RIP Comics Veteran Keith Giffen

Goodbye To A True Modern Comics Original

The very sad news just reached us that comics veteran creator Keith Giffen, who’s best known for his work on Legion Of Super-heroes, Justice League International and as the co-creator of Lobo, has just passed away at the age of 70…

Here’s part of his biography from wikipedia:

His first published work was “The Sword and The Star”, a black-and-white text story featured in Marvel Preview #4 (Jan. 1976), with writer Bill Mantlo. Giffen and Mantlo created Rocket Raccoon in Marvel Preview #7 (Summer 1976). Giffen is best known for his long runs illustrating and later writing the Legion of Super-Heroes title in the 1980s and 1990s. Giffen and writer Paul Levitz crafted “The Great Darkness Saga” in Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2, #290–294 in 1982.^[5] In August 1984, a third volume of the Legion of Super-Heroes series was launched by Levitz and Giffen. Giffen plotted and pencilled the fourth volume of the Legion which began in November 1989.

After successfully experimenting with his unorthodox brand of humour in the 1985 Legion of Substitute HeroesSpecial, Giffen began employing this style in many of his works. He co-created the humorous Justice League International series in 1987 with J. M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire.  The success of that series led to a spinoff in 1989 titled Justice League Europe also co-written with DeMatteis, and later with Gerard Jones, and featuring art by Bart Sears. The Giffen/DeMatteis team worked on Justice League for five years and closed out their run with the “Breakdowns” storyline in 1991 and 1992. The two writers and Maguire reunited in 2003 for the Formerly Known as the Justice League miniseries and its 2005 sequel, “I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League”, published in JLA Classified

He has worked on titles owned by several different companies including Woodgod, All Star Comics, Drax the Destroyer, Heckler, Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos, Reign of the Zodiac, Suicide Squad, Trencher, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and Vext. He was responsible for the English adaptation of the Battle Royale and Ikki Tousen manga, as well as creating “I Luv Halloween” for Tokyopop. He worked for Dark Horse from 1994 to 1995 on their Comics Greatest World/Dark Horse Heroes line, as the writer of two short lived series, Division 13 and co-author, with Lovern Kindzierski, of Agents of Law. For Valiant Comics, Giffen wrote X-O Manowar, Magnus, Robot Fighter, Punx and the final issue of Solar, Man of the Atom.

He took a break from the comic industry for several years, working on storyboards for television and film, including shows such as The Real Ghostbusters and Ed, Edd ‘n’ Eddy.

Giffen and his Justice League colleagues, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire, have applied their humorous brand of storytelling to a title that he had drawn in the 1970s, Marvel Comics’ The Defenders. Giffen later confessed concerning his 1970s run, “Back then, I was the kind of moron that I now warn new guys against becoming. … When I think of Defenders, I think of what could have been if I’d had an ounce of professionalism in my body at that time.” The Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire trio also produced the Metal Men backup feature which appeared in Doom Patrol.

Giffen and DeMatteis collaborated with artist Joe Abraham on the creator-owned title Hero Squared for Boom! Studios. The two-issue mini-series Planetary Brigade chronicled the adventures of characters originating from this series.

Giffen was the breakdown artist on the DC Comics title 52, a weekly series following in the wake of the Infinite Crisis crossover, written by Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid and Grant Morrison. He continued in that role with the follow-up weekly series Countdown to Final Crisis. He was the lead writer for Marvel Comics’s “Annihilation” event,  having written the one-shot prologue, the lead-in stories in Thanos and Drax,  the Silver Surfer  as well as the main six issue mini-series.^[26] He wrote the Star-Lord mini-series for the follow-up story Annihilation: Conquest.

Between 2005 and 2007 he co-created and often authored or co-authored independent comics such as 10, Tag and Hero Squared for Boom! Studios, Zapt! and I Luv Halloween for Tokyopop, Common Foe and Tabula Rasa for Desperado Publishing/Image Comics and Grunts for Arcana. Many of these were co-authored with Shannon Denton.

He co-wrote OMAC with Dan DiDio as part of The New 52 company-wide relaunch until its cancellation with issue #8. In October 2011, he became writer of Green Arrow from issues #4–6. Giffen and Paul Levitz collaborated on the  Legion of Super-Heroes for issues #17 and 18 in 2013.^[29][30] Giffen reunited with J. M. DeMatteis on the Justice League 3000 series launched in October 2013.^[31][32] In 2014, he and Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, and Brian Azzarello co-wrote The New 52: Futures End.  That same year, Giffen and Dan DiDio reunited on Infinity Man and the Forever People.  In 2016, Giffen wrote the scripts for a series about young adult versions of Sugar and Spike, drawn by artist Bilquis Evely and published as one of the series in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow anthology. In 2019, he worked with artist Jeff Lemire on an Inferior Five series, one that shared nothing with the original 1960s superhero humour other than the title.

Everyone at Tripwire offers their condolences to his friends and family.

Here’s a small selection of his art

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