Welp, Keith's back, and The Legion #50 is out, so what better time to plug in the tape recorder and find out what's rumbling through the head of the guy who over the years seems to have aroused more passion, both pro and con, among Interlac members than anyone else during the apa's 12-year history?

The interview that follows was actually Keith's idea, and I was more than happy to follow through on it. Some folks' worst fears to the contrary, he does care about what we think of his work, even if he takes exception to some of our opinions -- sometimes to the point of going out of his way to prove them wrong.

We did the interview by phone on May 22. It lasted about two hours. I didn't try too hard to play Mr. Hard-Ass Journalist here; my goal was to let Keith express himself and convey a notion of where he's coming from rather than debate him. In a more-formal medium, the Q&A it could have been condensed without losing too much crucial information -- but I think there's something to be gained from reading whatever can be glimpsed between the lines instead of sanitizing it of any subjective impressions that might be found.

Along the way, Keith talked about: his return as the Legion's penciler and how in that role he interacts with Paul Levitz; the Pocket Universe (he thinks it's a dumb idea); the notorious Subs Special; the Comics Journal swiping allegations of a few years ago; the Legionnaires' costumes; and The Legion #50, which he ranks somewhere in the vicinity of Chernobyl on the scale of unnatural disasters. Well, relatively speaking, anyway.

HARRY: By the time everybody sees this interview, they'll have already read The Legion #50. You told me the other day that you thought it was the Plan 9 From Outer Space of comics. Want to explain why?

KEITH: I keep going through it and keep trying to figure out who I should turn on, but there's really no ready target. In terms of quality control, it just seems to be a case of where a lot of things that could go wrong most absolutely, definitely did go wrong.

H: What things went wrong?

K: Well, there are stats missing, there are mistakes in the coloring, word balloons going to the wrong people. It's kind of a disaster. I look at it [in terms of] what it could have been. I think that other than the most obvious, glaring error in there -- and that is the fact that one of Duo Damsel's bodies is missing during her death scene [page 20, panel 5] -- a lot of other people probably just won't catch the things I caught. But you see, I keep catching things and saying, "No, that doesn't belong there! No, that belonged there!" and quite possibly, when they see the Time Trapper looking into this mirror-like object [page 2, panel 4], they might wonder what the hell he's looking at, because there's nothing there. Those are the two painfully obvious ones.

The other ones are just things that really shouldn't have happened but somehow did. One of the things that bugged me the most was the fact that Ultra Boy, who was supposed to be dressed in black leather, is now in this nice, tawny kind of a shade of tan [pages 3-5]. He looks like he's wearing buckskins, for God's sake. And I figure that really hits the button when it comes to encapsulating Ultra Boy's whole personality, right? Now all we need is fringe.

It's just a deep personal disappointment for me. The funny thing is that the odds are people are gonna go through the issue and go, "Keith's gone back to doing what he used to do!" and be more pleased about the issue than they would have been if everything had come out picture-perfect. But there are certain things that just can't be avoided, and I think it's important to know that I don't think any of this was done out of any malice toward the book.

I can't speak beyond the immediate team [Keith, Paul Levitz, Mike DeCarlo, Carl Gafford and Karen Berger], OK? But there are other people working on the book [whose names aren't part of the credits] who just say, "Eh, it's the Legion, fuck it." I talked with DeCarlo, I talked with Gafford and I know Paul is absolutely appalled with the whole thing. And everyone is really giving to the best of his ability. I'm not mad at anyone specifically -- I'm just mad at the overall end product. A lot of people are putting a lot into the book, and these things just shouldn't have gone through. There are extenuating circumstances, sure, but...

H: It sounds like the extenuating circumstances all ganged up on this one book.

K: It happens. It's just, it happened with such unerring consistency that I was blindsided by it, totally surprised. And in hindsight, I can say that [initially] I overreacted viciously.

H: Well, it's natural. You re-debut on a book and...

K: You want everything to be perfect. There's that ego that comes into play because you look at the credits and say, "Well, the only thing different is my name." And the people out there who are reading the books, they're not going to be aware of anything like this. They're going to look at the book, and if it's worse than the issue before, they're going to look for what's different. Well, there's one new name in the credits. The problem with the majority of the fans is that they honestly believe that they know so much, and they're actually so grossly ignorant as to how the business is run and the incredible number of things that can go wrong. So I've seen fans scream and yell about the pencils on a book when it was actually the inker who was to blame or the colorist who did it. It's really tough to point the finger. And I guess I overreacted, too, and said, "My God, they're all going to be pointing a finger at me!"

H: Did anything go wrong with #51?

K: Well, yeah. There were a few gaffes in there. No pun intended [a reference to colorist Carl Gafford, better known as "The Gaff"]. But nothing to compare with 50. With 51 it's tough for me to say, "Well, this is wrong, that is wrong," because I put a note on the bottom of a page saying, "Get out the Maalox, Paul, I'm digging in on this one." I think if any issue is going to cause the shrieks of indignation from fans that I dearly love, it'll probably be 51. Most of the Legionnaires do spend their time in street clothes, but I'm basically getting rid of the leftover 1950s and '60s haircuts. I've started playing with the costumes viciously, although I know that the Ultra Boy costume is going to cause all sorts of problems.

H: What's going to happen in #51? Ultra Boy's going to be back in black leather there?

K: No, in 51 he's still the pretty boy. By his next appearance, I would hope, he'll be in black leather. I'm going to have to really hammer that point home. It's an attempt at encapsulating the man's personality and his visual appearance.

Like Phantom Girl -- we worked up a whole new costume for her. I mean, it's the Thirtieth Century and she's still wearing bell bottoms! And this [decision to change] came directly from Karen Berger. Nobody likes Phantom Girl's costume, but nobody could come up with something new. So I devised something. It's like a Thirtieth Century version of a jogging suit or an aerobics class kind of thing with a light jacket. [And when I saw the colored pages] the jacket was colored red. The first thing that crosses my mind when I see the word "phantom" is red, right? But that's not something that is etched in stone. The way we will work that out is that we will simply show that she's got a whole closet full of these tunics to put over the actual pants, all of them in different colors, and we'll slowly work our way around to white again, and then break.

It's always bothered me when I've seen Legionnaires walking around in street clothes and they're basically wearing variations of their costumes adapted to street clothes of the same colors. Doctors on their days off don't wear white. If I spend my entire working day in some kind of a weird orange overall, I'm not going to go home and put on orange clothes.

H: Well, we know the reason why that was done. It was to aid in visual identification.

