Meanwhile...: Jumping very quickly back to something that resembles a topic, there was a very Creeper-a-la-Ditko feel to HECKLER.

Keith Giffen: Yeah, that was deliberate. Very much deliberate.

MW...: Was Ditko a strong influence on you or did that just seem to fit the character?

KG: I always liked the fact that Ditko’s characters were so unique. They really stood out, you know? There was no mistaking The Creeper for any other costumed character. The Creeper was The Creeper. Each one of Ditko’s characters had a real distinct visual flair and I wanted that in THE HECKLER. So yeah, the costume was a very, very deliberate attempt at duplicating some of Ditko’s more extreme costume designs.

MW...: Whatever happened to the Creeper project that you had been reportedly working on for the last few years?

KG: Other stuff intervened and I walked away from it because I’d made prior commitments.

MW...: I was actually quite surprised when Len Kaminski and Shawn Martinbrough came out with their CREEPER series.

KG: Well, nobody was doing anything with the character at that point and I had walked away from it. It’s not like I own the character. It’s D.C.’s character.

And no, I don’t like what they’re doing, but it’s what they’re doing. They seem to be succeeding on some level.

MW...: Do you continue to read titles that you’ve left just to see where they’re going?

KG: No I do not. There’s no way on Earth I could have anything but a negative reaction. It’s like, “You’re fucking with my kids!”, you know? “The foster parent may be the best guy in the world, but that’s my kid.”

I don’t think Paul Levitz ever read my run on the LEGION.

MW...: Is there a moratorium on that? A certain amount of time you need to distance yourself from a project before you can go back and read it?

KG: No, it’s up to the individual. Some people pick it up immediately to see what’s going on, other people never pick it up. I just prefer to walk away from it clean.

If I leave a book under my own steam, if I just decide to leave a book, it doesn’t mean that there’s no more stories that can be told with that character, it just means that there are no more stories that I want to tell with that character.

MW...: That last bit sort of leads us into the next thing I wanted to cover, and that’s ownership. You’ve ventured into the realm of creator owned books a couple times with books like THE MARCH HARE and TRENCHER...

KG: Right.

MW...: Actually, did you know that A-List comics just reprinted THE MARCH HARE?

KG: Yes, with my blessing.

MW...: Was there any intention of you continuing where you left off with that series?

KG: No. Let’s see now, A-List comics...Steve Schanes does that, and he’s also sort of partners with a producer, and the producer wanted to farm THE MARCH HARE around and asked if he could reprint it so he could have something to drop on people’s desks. And I said, “Sure, why not.” He also asked me if I’d be interested in working up a treatment that’s slowly turned into a full screenplay that I’m still working on.

MW...: For THE MARCH HARE?

KG: Yeah.

MW...: What happened to that series, initially. There was one issue from LP Comics, I believe, and then there just wasn’t any more.

KG: It came out from David Singer who then dropped out from sight, I’m not sure why. I really don’t know why, for all I know, he could be in Tahiti, he could be in Wyoming, he could be living next door to me. I don’t know, he just vanished off the face of the Earth, as far as I’m concerned.

MW...: So you would have continued with the series had things been different?

KG: Yeah.

MW...: You also did TRENCHER for Image.

KG: Yeah.

MW...: Why the move to the big “I” after such a long time at D.C.? Or is that the answer right there?

KG: Kind of the answer right there. When Image came out they were connected to Malibu and I thought that was a wonderful idea. I got into talks with D.C. about creating a line like that that would be connected to D.C. and it got weird, and then it got ugly. And in the meantime, I was constantly being bombarded by Al Gordon and Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld and Jim Valentino, “come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.” So I went. I figured I wasn’t going to be able to do this at D.C., let me do it over here.

And that was really it. Had D.C. turned around and said, “Okay fine, let’s do it that way”, I probably would have wound up doing TRENCHER for D.C. under an Image type imprint umbilical to D.C.. But, it didn’t work out.

MW...: Was Gideon a character you had kicking around for a while or was it something totally new for you?


KG: It was something that came to me one afternoon full-blown. Bang! It was there. Gideon, Phoebe, re-possessing souls, the whole bit.

And TRENCHER, by the way, there is a screenplay that is now actually being farmed around and is generating interest. Gideon might reach the silver screen, how do you like that?

MW...: I like that very much. [laughs] Do you know who’s written the screenplay?

KG: I did.

MW...: Oh. [laughs] You actually have some experience with writing for the screen, don’t you?

