Keith Giffen Always Delivered a Knockout

A Brief Treatise on Life, Comics and How to Keep Beat Writing From Being Drudgery

Google Maps claims it’s a 19-minute walk from my childhood home to holy ground, but when I was 10 years old it felt like forever. We went through the woods (though we certainly didn’t have to) sticker bushes and an inexplicable patch of bamboo our first significant obstacles. Then it was across the soccer and ball fields at the elementary school, each home to many personal failures—and a few minor successes—until we reached ALL CAPS “danger.”

The Road.

This journey would be unthinkable today. If I saw a kid I knew out on his own, crossing four lanes of traffic going a robust 40 miles-per-hour, navigating a busy railroad track and passing any number of weirdos and vagrants, I would flip the fuck out. But I grew up in a different time, an era when kids could roam, when it didn’t seem like child abuse to turn a young man loose, to worry about his whereabouts only when it was time for supper to hit the table.

We took this well-beaten path almost every Saturday afternoon, because the destination was worth the journey—Southern Comics.

Before this oasis of nerdery opened in the same strip mall shopping center my mom went to to gossip and do “The Firm” workouts, my comic book experience had been limited to a single spindly spinner rack at the Kroger and the occasional trip to the newsstand downtown, where I’d split my time between the funny books and the wrestling magazines. My step dad hated both, considering them anti-intellectual and crass, but would accept comics more readily than rasslin. And, so, I’d return home with a copy of Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe or The Avengers to while away a few hours, reading them again and again, lost in the beautiful explosions of color and inanity.

Comics at the time weren’t the beating heart of mainstream normie culture the way they are now. They were for outcasts and dreamers, kids who played D+D and wore Doc Martens, dudes who listened to REM or The Cure and loathed pop acts like Huey Lewis and the News (I had a well-worn tape of Sports and still know every word of “Hip to be Square” though. Don’t tell anybody).

A comic was different than any other form of entertainment, combining the pompous verbosity of a pulp novelist with exciting visuals that weren’t limited by any particular budget or technology. They were 30 pages of cheap paper, two staples and endless entertainment.

At Southern Comics I found a home—and a repository for my weekly allowance. Soon I didn’t just buy comics and discard them like we did our other periodicals. I had a long box that held 300 of them, then two. My immersion in this world came at a time of a creative renaissance, when The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen took super heroes to new and increasingly dark places. Soon grim and gritty was the predominant style, with hyper-violent anti-heroes ruling the roost, often only distinguishable from a villain by virtue of their name being in the title.

Keith Giffen’s Justice League International pushed back at this darker world, taking a collection of B-characters and recreating the super hero team as a situation comedy, action and suspense often giving way to belly laughs and guffaws. Giffen (who passed away earlier this month) had begged for the book for months and was given free rein, in part because most of DC’s top tier stars weren’t available for him to use.

People in power kept track of what Superman was up to. There were editors and executives and committees who wanted a vote. Less so with, say, Fire and Ice or the Martian Manhunter. It allowed the creative team to be ridiculous and silly—and, surprisingly, that humorous touch made the characters more human than ever. Giffen plotted the stories with a series of sketches and provided notes on the story for J.M. DeMatteis to “turn into English” while Kevin Maguirre provided the stunning art based on Giffen’s rough outlines. Together, they captured lightning in a bottle. The book quickly became my favorite and I’ve probably read that particular run 50 times over the years.

Fast forward to 2018. I’m working for Bleacher Report and eight years into a run as a “full-time” combat sports reporter. While occasionally fun, working a beat can also be monotonous and dull. The faces and names may change, but the stories and their beats are always the same. The underdog, the legend, the kid from dire straits, the other kid who was seemingly bred for athletic success, the close contest, the blowout, the PED controversy…there are only so many kinds of athletes and athletic contests, and pretty soon they all blend together. Occasionally I’ll come across a story I did when I’m researching a topic and have no recollection at all of attending the event or talking to the athlete. It’s an endless grind of stories mostly meant as temporary and unexceptional “content.”

It can be dire.

The antidote, I found, was to try to find ways to amuse myself. So, when Bleacher Report and the editors at CNN wanted to do something about UFC fighter Conor McGregor’s exciting rise to the top of the MMA world as an “anti-hero", I immediately jumped at the opportunity. Not only was McGregor a fun character to cover, but I had the inkling I might be able to make the story even more entertaining for me (and hopefully the reader by proxy) by interviewing experts from outside the MMA world with some expertise in this area.

Why not, I thought, take a shot at interviewing Giffen, my childhood muse? After all, who knows more about anti-heroes than the creator of Lobo and the man who made Guy Gardner a blowhard so obnoxious you almost couldn’t help love him?

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As chance would have it, comic artist Howard Porter was a reader who just happened to know Giffen. He made the connection and I was able to spend over an hour chatting with Keith about movies, life, art, and even a little bit about my story for Bleacher Report. It turns out he’d actually created Lobo as a repudiation of the increasingly violent heroes that still occupy plenty of space in the comic world in television shows like The Boys or the books of Garth Ennis and the like.

“I did him as like a shrieking response to the heroes who kill, the Wolverines, the Punishers and stuff like that,” Giffen told me. “And I figured, ‘Well, why not make a really over-the-top statement?’ I didn't really care about if people liked it. I was almost hoping people didn't like it as much as I didn't like it. Unfortunately, it went from being a statement about a kind of comic to Lobo becoming almost a poster boy for that kind of hero. So I totally misfired on that. People loved it and many didn’t understand it was a parody. I used to beg Dick Giordano to take me off the book. I hated the character.

“Of course, it wasn’t just comics. It was entertainment more broadly. When my discontent started growing I think it was because the society, at that point, started fuzzing their heroes a bit. My first real impactful experience with a character who was neither a hero or a villain was in Dirty Harry. The Clint Eastwood movie. He's obviously the hero, but he's despicable. Because of that, the villain was completely villainous, almost one-dimensional. There was nothing of that villain that one could identify with, and I believe that was done to make the actions of Dirty Harry more palatable.”

Despite his attempt to provide a ray of light to hold off the creeping darkness threatening to overtake the medium, Giffen wasn’t afraid to work the grays. After all, this was the same man who had helped reinvent Darkseid for a new generation of readers. Complicated villains were right in his wheelhouse long before he was known for bringing the laughs.

“I'm not a huge fan of defining heroes and villains as opposite poles,” Giffen said. “Because to me, the best heroes have flaws that are kind of villainous. And the most horrible villain has traits you can admire—even Dr. Doom loves Latveria.”

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.