K: Right, but there should be other ways of getting across visual identification, like maybe the fact that each Legionnaire looks different. That each has different body language. That there are smaller identifying factors. One of the problems I've had with Sun Boy is that he's a standard comic book pretty boy. That's the way he was drawn, and that's the way he should have been drawn because that's the way he's been handled. He's the playboy, and I was groping around, trying to get a handle on it. I was gonna go back to the hair that looks more flame-like, but that's been done to death. So I gave him an earring. The red hair is enough, but even if they color it wrong, the earring will say, there he is, that's Sun Boy. If you have five characters standing in a room and you silhouette the man, the silhouette should be distinctive enough so you can say, "Well, yeah, that's this person and that's that person." Even something as simple as Chameleon Boy's antennae would say, "That's Chameleon Boy."

There should also be something to differentiate each of the other characters. Even if one has a slightly spiky hairstyle, the other one's got a crewcut and the other one's bald. There has to be that instant identification. If you can get that down pat, then you can really get away from the [fallback argument of saying], "There's Timber Wolf in his street clothes -- we'd better color him orange and gray." You can just move away from that. And it also saves Paul the hassle of having to do the Mort Weisinger-type captions. "Timber Wolf said to Sun Boy..." Sometimes you're stuck doing that because I know it's Shrinking Violet and Paul knows it's Shrinking Violet, but if he just has her talking there's no guarantee the readers are going to know it's Shrinking Violet.

In a way, it's almost like saying, "Expect the worst because the odds are it's going to happen." You know you're going to get the letter saying, "I love the issue, but gee, who was that Legionnaire that Gigi was talking to in page 5, panel 3?" because she wasn't wearing this light green outfit or because she hasn't become distinct-enough a character.

H: Even in a case like that, if you do make her distinct, you still have the first-time readers to take into account. Or do you take them into account?

K: I didn't used to. I used to think, let the book evolve, let the book grow. But now it's been hammered home to me. It seems that the fans today, your really hard-core fans, either want the book to remain in stasis and never change or they want the books to progress and be new and keep going on. Let's have real aging, they say. OK, let's have real aging. But why should I rob my son of the joy of discovering the Legion or Superman or Batman just because a handful of fans out there want the comic books to keep up with them?

The Legion is a perfect book. It is a whimsical book -- sci-fi whimsy, not hard sci-fi. These guys are talking in space, right? So the older fans of the Legion, the ones who were there when [Jim] Shooter was writing it and when Curt Swan was drawing it, they want the book to keep up with them. That would mean we'd have to leave the kids behind, because if we keep up with them, we've got to keep intellectualizing and adding layer upon layer of complications to keep their interest. Which loses the kids -- it drops the bottom right out on them.

One of the great things that Paul is doing right now is that he's scaling down the Legion. I mean, Brainiac 5 leaves, Dream Girl leaves and Mon-El is a piece of Sizzlean. He's mostly getting rid of the overused characters so that he's forced to focus on some of the characters who, basically, have been mostly standing in the background going "Wow." But also, it scales it down so it's more understandable, so that the first-time reader picking up the book can get an understanding of the book.

Paul does this wonderfully with the way he does captions. He can give the same information five, six, seven times, and it sort of bamboozles the long-time reader [into thinking it's something new and different]. Because "Metropolis, capital of Earth, big city" -- how many times can you say that? Well, you can say it by quoting from the Metropolis Department of Tourism, or from the Encyclopedia Galactica. See, he's got all these different reference sources, so he can give the same information to the readers in different ways. He can give it a little twist, he can be a little sarcastic if it's like a Metropolis Tonite review column, or he can give it straightforwardly -- "Here's what it's all about" -- if he's doing it from the Encyclopedia Galactica. This helps the new person assimilate the information.

But I don't think someone can just pick up an issue of The Legion and immediately know what's going on.

H: I don't think you can do that with any comic. I couldn't do that with the Legion when I started reading it back in 1964.

K: But you shouldn't. There should be something in the book to grab your attention...

H: ...and to make you come back and find out more about it.

K: Now if you cheat the guy and never explain some of the background, then it's your fault, because he's going to get too confused and pissed off, and he's going to drop the book. But if you can keep coming back, cycling back to the same thing in different ways -- "Lightning Lad is from Winath and he's had bad luck," and so forth. I choose that because that's probably the most oft-told story. The Luck Lords, the spotlight on Lightning Lad though the eyes of his brother or sister, the original stories. Sure, if you're a long-time reader you'd say, "Oh my God, this story again!" Well, there are a lot of people out there who have never read that.

H: And you've got to give them some of that background. There was a time when it seemed that Paul wasn't really paying a lot of attention to that -- there were entire issues that never established that this was going on in the Thirtieth Century.

K: Paul writes to the artist. He's told me that a hundred times. He gets a handle on what the artist likes to do, doesn't like to do and is capable of doing or can pull off, and he will write to those strengths. Every so often, he will toss something else in there to see if the guy is flexible. I'd assume he's not going to straitjacket himself, but if he's got an artist who's just good at straight-ahead action, he's going to give him straight-ahead action. You'll sometimes have a string of issues on the book wherein the artist really doesn't belong on the book; this happens on almost every comic on the market. When that happens, any background information you're getting is the writer's doing, because the writer's got to sneak it in whenever he can.

I read Paul's plots for the three issues before #50, because I was supposed to come in on issue 47, and then they decided no, let's make issue 50 a double-sized issue and then sabotage...no! *heh heh heh* So I read these plots and I saw the pencils. Now [Pat] Broderick and [Greg] LaRocque both like action. So, of course, Paul is going to focus more on the action sequences. It's a real song and dance. It's a real delicate operation to get in there without stopping the story dead. So half of the time, instead of fans turning to the writer and saying he's just doing Mickey Mouse work, maybe they should look at how the info is being relayed. Is there time for that information, or did it have to be snuck in there.

You might look at a book and say it was all just action, action, action. Maybe that's all the writer has gotten from the artist. And then fans complain about how the characters talk so much in combat. Maybe sometimes they have to. It depends on the individual writer's or artist's approach to the book, so it's really hard to point that finger. It does aggravate me when I hear fans saying, "Oh, on this issue he really screwed up because they are talking through the fight scenes." I've been in real fights before, and I didn't have time to talk. But the information has got to be relayed, man -- it's a comic book, so give us a break. If you don't get it while they're sitting around, chewing the fat before the fight scene, you've still got to get the info across. So where do you get it? It has to come across in the fight scenes.

H: What strengths do you think you have that Paul has been playing to?

K: My love of the book. I just really, really like the book. Paul and I both really enjoy handling these characters.

H: In terms of the kind of story you like to do.

K: My ideal kind of story is the one I plotted for the Justice League moving day issue [JLI #8]. I admit to the need for combat and I admit to the need for bombastic action, but my favorite stuff is the characters just getting together and relating to one another. Bouncing something off the characters and seeing how they react; the characters' body language, the expressions on their faces. And making sure the characters are being consistent.