KG: I learned. I was taught by the producer who is currently farming around the TRENCHER project. He taught me the basics of it, hammered in over a two year period.

MW...: Did you and Bob Fleming not write an episode of THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS?

KG: We wrote a REAL GHOSTBUSTERS, but the first five minutes are ours.

MW...: The rest was redone?

KG: The rest was redone with good reason. I don’t want to go into that, it was a particularly awkward period there. And I won’t be able to go into it without being more negative than I need to about people.

MW...: Okay, jumping back to TRENCHER then, after four issues you moved to Blackball...

KG: Got a one-shot Christmas special, he appeared in one issue of Blackball Comics, and he does occasional guest shots here and there. He was also in IMAGES OF SHADOWHAWK, which I did, and I think he appears in the latest issue of SHARKEY as well.

MW...: SHARKEY?

KG: Yeah, it’s a book by Dave Elliott. It’s a character I own lock, stock and barrel, so if somebody wants to play with him, I sort of loan him out and he comes wandering back again.

MW...: When you and the other creators were “dismissed” from Image, it was never made really clear to the fan press why exactly it was done. What really happened there?

KG: I don’t know. To this day, nobody at Image has had the decency to call me up and tell me. The only person I know was not involved was Erik Larsen. You know why? The vote. Erik Larsen was in New York with me. Another person I don’t hold personally responsible is Rob Liefeld because after [I went to Blackball] I found out that Rob Liefeld was planning on keeping TRENCHER going by pushing it through Extreme Studios. And Jim Valentino who was the one who called me and warned me a week before it happened. That’s the extent of that. I was never told why.

MW...: So is that why the work that you’ve done for Image since has been for Erik, Rob and Jim?

KG: Yes, exactly.

MW...: Okay. Now, Blackball was fairly short-lived...

KG: Yes, Blackball was coming out, and for some odd reason, some article appeared in a magazine somewhere saying Blackball Comics is dead and has gone under, which was news to Dave Elliott and me. But once it was printed, it was like, “Oh, you’re under?” And no matter what we did, we could not convince people that we were still planning on publishing. At that point, the bottom fell out, so we were almost lucky. [laughs]

MW...: That was something that Marvel’s MC2 editor was complaining about recently. He had said that if everybody believes all the unsubstantiated rumours on the newsgroups, retailers will stop ordering books because they’re “cancelled”, and fans won’t buy them because it’s a dead investment. It basically becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

KG: Yeah, and some of the meat-heads running some of the comic book stores across the country - and trust me they’re out there..they’re not the majority, but they’re out there - they stop ordering. Waitaminute...Rumour spreads and you stop ordering?

You know what it is? Comic books has become such a small pond, such an incestuous industry, that stuff like this can happen. If a rumour goes out that Gus Van Sant’s PSYCHO is not coming out, when people see it in the theatre they’re not going to go, “Oh no. That didn’t come out”. But sometimes the comic book business will fly in the face of logic like that. “AVENGERS was cancelled but here’s the latest issue.”

“Can’t be, it was cancelled.” [sighs exasperatingly]

MW...: [laughs] You said that TRENCHER number five was done and just waiting to be published for some time.

KG: The Tummytuckers, yeah. The Tummytuckers from outer space. We’ve been invaded by a bunch of aliens who are going to help us reach our potential through forced cosmetic surgery. It was a real satirical riff in Stephen King territory.

MW...: If the opportunity came up to publish it, would you take what you have and put the one issue out?

KG: Not in the current climate, no.

MW...: From an art standpoint, this is something that’s a few years old. Do you look at it and think, “Oh God, I don’t draw like that anymore.”

KG: The funny thing is, when I ink, I do. TRENCHER I didn’t pencil. I went straight to ink. I used rapidographs. I never put a pencil line down on the paper, I just drew it. I just wanted to do real free-wheeling kind of artwork, you know? From head to paper as fast as possible.

MW...: This is a good opportunity to mention your colourist on not only TRENCHER, but many books that you’ve worked on through the years, Lovern Kindzierski.

KG: Yeah, Lovern. Yeah, preferred colourist, he knows what he’s doing. He’s competent, he’s professional, he’s a nice guy, why wouldn’t I want to work with him? He’s definitely my preferred colourist. He’ll be colouring VEXT.

MW...: Very often you’ll get a writer/penciller team, or a penciller/inker team that stick together, you don’t usually see pencillers and colourists hanging together.

