STORYTELLER’S SUNDAY: KEITH GIFFEN
A two-page spread from Defenders #50 by Keith Giffen. Inks by Mike Royer. Characters ™ and © Marvel Characters, Inc.
As a young child, I was not a reader. I was a forest kid. We lived in an area with a lot of untouched woods, or at least it seemed that way to me. I loved being in the woods and learned much from them. But my father despaired.
For years, he deposited a steady stream of children’s books in my room, which I read quickly and ignored. I had the technical skills of a reader, but not the interest. Then one day, he bought me a comic book and I was fascinated.
Comics became my gateway to more and wider reading. I quickly began reading novels far beyond my age, but the comics never left me. One day, I found Keith Giffen’s run of Legion of Super Heroes. I knew of the title and had read earlier issues. By now I was a little older, maybe a preteen, and my interest in the vapid superheroes introduced in Superboy comics, of all forsaken things, was long gone.
Now, I found I was interested in social commentary in comics using characters as metaphors. I was interested in mature things with the seriousness that only children and adults with a stick up their asses can have. And this one…
I opened it and the art was like a slap. Style, it had style. Was it good? I didn’t know. And the writing? Polar Boy, one-time member of the satirical Legion of Substitute Heroes, was now a Legionnaire and manned their control center. Talking to the AI, he expressed his doubts about himself and his friends, and how they were being torn apart.
He talked like a real human who just happened to have superpowers. The storyline that unfolded was tragic, almost Shakespearean, with a reversal at the end so dramatic, it was almost like the writer was winking at the reader, “My editors wouldn’t let the real ending stick but we know, don’t we?”
I was hooked. Throughout his career, Giffen wandered between commercial works. He was a brilliant comic writer. Fun and satirical with very human characters. He wrote superheroes, but he was subversive while a populist, a cultural anarchist writing comics for kids and sliding things in. But he was an artist too with a great, low-key style using lots of shadows.
I never met Giffen, but he was one of the writers who taught me that if you sympathize with a character the setting doesn’t matter. The premise doesn’t matter. Character matters.
Keith Giffen died earlier this month. He will be missed.
___________________________