Paul doesn't have to explain Brainiac 5's personality in the plot, because he knows I know what it is. All he's got to do is update me on certain things. When I left Shrinking Violet, for example, she had just gotten out of a containment unit and she was reacting violently to everything. So Paul updates me on how that's been refined or expanded on. That's all he has to do.

I don't know, but I think he plots his stories for me a lot more loosely, too, because he realizes I like the room to throw in occasional things. And I've often told Paul I like the fact that he can roll with the punches. But in a way, I'm going it to see if I can get a reaction out of him. The most obvious example of that was the original Invisible Kid sitting up in the wreckage and going, "Where am I?" That was sort of a challenge to Paul -- "OK, figure this one out, Paul!"

H: That was something you threw in that Paul hadn't plotted?

K: No, I just did it. I thought, "I have all this wreckage here, so let me just draw him in here." And when Paul saw it he said, "Now what?" I said, "I don't know -- run with it." That was totally me. It was totally off the wall, and from the venom of the way fans reacted, I'd say I did my job. It's sort of a way of saying to the readers, "Don't take me too seriously," and it's also a way of saying that you are no longer reading a "safe" book. Things can happen and will happen. Just because five Legionnaires go off on a mission, there's no guarantee five are going to come back or that they are going to come back in the same shape that they left in.

H: Which we are going to be seeing more of...

K: By the time this is printed, they'll know, so I guess I can talk more about #50 a bit more. I didn't kill Duo Damsel. That was not me. That was Paul. The characters who went out [to battle the Time Trapper] in #50 -- Mon-El, Brainiac 5, Saturn Girl, Duo Damsel and Rond Vidar -- they all come back changed. Saturn Girl comes back bearing all these physical wounds; Brainiac 5 is carrying around emotional wounds, although they are not readily apparent; Mon-El is trashed. This man looks like a burn victim, like he was yanked out of a burning car. I think Paul sort of agrees with me that he's not going to look any better. Remember handsome Mon-El? That's nostalgia, man. Burn tissue is ugly to look at, right? What about invulnerable burn tissue? It doesn't go away.

So they all do come back changed. They've gone up against a major menace, and they've paid the price for their presumption. Yeah, they defeat him, but there is that price to be paid. They don't come back the same people. There's cause and effect.

H: It's interesting that you brought that up. There seems to be a line of thought with some folks in Interlac -- and to some extent that belief is unjustified -- that doesn't give Paul enough credit. There were a number of comments from people about how Keith is coming back and everything is going to change, as though you were the driving force, totally, behind the book now that you're back.

K: I read those, too, and in a way I feel bad for Paul because of the feeling out there that Paul needs somebody to feed ideas to him. He's infinitely more knowledgeable about the Thirtieth Century and all of its various locations and lore than I could ever be. The only thing that my coming on the book has changed is that now Paul is working with somebody he knows will go a bit further. He doesn't have to be afraid of asking for a Thirtieth Century version of a strip-mine, because he knows he'll get it [without having to write an elaborate description of one].

Now I'll sit down with Paul and say, "Wouldn't this be a great idea," and "Wouldn't that be a great idea," and I'll throw little things in there. But the stories are basically Paul's. All I do is toss ideas at him. Paul hands me the typewritten plot. He still steers this book, but I'm allowed to come in and do little weird things here and there. The one book that I actually plotted for the Legion was the Subs Special. And that was a deliberate attempt at just doing a full-tilt humor book with no connection to continuity at all.

H: There were some incredible cries of outrage about that, too.

K: Sure, because these clowns are determined to force it into their sacred continuity. It's not a book that stands in Legion continuity. It does not exist. It never happened. It's just a story that we wanted to do, and we figured, let's do it. Why can't we do it? It's a dream, or whatever you want to call it. How could it fit into Legion continuity when the way the Subs got onto Bismoll was by editorial decree? It's like, "Come on, people, open your eyes." I thought they would read it and say, "That's amusing," and get back on with their lives again.

H: Would you like to do another Subs special?

K: Ty Templeton would give his left nut at this point to be able to do a Substitute Heroes story. I'm sure that if another Subs idea comes up and we say, "Gee, this sounds interesting, let's go," we'll try that again. It's like Legionnaires 3 -- the idea hit and we asked permission to do it, and we got it. So I had just as much to do with Legionnaires 3 as I did with the Substitute Heroes Special, and Legionnaires 3 was no laff riot. Same with Cosmic Boy, but that one was basically Paul's idea. Those two can be put into the continuity that the Subs Special was never meant to be in.

H: I suppose a lot of people would have been a little happier if there had just been two little words on the Subs special: "Imaginary Story."

K: But why should we have to? I figured I was doing fandom a favor by not using Night Girl. I figured I'd give them that much, because of Night Girl's connection with Cosmic Boy. I could hear the shrieks that would have gone up. But it's still treated like this piece of garbage. Why is it a piece of garbage? Because of what it did to the Subs. Well, forget the Subs -- how did you like the story? I haven't heard much about that, although there was one guy who wrote in a comment saying, "I, too, agree that what Keith did to the Substitute Heroes was a sin and a crime against God and man, but it was a funny story anyway." That's all I'm asking. Was it or wasn't it a funny story? Forget all the baggage and the continuity and the stuff you've been dragging around for years. Just sit down and read it clean.

H: Although I presume that's not the attitude that you bring to the regular Legion stories that you do.

K: No, with the regular Legion stories you've got to take into account the rich traditions of the team and of the book as well as pushing the story forward. No, I'm not going to come in and say to Paul, "Let's give Lightning Lord a prefrontal lobotomy and turn him into a humorous character." It doesn't work. It's like there are certain things you have to back away from.

H: It did work with Guy Gardner...

K: But the Justice League is a whole different kind of book. I've always said that each assignment that you get dictates the approach. All right, I guess that's why I get into so much trouble -- because I don't use the same approach for each individual assignment.

H: No, you confuse people by doing that. People are used to the consistency of a Jack Kirby or Curt Swan.

K: Both wonderful creators and artists in their own right.

H: But they are also very predictable.

K: You know what you're getting when you pick up a book and it says Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, whoever, on the cover. I don't want that to happen with me. I want people to pick up the book and say, "Oh, Giffen is doing Superman. I wonder how he'll approach Superman." Or, "He's back on the Legion. I wonder how his approach will be different from the first time around," and not to say, "Oh my God, he's going to do the Legion the same way he did Dr. Fate." That's ridiculous. The approach I used on Dr. Fate would not work on the Legion. I learned that from experience. The book has different parameters.

