Keith Giffen, co-creator of Lobo, Jaime Reyes, Jack of Hearts, Maxwell Lord, and Rocket Raccoon, and co-author of some of the best Justice League and Legion of Super-Heroes comics of all time, has passed away.
The news broke on Giffen’s Facebook page, with a post that captured Giffen’s spirit and sense of humor:
“Keith was probably the most fertile creative mind of our generation in comics,” said Paul Levitz, who worked with Giffen on Legion of Super-Heroes. “He had an infinite number of ideas, pouring constantly out. Many, thankfully, never saw print as wholly insane or inappropriate. But the ones that did!”
The duo worked together on roughly five years worth of Legion stories. “Many of them he made far better than they might have been with any other collaborator, because of his ideas and contributions to character moments and drama,” Levitz continued. “A few we had rough times on, but I think no more than could be expected in a long relationship.”
Born in Queens, New York, Giffen’s family moved to New Jersey when he was an infant. He said he started reading comics at a very young age, thanks to a customer of his mom, who used to do tailoring work for neighbors.
“She was really handy and capable of cobbling things together out of patterns,” Giffen told the Jack Kirby Collector. “So a lot of the women in the neighborhood would go over there and pay her to do what they couldn’t do. And there was this one woman who worked at one of these—I don’t know what they’re called, but they were these big paper plants where all of the comics came with the titles torn off to be destroyed. And she would just scoop handfuls up and bring them to my mother, and she would pass them on to me.”
He said the first issue he remembers reading was an issue of World’s Finest. “It was when Batwoman got Superman’s powers,” Giffen said. “All I could remember about it for years was that it had this big green monster with Mickey Mouse gloves on the cover and Batwoman zooming down. That was my first exposure to comics. That really stood out among the Archies and the various others. From there it was an easy slide to the Fin Fang Foom and the Goom, Son of Goomba books, which are probably my first exposure to Jack Kirby before I knew who he was.”
Giffen’s first published story was a collaboration with Bill Mantlo — “The Sword and The Star,” a black-and-white text story featured in Marvel Preview #4 with writer Bill Mantlo. The story was a play off The Odyssey, and Giffen got the gig after randomly dropping off his portfolio at Marvel. Mantlo saw his work and requested he fill in for Ed Hannigan, who couldn’t draw the story due to a prior commitment. That was in early 1976, and later that summer Mantlo and Giffen would create Rocket Raccoon in the same title.
“He was a throwaway character,” Giffen told Rolling Stone about Rocky Raccoon, who was originally named after the Beatles track. “When you create these things, you’re like a foster parent: You hand it off to the next guy and hope he won’t fuck it into the ground.”
Giffen spent the late 1970s working on titles for both Marvel and DC, including Defenders, Super Villain Team-Up, All-Star Comics, Iron Man and Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, where he and Mantlo created another “throwaway character,” Jack of Hearts.
His early art style had a distinct Jack Kirby influence, but morphed over the years into a cleaner style that brought him to the forefront as he worked on Legion. Together he and Levitz took the title to new heights of popularity, peaking with a story that I would call one of the greatest monthly comic stories of the time, “The Great Darkness Saga.”
And while working with Roger Slifer in the early 1980s on Omega Men, the duo would create the bad-ass intergalactic bounty hunter Lobo, who had a very different look when he debuted:
In the mid to late 1980s, his art style changed again, to a less realistic, heavily inked style that echoed Argentinian artist José Antonio Muñoz. You could see it on display in the “Five Years Later” Legion of Super-Heroes series he plotted and drew. The Comics Journal ran several articles in the 1980s analyzing his new style and accusing him of “swiping” from Muñoz.
