reaches the point where it’s almost a dogma. “This is this and that’s all there is to it” — that’s when I get to feeling, “Well, no, it’s not.” And lots of times it just goes full circle. They’ll say something like, oh, “Saturn Girl would never have an affair,” and I’ll think, “OK, let’s take her through the affair, but let’s bring them back to the happily married couple — but let’s rip them through it.” These absolute statements bother me so. You know, “This shalt never change, world without end, amen.” Sorry. And it does do the book good [to do things like this].
HB: It’s got to change. It’s got to move along.
KG: It’s got to grow and evolve a little bit, and there’s nothing that’s done that, if the outcry is too bad, can’t be undone. I happen to like the way Ultra Boy looks — when he’s colored right. Maybe we’ll get more hate mail on that than we’ve ever gotten in our entire careers. We say, “My God, it’s got to go back.” You know how easy that is? It’s done in one panel. “Oh, you’re wearing that again.” “Yeah, yeah, I felt like a jerk.” It’s over. So if it’s that easily done that you can give it a shot, take it. You might like it. If you hate it, fine, we were wrong. We’ll go back. I can only assume that’s why Paul said to put Mon-El’s hand back on. But don’t not try.
Thanks to Harry Broertjes, once again, for allowing his time capsule interview with Keith Giffen to find a whole new audience. I hope everyone seeing it here for the first time enjoyed reading it as much as I did running it!
Until next time,
Glen
That was great, travelling back in time to read about the future again. Thanks for sharing!