When you come on a book, there are some parameters you have to work within. You can go anywhere you want within that space, but if you try to push it too far, you're going to hit the wall. I usually can't go any further. Now what I object to is when the parameters are too tight. "You're coming on the Legion and you can do this, this and this, but you can never change Ultra Boy's costume." If the editor and Paul and everyone agrees, who says I can't change it? But then, there are the parameters with the Legion like you can't have them all decide to join the army and do the Legion as a military book, because it would violate the whole concept of the series. It's like what Steve Englehart is doing with the Fantastic Four is a violation of the whole concept of the Fantastic Four.

H: And what was he doing? I haven't been keeping up with it.

K: He changed the membership. Fine. But now there's two Things in there now, and it's just incredible. It's not the Fantastic Four. If you're going to do that, take some of the Fantastic Four's powers and make a new team. This is not the Fantastic Four that I grew up knowing or that I've been familiar with for years. Now I'm not saying you can't change it at all, but keep in mind which book you're working on. I'm not going to come onto the Legion and turn it into the Justice League. They're two different books. "Oh, no, it's going to be a funny book!" No, it's not going to be a funny book! It's the Legion. Yeah, there are going to be more humorous pieces in there, because I believe in the midst of all this cosmic seriousness you've got to have a little bit of cosmic relief. Shakespeare did it.

H: And people do act like that. People don't go around being solemn all the time in real life.

K: Right. The one thing I loved about my first run on the book was that there was a camaraderie. The characters could joke and laugh with one another. It was a group of people who got together, and there were personality clashes and everything -- and some of them were humorous. I don't want everything to be dead serious and gloom and doom. There's got to be a little bit of relief in there, and if people don't like it, all I can say is, "Don't buy the book."

H: What kind of arrangement have you and Paul set up now in producing the stories? Let's go through it step by step.

K: Paul gives me the plot. It's all typed up. In drawing it, I might add little things. I'll make sure all the information he wants is on the page, but [in an upcoming issue] he introduces the character that we call the Elemental. He suggested it was like an Oriental humanoid to give it a different look. I made it a Gil'dishpan. That's something that, if he wants to when he sees it, he can bounce an idea off of, or just continue his plot as if it were a humanoid and I'll translate it all into Gil'dishpan terms. When I see him in the office, I'll say, "How's this for an idea?" "How's that for a wild idea?" And if it appeals to him, he'll toss it into the book. Now I'm pushing him to do a western. Take the Legion to a planet like the wild west. If he can come up with a decent idea for it, I'm sure he'll do it.

In this latest issue, he mentions Blok is starting to change visually, so when I read that I threw in subtle changes in his facial structure and the design of his body. Paul had put one line there saying it was sort like the silicon equivalent of puberty. So I went to Paul and said, "Let's really push this. Let's have him go through kind of a pubescence that a silicon life form would go through." I envision Blok, when he's done with this, possibly being 11 feet tall, eight feet wide at the shoulders, massive, slow-moving, nodules sprouting at different parts of his body to give off steam and heat. He will be like this volcanic reactor. The heart of rock is lava. He will become this intensely massive creature. Slow-moving, yes, but very effective as a character. Not the Pillsbury Doughboy in gray. I know full well we're going to get a lot of letters saying, "You sabotaged him! I loved him!" Well, how come we only get the "I loved him" letters when it's too late?

H: Maybe part of it is just the explanation, or lack of one. What's needed is a comment off to the side to the effect that Blok is going through puberty here, he's going through changes. Maybe Blok should be saying, "I don't know what's happening to me here."

K: Well, you know, there is a scene where he's looking in the glass and going, "Jesus, maybe I'm out of my environment. Am I evolving into something my life form was never meant to evolve into?" But that's the extent of what I'm doing at this point.

I'll take an idea of Paul's and I might push it further than he had meant at the time, like with Shadow Lass. Something happens between Mon-El and Shadow Lass, and I pushed it a bit further to give it a visual point of reference, and Paul loved it. And from out of that he sat down and spewed out this bunch of ideas that related to Talok VIII that he springboarded into a whole story idea. I'm not coming in to Paul and saying, "OK, now we're going to do this and this, so just write up a plot, Paul." That's ridiculous. He's still writing the book, he's still plotting the book, he still has final say on what goes down on the typewriter paper. But I have his and Karen's blessings to play with it a bit. As long as the story that he wants told is getting told, I can do little things like bring Invisible Kid back. Or have Timber Wolf trying to catch a bus and turn it into him going through the roof of the bus. He still caught the bus.

And if I have a bit of space -- and sometimes I wonder whether Paul does this on purpose -- sometimes I'll get into the page and think, "Boy, the information on this page I can get into these three panels, and I've got a whole bunch of panels left over." That's the point where I can sit down and think, "OK, what else can I toss in here? What weird little thing can I put in?" In #50, he had the White Witch vanishing. She vanishes in anger -- she'll be gone, too, for a while -- and that's what Paul called for. Well, I simply added the extra layer: She vanished in a cloud of sulphuric smoke. Polar Boy, who is standing close by, is recoiling -- he's clutching his nose and fanning the air desperately. It doesn't make Polar Boy look like a jerk; as a matter of fact, I'm trying desperately to make Polar Boy look like less of a jerk.

H: You've got a job ahead of you on that one.

K: The silly little beanie is gone. And the fur is back. And even Paul has mentioned that he's building toward issue #52, which is sort of a coming of age for Polar Boy and some other characters. Paul even put in the plot that Polar Boy maybe gets rid of some of the sillier parts of his uniform as he begins to realize that you have to accept responsibility for what you're doing. You have to accept the responsibility that comes with the position that you've accepted, and no matter how much you bitch and whine and moan or slap your forehead or try to act cool, it all comes down to the performance. And that all came from Paul.

H: Is there anything you do that gets Paul pissed at you? Is there anything you do that makes him slap his forehead and say, "That darned Keith, what's he doing that for?"

K: Interesting. He doesn't come in and say, "Jesus, what do you do this for?" He comes in and sort of shakes his head and with this horrible look on his face and lets me know I've gone a bit too far. I blew Mon-El's left hand off [in #50] and he said, "Now that's a bit too much." In a way, I did push it too far, but he's never really come back to me and been really pissed off about anything that I'd done that he wasn't expecting. There's never been any time when he's come to me and said, "This is patently ridiculous -- redo the whole thing," "This is garbage," or, "I don't know where your head was at, but this sucks." He enjoys the back and forth. He sort of gets a kick out of the fact that somebody's thrown the ball downhill. He'll throw it right back twice as hard.

For every time that I've done something like bring Invisible Kid back, he's said, "OK, fine, here's the panel description: The entire population of Daxam rises off of the planet." We have a real good give and take.