“A friend of mine who shall remain nameless, because I don’t want him dragged into this, showed me a whole bunch of xeroxed pages of this Munoz artwork,” Giffen told the Jack Kirby Collector. “I was flabbergasted. I think for about a month I couldn’t work. All I could do was study this guy’s work; poring over it and poring over it, until the point I practically became that work, and I stepped over a line. I fully admit that—not for any of the reasons they claimed I did. There was no time I was sitting there tracing or copying, no. Duplicating, pulling out of memory and putting down on paper after intense study, absolutely. Did Munoz wrong? Mm-hmm, sure did. I guess they could have a nice little article on how you get so fixated on something and so obsessed by it that you can actually do somebody that you’re a big fan of wrong. The odd thing was the end result of the whole thing. I got Justice League and then my career really took off. So I don’t know how that works. [laughter] I’m not kidding. I was so gun shy at that point about putting pencil to paper. I moved into the plotting and the breaking down and telling the story, which I always thought was my strong point anyway.”
Throughout his career, Giffen would prove his resilience and his ability to grow, whether via his changing art style or by shifting from just being an artist to a plotter and eventually full writer. After Crisis on Infinite Earths simplified the DC Universe and DC rebooted their major titles, Giffen and the man who would become his frequent collaborator, J.M. DeMatteis, took over Justice League of America, changing the name and tone of the book. Joined by artist Kevin Maguire, they would go on to introduce a lighter, humorous take on DC’s greatest heroes. The book would quickly change from the simple Justice League to Justice League International.
“Keith was one of the most brilliantly creative humans I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing,” DeMatteis wrote on Facebook. “A curmudgeon with a heart of gold. A generous collaborator. An old, dear friend. And, as my wife observed, ‘He was like a character out of a Keith Giffen story.’ So true! Safe travels, Keith. You will be missed.”
Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire were a creative powerhouse, whose work on Justice League still resonates with fans today — and with creators like Tom King and Greg Smallwood, who revisited that era in their award-winning Human Target miniseries last year. The Giffen/DeMatteis team worked on Justice League for five years, closing out their run in 1992. They’d continue to work together on comics like Metal Men, Defenders and Hero Squared, one of the first titles published by BOOM! Studios, as well as the award-winning 2003 revival Formerly Known as the Justice League.
I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another character Giffen brought to life in the 1980s — one he created on his own in the early 1980s, Ambush Bug. The character first appeared in DC Comics Presents #52, in a team-up story featuring Superman and the Doom Patrol:
Giffen introduced Ambush Bug as basically Bugs Bunny as a super villain, but the character shifted to be more of a hero — an annoying, off-kilter hero. The character has rarely been used by other writers besides Giffen over the years, making him the character I most associate with him. Giffen has worked on the character many times over the years, in miniseries, specials and as a guest star in various titles he’s written.
I’ve mostly talked about Giffen’s work at DC, which also included Dr. Fate, Doom Patrol, Suicide Squad, Reign of the Zodiac, Aquaman, Vext and many others. In later years, he’d go on to work on DC’s ambitious weekly series 52, followed by the weekly Countdown to Final Crisis. He also worked for a lot of publishers besides Marvel and DC, from Trencher at Image Comics to I Luv Halloween at TokyoPop. Yes, he even did manga; he also adapted Battle Royale for English-language readers.
But I wanted to shift over to his Marvel work in the early 2000s for a moment, where he and others would put the focus on their cosmic characters. Giffen helped spearhead Annihilation, the crossover event that saw Fantastic Four villain Annihilus and his Negative Zone forces invade the Marvel Universe, only for a ragtag group of heroes that included Gamora, Star Lord, Drax and Rocket Raccoon, among many others, to fight back. It was followed by Annihilation: Conquest, which eventually brought about the Guardians of the Galaxy as we know them today. He might have only c0-created Rocket Raccoon, but I think it’s safe to say the Guardians we know in comics and on the big screen wouldn’t exist without Giffen. And neither would the wonderful Blue Beetle movie that came out earlier this year, featuring Jaime Reyes, a character he co-created.
He’ll be remembered for his creativity, his versatility and the impression he left on both fans and pros alike.
“He gave me one of the best pieces of advice I ever got,” said Mark Waid, who worked with him on several different projects at DC. “When I asked him 20 years ago what the secret was to maintaining a steady career in comics, he said, ‘Figure out what you do better than anyone else and own that lane. It may not always be in fashion, but when it is, they have no choice but to come to you.'”
Rest in peace and thank you, Mr. Giffen, for not always being in fashion, but for always being you.
I owe him many hours of happy reading. Sad news.