H: Is there anything that he does that irritates you?

K: No, not really. He knows the book so well that lots of times I've just got to take his word for a lot of stuff. But it's not that I get rankled -- it's just that sometimes I'll be amused by something like "the entire population of Daxam," which was the actual panel description. And I'm amused by it to this day. Sometimes he'll put something down there, I'll look at it and I'll go, "Ohhhh-kaaayyy..." but it's more in amusement, and I'll sort of dance around it rather than go in and say, "What are you, an idiot? `The whole population of Daxam'! What do you think I am? Why even bother to do that? There's other ways of handling it!"

We get along pretty good.

H: That's been pretty clear all along. It appears you've got a looser leash than most of the artists he's worked with.

K: No, really, he'll give that loose leash to...

H: Let me put it this way: You're the one who, probably more than others, who has stretched that loose leash.

K: Yes. A lot of artists in the business will come onto a job and draw the plot. And sometimes they won't even draw the plot. They'll drop stuff out that they don't feel like drawing, or combine scenes. I've always tried to make it a point when I pick up a plot never to take anything out, but, if possible, to add. There's no way on Earth a writer is going to get mad at you in that way. There's no way on Earth you're going to start getting hard feelings unless the guy is a real megalomaniac. Which Paul isn't. At least, not to me. He wasn't on the Legion when I first encountered him, and that's how I base my opinions. Maybe Paul sets cats on fire. I've never seen him do it. He didn't do it to my cat. You make your judgment on the person who's facing you. So, no problem.

H: What do you think of the new Wanderers?

K: God, I'm sorry, Doug [Moench], but they suck. I went in to Karen and I said, "You keep them two star systems away from the Legion." I don't want them in my back yard. I've read the first two issues. I don't know how many others have come out, but I know I won't be reading any more. I don't want to go any further than that except to say that I won't read it, and I want to pretend it's not there.

H: So if it's up to you, we won't have any Wanderers showing up in The Legion?

K: I don't know. But if they do show up in The Legion, I'll do my best by it. I'd really prefer they didn't at this point, but if it happens and there's a plot and the Wanderers are there, I've got no authority to go in and say no.

H: Well, conceivably you could go to Paul and say, "We don't really want to do this, do we?"

K: There're usually other reasons for doing it. If the Wanderers were to appear in the Legion, we would work it out between Doug and Paul, or it would be something that Paul feels is important to the story. So I can't go in and say, "Jeez, you know this story that revolves around the Wanderers -- do we really need the Wanderers?" [And Paul would say,] "Well, yes, it's kind of a Wanderers story." I'd rather not draw them. I'd be very vocal about it. But if I have to draw them, I will; if I have to deal with them, I will. It's like the Heroes of Lallor. I hate them -- I've always hated them -- but I've dealt with them, and if I have to deal with them again, I'll deal with them again. Maybe if I were plotting the book as well as penciling it, I'd have more to say about it. At this point, I'm penciling the book and just harassing Paul.

H: Are you going to keep penciling the book, or are you still planning to go to breakdowns?

K: My breakdowns [on #53] -- you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference in my breakdowns from the pencils. It wasn't put in the credits. But it's faster. The book is kind of late, so it will up my speed a bit, and there are other projects up at DC that I committed to that I want to do, and rather than drop off of the Legion for four months while I do these other things and then come back, I'll go to breakdowns, which is just as effective. DeCarlo will handle them just the same way, there's the same amount of information relayed, and I'll be able to stay on the Legion as well as do these other projects. [As it turned out, Keith returned to full pencils on The Legion as of #54.]

H: Let's talk about these other projects. What are they?

K: Of course, the ongoing Justice League concern. And there's the companywide crossover which, this year, is called Invasion [which I'm plotting], wherein we get to see -- we've seen Earth in the Twentieth Century and in the Thirtieth Century, but what were the Khunds doing in the Twentieth Century, or the Dominators? I'm trying to apply some of the Legion's sci-fi to the universe in the Twentieth Century -- sort of projecting backward to what they'd be like.

H: Without giving too much away, what's the basic story there?

K: Have you ever read the book [by Tom Clancy] called Red Storm Rising? Invasion is a combination of Red Storm Rising and the Mars Attack cards, with a little bit of genetic manipulation thrown in there. It's basically a good old-fashioned "Look out, Earth, here come the aliens to take over!" story. We also do a little bit of delving into the nature of super-powers and why, if Barry Allen got splashed by chemicals and Joe Shmoe got splashed by chemicals, why would Joe Shmoe simply be electrocuted by the lightning or burned by the acids whereas Allen got super-speed? What's the difference between these two people?

Other than that, it's three 80-page issues. I'm talking 80 pages of story content, not 74 pages of story and the rest are ads. I'm plotting and breaking it down. Andy Helfer is editing it. Todd McFarlane is penciling it. We've broken each one down into four separate chapters. Craig Russell is inking the first chapter, Al Gordon the second chapter, tentatively Dick Giordano for the third, and Joe Rubenstein for the fourth. And Bill Mantlo will be supplying the dialogue.

H: Bill Mantlo? That's his first work for DC, isn't it?

K: Exactly. He's been doing night court for a while. He's an attorney now. You ever see the show Night Court? He's sort of doing Markie Post's role as the defense lawyer. He's not half as attractive as Markie, but he's living that show, basically. And he's been out of the field for quite a while, and he decided he'd like to get back in again. And Invasion is sort of a hideous baptism -- if he can write Invasion, there's no DC book he can't write. And he's getting more freedom than he's ever had before. He doesn't have somebody telling him to pull the guts out of his stories anymore. And I think it's going to go a long way toward changing people's minds about Bill Mantlo. Again, it comes down to all these opinions that are thrown around by people who really have no idea what's going on in this business.

H: What's the key to knowing what's going on in the business?

K: Working in it. I'm afraid there's no other way. I can sit here for hours and tell you or try to tell you, and you might come in and write something about it and it might just be totally different [from the true situation]. Sometimes there are so many hands involved in a project that the people whose names are on the books aren't responsible for the finished product. Sometimes it is too late to pull your name off. And sometimes it's not feasible to do it.

This is your job, and if you have a job, you're not going to deliberately go out and try to get yourself fired, OK? Which means that sometimes you're going to swallow a couple of bitter pills. It's great to be a creator, it's great to be a fan favorite and it's great to call your own shots and steer your own destiny -- but that's the exception, it's not the rule at this point. Most of the guys in the business -- the guys in the trenches, like Andy says -- are the ones who are giving it to you month after month after month after month. When I hear people kicking around Don Heck, George Tuska, and to an extent Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger, and then lauding the latest Young Turk to come down the pike, it aggravates me. Because I think, "Who the hell do you think kept this business going long enough for this new guy to get in and do his wonder work?"

H: There's a feeling among a lot of fans that the people whose names are on the book are the only people who have anything to do with the book, and that the final product is totally the sum of their efforts, without taking into account how one may have played off the other and whether people whose names weren't listed had something to do with it.

K: The people whose names weren't listed, the executives who came down and said, "This won't do at all, we'll never get it past the Code." We have the Code itself to take into consideration. And occasionally the editor will rewrite stuff without the writer even knowing it. Faces will be drawn without your knowing they've been redrawn. It's not as cut and dried as it seems.

H: Sometimes it can be kind of egregious. I remember there was a Berni Wrightson Tomb of Dracula cover about 10 years ago that John Romita had redrawn a face on [ToD #43]. About the worst example of that was back when Jack Kirby was doing Jimmy Olsen and there was Al Plastino drawing the Superman figures in it.

K: And Murphy Anderson doing Jimmy. You have no control over it. What are you going to do, say, "No, uh-uh, you can't do that and I'll never work with you again if you do"? You have a family to support. I just wish that before the fans start sounding off, they'd sit down and really think about it.

H: The thing is, they have to know what to think about, because right now they have impressions, and without any other information, the impressions become the reality.

K: It's never really going to change. I'm not saying fans shouldn't be entitled to an opinion. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, and they are entitled to express it in any way they see fit. And I guess, based on the amount of information that's available to the fans, they're doing the best they can. Fans, the readers -- I do it myself -- expect a certain level of competence about the product they're buying, a certain level of professionalism. They'll say, "This is the bottom line, and anything below that line is just open for trashing." But it's when they start dragging in all sorts of technical shit that it bothers me. If you don't like something, fine. Tell the whole world you don't like it. Tell the whole world why you don't like it. But don't come to me and say, "Now you've got to dislike it," too. That's what irks me the most.

It doesn't make it any easier when I read something that's so far off the mark that it makes your teeth ache. It's gonna happen. I guess when all is said and done, and all the excuses are made, and all the yelling and ranting and raving is done, it's the finished product that counts. You lay down your money, and it's the finished product that tells the story. It either stands or falls.

H: I suppose there's no way around it short of DC and Marvel also publishing the original plots alongside the stories, so the readers can compare them against what finally emerges.

K: Yes, but what are you going to do? Publish the plots, then publish the pencils and then publish--? It's the finished product. You keep your fingers crossed, you shoot it out there and you hope to hell it doesn't get shit on too fast. In my roundabout, meandering way, I just wanted to make the point that it's not all that cut and dried, folks. There's more to it than you know. There's more to it than you'll ever probably understand, and let it go at that.

H: What about your other projects? Justice League, Invasion...

K: Justice League, Invasion, a horror story that I can't say too much about at this point because it's still in the formative stages, but it'll be a horror story, and not EC horror. More along the lines of David Cronenberg than Tales of the Crypt.

H: This will involve DC characters.

K: Yeah. Again, I don't want to mention anything more, but it involves a DC character, and I'm going to be plotting and penciling this, and I'm debating whether I'll have the inclination or the time to ink it. But I'd like to do as much as I can on this project and see if I can control what finally gets out there. There's an Aquaman miniseries I'm plotting and breaking down that's got Curt Swan doing some of the most fantastic work that I've ever seen on it. Bob Fleming is dialoguing it.

H: Who's inking Swan on that?

K: Some new guy whose name I forget. But he's doing a pretty good job. Curt's such a bitch to ink because it's so beautifully rendered, and it's the rare artist who can come in there and really get it right. Murphy can get it right, and possibly one or two other people have come very close. George Klein was really good, too.

Ragman is stalled at this point because of Invasion, and the horror book that they want first. But Ragman is up and coming.

There's a secret origin of the Justice League of America coming up in the Secret Origins book. No Wonder Woman, but Black Canary, so that's really the only variation. And no, it's not a laff riot. It's Justice League of America, it's not the JLI.

H: Who's drawing that one?

K: Eric Shanower. Pencils and inks. It's gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.

H: The Blue and the Gold [the proposed Blue Beetle-Booster Gold title]?

K: No, I have nothing to do with that. I've nothing to do with The Blue and the Gold or Mr. Miracle's book or any of the other individual offshoots of Justice League International. There might be another Justice League-oriented book coming out of Invasion -- we're keeping our fingers crossed.

H: Can you talk about that?

K: No, because we're really not sure what it is at this point. Possibly another core group, because there are so many [JLI] embassies around and we would like to focus on some of the international aspects of the group.

I think that's about it. I think I've touched all the bases of the stuff that I've got coming. Oh, and the Creeper miniseries, which is plotted. We're just looking for a penciler at this point.

H: What's the deal with Video Jack?

K: Video Jack, as of issue #6, is history. The original agreement was to go six issues and then we'd see if we wanted to do it or if Epic wanted to do it. Cary [Bates] and I got involved in other projects, and the sales weren't really that strong at that point, so Video Jack ends as of issue #6 with one full story, like we originally intended it to be. I'm taking less and less of a hand in it as it goes on, which, again, was the original intention. I helped to plot and break it down, and to do all sorts of video realities, and we passed them on to other artists for other video realities. I think in the latest issue [#4] we've got Joe Barney and the guy who did 'Mazing Man, [Stephen] DeStefano. After that we've got Carmine Infantino and Al Weiss along with my pages, and then we've got our big sixth issue wherein we've got this incredible fight scene with such diverse people as Bill Wray, Walt Simonson, Trina Robbins, Michael Gilbert, Neal Adams and on and on and on -- each doing one page, pieces of a fight scene that slips through all these different video realities.

H: What was your and Cary's thinking on Video Jack? That book, at least in my case, was real hard to get into.

K: My thinking on the book was that the first six issues were one whole story, and just like when you're reading a novel, you sometimes don't really get what's going on till you're three-quarters of the way through. It's like the first 12 issues of Justice League International. That's one long story, and until you read "Max's Story" at the end, you have no idea what was going on back with the Royal Flush Gang, where that Ace came from. Who's this man, Maxwell Lord? We tied up a lot of loose ends. Video Jack was a lot like that in that it was meant to be a little harder to get into than the average comic. It was meant to pull people back to find out what's going on. How well we succeeded or failed is up to the readers. I don't know. I think we did pretty good.

H: What's it like working with Cary? You both have that Legion connection, even though it's been years and years since Cary worked on the Legion.

K: I like working with Cary a lot. Cary, when he stepped down off the Superman books and The Flash, had to prove himself all over again. And he did it with flying colors as far as I'm concerned. If people who are reading and enjoying JLI are not reading Captain Atom, they are only reading half of JLI, because there are certain things going on in Captain Atom that are only going on in Captain Atom, but that are JLI-related.

Back to Cary. He did Captain Atom, Silverblade, Video Jack and other upcoming projects. He's really proving himself to be an A-team writer, just as good as anyone else in the business.

H: So you wouldn't mind working with him again?

K: I'd love to work with him again. We probably will work together again sometime in the future. He's really open to things. We sit down, we bounce ideas back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. I just keep getting wilder and wilder. But he goes for them -- and then, as he's putting it all together, he'll fine-tune it, sand off a piece here, smooth off a piece there until he gets it into the kind of shape that the reader will accept, that doesn't go beyond the bounds of reader comprehension. I'll work with Cary any time, and he's got more ideas than half of the writers in this business. In other words, he's one of the guys who doesn't have to worry about giving away an idea, because there's another one right behind it. And besides, he's got a nice, wonky sort of humor.

H: What about your editors? You've got Karen Berger on the Legion, you've got Andy on JLI...

K: Well, Karen is Karen. Karen hasn't changed from the first time around. She's leery of me, of some of the things that I do, and every so often she'll call me and say, "Why did you do this?" and makes me explain the whole thing before it goes through. But Karen is fine. I have no problem with her.

Andy's a madman, Andy's out of his mind. Just look at JLI and understand that he watched this thing evolve in the direction it went to. And there was no guarantee this thing was going to take off. We were in the middle of Dark Knight mania, man, and The Punisher, and we came out with a book with a very obvious tongue-in-cheek flavor. So he took a real big chance on that one. He's a little maddening and frustrating sometimes. He has to know what's going on at all times. He seems to be cut from the Julie Schwartz mold of editor, which is not an insult at all. It's a compliment in that they want to know what's going on and why it's going on, and they will not put up with prima donnas. "You're doing the book, let's hear the story. I want typed plots, I want full stories, no glossing, no vamping your way through or giving the book over to eight pages of fight scenes because you're too lazy to come up with a plot twist."

So I've been lucky. I've always worked with editors I get along with, and who seem to be willing to listen to a different point of view.

H: One thing the people are going to want to know about is the deal with the Legionnaires' costumes. You're going to be putting quite a number of them through changes. Let's run through them here, one by one. We've already talked about Ultra Boy...

K: Ultra Boy is supposed to be in black leather, folks. He will be back in black leather, and that is a metal epaulet on one shoulder, even though it's colored to look like leather. The shirt is the same, though. I like the symbol. I kept the shirt, I kept the belt. So to me it's sort of like an extension of the current costume. It's not thumbing my nose at this costume. Everyone said, "Never change this one," and I didn't change it just because people always said, "Never change this one!" It wasn't a spiteful move on my part. It was just that I thought he doesn't look like a street punk. And his body language has not been a street punk's body language. Let's get back to that tough guy from Rimbor who's probably had experience with drugs.

H: He's in a good position to have experience with drugs even now. He can go out, he can get himself high as a kite, and if an emergency comes up, "Hey, I'll just turn on my invulnerability here," and all the effects go away.

K: Yeah, visually he should be more of a punk. I also gave him more of a street punk utility kind of haircut. We'll see if that works.

H: But not the ducktail he had originally.

K: No-o-o-o. No Brylcreem. They don't make Brylcreem anymore.

H: What about Sun Boy? You've got him with an earring...

K: One earring. I like Sun Boy's costume. I don't see anything wrong with Sun Boy's costume. It still functions well. The only thing I was thinking of doing was taking the tunic and opening the front up and putting the sun emblem on a shirt underneath -- a body shirt underneath so it would give him sort of a bulkier appearance. But I'm not going to do anything with Sun Boy at this point. I look at the costume. I see it works. The most radical thing I ever did to Sun Boy was bring back the vertical lines on his shorts. That was it. Maybe I'll toy around with the sun emblem, make it look more like a sun instead of like a star. But I still don't know what to do about his hair.

H: Phantom Girl.

K: Phantom Girl: Totally new look. The costume is not red, it will be white, don't worry. Slippers, sort of a half-jacket, black and white costume. The one big barette is back instead of the two smaller ones. I've frosted the top of her hair, dropping a little zip-a-tone in there. We'll see how that works out.

H: Who else? Shrinking Violet?

K: I haven't even thought about her yet. I was the one who put her back in the green minidress. But I think I might turn the dress into sort of a loose-sleeved blouse with a belt cinching it so that instead of being a skirt, it would sort of like an overhang from under the belt, and bring the tights up to give her a sleeker look. You know, cover her legs.

Brainiac 5: A different haircut so he won't look like such a dork, pockets on the uniform at different points on the overalls, and updating that belt to make it look more Thirtieth Century-ish and not like an elevator button. As for #51, I am sorry it had to happen that way, but his costume is not Kelly green from the waist up. It was a misunderstanding on everyone's part because I had them unzip the front of his overall, but the turtleneck would have remained in place -- I figure it unhooks like a priest's collar. But I never put a coloring note in there, so it's my fault.

Lightning Lass: A little sleeker look, a hip belt and the white lightning things on her shoulders, I extended them so they actually overhang the shoulders. Basically the same haircut -- I like the sort of overhang in the front of her hair.

Shadow Lass: Exactly the same costume, but enough texture put in so that it's kind of obvious that it's velvet.

Polar Boy: We removed the beanie cap and the inner tubes around his neck. The inner tubes over his shoulders are now fur -- the original fur idea has come back. And I don't know what else I'll do with him now that Paul's says he's going to toy with it some more in one of his plots.

Dream Girl: A different, layered kind of a haircut. I stole Kevin's [Kevin Maguire's] hairstyle from Green Flame, which Mike DeCarlo then inked in such a way that it doesn't look like it was stolen -- so that was an admission I didn't have to make here. God damn!

Blok: I drew him once in that thing that he's wearing now. Never again! He'll just keep changing his look, but eventually he's going to evolve quite dramatically.

H: What about Wildfire?

K: Yeah, what about Wildfire? I was going to put him back in the visor, but then I thought, knowing his personality all along, he's finally gotten a way to achieve his human form and he'd never go back into a containment suit. I have no idea what I'm going to do with him at this point. I certainly don't like the Firestorm look to his head, but I haven't really had time to think about it. He hasn't featured prominently enough in the book for me to do anything with him.

Dawnstar, I'm going to bounce around different ideas, but I'll probably end up coming back to the outfit she's got now. I want to see if I can get something that looks a bit more American Indian minus the slut appeal.

You know Rond Vidar is a Green Lantern now. I put him into a nice little Green Lantern uniform.

I don't know if I'll do anything with Mon-El. This is all contingent on Paul saying, "Go for it." I don't know if I'll put Mon-El back into his uniform again. Maybe variations on it, but I think he should be somebody who sort of dresses for the occasion.

Saturn Girl, I put her in street clothes. She's got a totally new haircut that people are going to hate. I just don't like the Donna Reed cut.

H: So what does it look like now?

K: It's a very short cut -- a businesswoman's cut, almost. That's the best way I can put it. Short, but a little bit longer in the front -- it sort of hangs down at an angle, with a layered look.

Also, Polar Boy, when I took off his headpiece, I gave him back that sort of Jack Frost spiky kind of hair, like icicles.

Timber Wolf's going to stay basically the same because I don't know what to do with him.

H: Nobody seems to have known what to do with him for a long, long time.

K: And other characters. I guess as I have to do them and they feature prominently in an adventure, I'll play around with them a bit. I'll tell you one thing right now: I hate drawing Tellus. If I had my way, he'd be the next one for the body bags. I don't like him at all. I don't know why. And Quislet, I'm just totally confused about. I still don't know what's going on with him, but we'll see. And Bouncing Boy's got a mustache. I gave facial hair to Star Boy, and he's gone, so I figured, ol' Bouncing Boy, [it was his turn]. Now he looks like Oliver Hardy.

H: It's very easy to picture that.

K: It works, and he's fat again. I'm not talking muscular fat, I'm talking fat!

H: What kind of influences come into play when you start fiddling around with the looks of the Legionnaires? Is it stuff you see on the streets when you go into New York, is it magazines, or is it coming straight out of your imagination?

K: What I do is, my wife picks up these magazines like Elle, and my daughter picks up even weirder ones, fashion magazines, and I'll flip through them. If I see something that catches my fancy, I'll rip it out and tack it to the board, and I'll play with it because I'll then have to take this hairstyle and try to project it a bit further. What's the next step for this [style]? What would be the Thirtieth Century version of this? Sometimes it even requires bringing it down a bit because things tend to go in trends. Who's to say that the 1950s look five times removed might come back in the Thirtieth Century? You can never tell.

But mostly, it's fashion magazines and stuff I see on the street, people at the office trying to put on the latest look. Same thing with the uniforms and street clothes.

H: What about the influences on your artistic style itself? You've gone through a number of changes over the years. What brings these about?

K: Boredom, mostly. And again, each assignment dictates its own approach. With the Legion now, and specifically since that whole Comics Journal thing, I've made it a point of working in a vacuum. I'll flip through comics to see what's currently going, but I won't bring 'em home. I don't remove myself totally -- I'm still aware of what's going on -- but I won't allow myself to reach that point of fanaticism to where your judgment is warped, for lack of a better way to do it. Or you lose your sense of judgment and you can't see the forest for the trees, and you step over that line. I've always said about the Comics Journal article that I'll accept the rap for the crime, but I will not stand for the motivation that was given for it.

With the Legion right now. I'm trying to take all the stuff I learned since I left the book, and trying different approaches, and now focusing back and pulling in some of those [approaches to something] closer to standard comic books. With the Legion, you can't do anything but the basic, standard comic book. You can put little pieces in there, but it's such a complicated book. And I'm still applying what I've learned to it. So it's not the old Legion stuff, but again, it's not the stuff people are terrified I'll do. It's sort of a combination. God knows, everyone up at DC likes it. All of a sudden, they are saying, "Wow, with this you can do anything." So we'll see how the fans out there respond to it.

H: There were those couple of issues of Justice League you did that didn't seem to go over too well, at least judging from what people were saying in the comics shop I go to.

K: No, it didn't go over very well at all, and it was a mistake on my part. I tried to force the Justice League to fit my approach instead of tailoring my approach to what I know the Justice League required. That was wrong on my part. It should have been much closer to what was going on before -- much, much closer. I shouldn't have accepted the assignment if I wasn't willing to work within the parameters -- the parameters that I, myself, had set up for the book. So it was just a stupid move on my part.

H: But then, that's how you learn about those things. If you hadn't done that, you wouldn't be aware of the problems now.

K: If I hadn't done that, I'd be trying to do it to the Legion now. At least I'm aware of it. My last hurrah with that was Legion #45, the big issue where I did those few pages, and I just whack-whack-whack-whacked 'em. But now I'm making an effort to come closer to what the fans want. People will pick up the Legion and go, "Wow, it's just like the old days again."

Of course, it's not exactly. Larry [Mahlstedt] isn't along, but I think if they look at the work and see where it's coming from, they'll realize it's not the esoteric stuff. [An unpublished piece by Keith and Larry -- originally intended as a cover -- appears here.] But then, who knows? The fans might look at it and say, "Bring back LaRocque." And it's really funny, too, that people are so unaware of the incredible amount of difference that DeCarlo made on that book. Look at the latest issues of The Flash that LaRocque is on that Larry's inking, and then look at the last issues of The Legion where DeCarlo inked, and you'll see that Mike contributed a lot. Not to slight Greg, but he belongs on The Flash, man.

H: What's your favorite comic book out right now? Aside from the ones you're working on.

K: 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.'"

H: What's Sinner?

K: 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.

H: What about books without pictures? What are you into there?

K: 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 Irving's books -- [The World According to] Garp, Hotel New Hampshire and all those.

H: What about TV? What do you watch?

K: 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 hard-core 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.

H: The new one? The old one? Both?

K: 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.

H: What is it you hated about them?

K: 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.

H: When did you start out in comics?

K: The Bicentennial year -- '76.

H: 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.

K: 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.

H: Down south where?

K: 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].

H: The Pocket Universe of America.

K: 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 #50.

H: I've got to ask you, since you reacted to it: What about the Pocket Universe? Lemme get you started on it.

K: 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.

H: You had some problems with the Time Trapper in the original four-parter [the original Pocket Universe story] too, as I recall.

K: 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 story line. 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.

H: Well, they stuck you with that, and now you and Paul can run with that new twist.

K: 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.

H: There's a lot that can be done with her, too, that has never really been touched on.

K: 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.

H: Could it have popped out of that big ol' power battery on Oa in 1987?

K: 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.

H: Who's your favorite Legionnaire?

K: At this point? To draw, Blok.

H: If you were placed in a room for an hour with a Legionnaire?

K: Oh, Cosmic Boy.

H: How come?

K: 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.

H: 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.

K: 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.

H: Why?

K: 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.

H: 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?

K: 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.

H: I think she was there for Mike Grell, originally. I recall Paul saying that she was created specifically for Mike.

K: 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.

K: 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.

H: 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.

K: 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."

H: Such as?

K: 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].

H: It's got to change. It's got to move along.

K: 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.