KG: You know, you don’t, but there’s a handful of people in the comic industry that I know that have sort of transcended professional friendship, and sort of branched off into straight ahead buddy, meet and have a beer, type. Bob Fleming, Lovern Kindzierski, Dave Elliott, Eric Stephenson and other people who will be pissed off because I didn’t mention them. But yeah, it’s just like minds, I guess.

I always liked Lovern’s work and another thing on TRENCHER that a lot of people don’t realise, is that I saw the colour when you did. I never asked for colour proofs, and he never let me down. It’s rare to have that kind of faith in a collaborator where you know you can just walk away from it and know that you’ll do a bang-up job because he’s as committed to making it look as good as possible as I am.

MW...: TRENCHER number five was also the issue where you were supposed to print the results of your “Biggest Jerk In Comics” poll. What kind of response did that poll get?

KG: It got a halfway decent response. Not like the polybag thing wherein I was knee deep in polybags for a while. It got a lukewarm response. I think a lot of people thought I’d pushed it a bit too far on that one I’ve still got the results around here somewhere.

MW...: It’s been a while since the poll was started, do the results even still apply today?

KG: No, it was within that little window, you had to get it in between that time, and I counted up the votes and tallied them up and stuck them all somewhere figuring, “Well, it’ll never happen now.” It’s a moot point.

I tied for third place, by the way. Let’s see, it was me, Tom DeFalco, and Gary Groth tied for third.

If PUNX had continued on at Acclaim, we were going to try to drag the readers in and make the book a bit more reader friendly, but it wasn’t to be. It was an odd little book.

MW...: We’ll talk more about PUNX later on, but finishing up with TRENCHER here, you had a TRENCHER/WILDSTAR cross-over that had been alluded to in the WILDSTAR letters page...

KG: At one point, yes, we were planning that but it never came about. Everything fell apart so it never happened.

As a matter of fact, there was even a TRENCHER/MR. MONSTER face off that’s been done, but we have no place to put it. And it was a jam wherein I drew all the TRENCHER related stuff, and then Mike (Michael T. Gilbert) went and drew all the MR. MONSTER stuff. Again, it was supposed to be in Blackball and it never happened.

MW...: Speaking of stillborn projects, whatever happened to the Galactic Legion book you were going to do with Jim Valentino?

KG: Again, it fell apart in the planning stages. No one’s fault, it just fell apart in the planning stages.

MW...: Does a lot of stuff fall apart?

KG: Yeah, a lot of stuff falls apart.

MW...: What we see on the shelves every month is basically...

KG: The stuff that got through the process, yeah.

MW...: Do you have any more creator owned projects that you’re thinking about?

KG: VEXT is coming out creator owned, but right now, no. I’m just sort of laying low for a while, I’m doing SPIDER-MAN now, I pick up a project or two here and there. VEXT is kind of my creator owned thing at this point.

MW...: I spoke to Ron Marz recently and we talked about his experiences with Acclaim and the abortive “BirthQuake” relaunch, and considering the volume of output you had with them at that time, I wanted to ask you about your time at Acclaim and what it was like for you.

KG: Ummm...[long pause] I was given a certain amount of freedom and creative leeway at Acclaim. I have to believe on some level that Massarsky and company definitely wanted Valiant to turn around - Valiant, Acclaim, whatever the hell they called it. They were being second guessed by the corporate entity right, left and centre. It got kind of ugly, it got kind of weird.

It was a little bit like Marvel now. You were never quite sure day to day what was going to go on, whether your editor was going to be there when you called, and that doesn’t make for confidence. If you were to put a gun to my head and say, “Who was responsible for what happened at Acclaim?”, just shoot me. I have no idea.

I’m pretty sure that this end result for Acclaim, or the way it happened, was not done deliberately, or done with malice. I’m sure there was a certain amount of ineptitude there, but to try to single somebody out and make them the villain, no. Doesn’t work.

I ran up against people I didn’t get along with, I had people I did get along with, but that’s the same as any other company. What happened to Acclaim was unfortunate.

MW...: I thought your run on MAGNUS: ROBOT FIGHTER was quite good. I thought it was on par with your LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES in terms of how it dealt with the characters more maturely, rather than just going for the cheap slugfest of the month approach.

KG: Again, I was given a lot of latitude, I was given a lot of freedom on the book. I always knew that it was heading to a finite point. I knew it was heading towards that ending when I took over, I just didn’t think we’d arrive that fast. [laughs]

MW...: [laughs] Is that the ideal situation for you, to go into a story knowing where that finite point is, or at least knowing it’s on the horizon?

KG: Yeah, from the first issue of LEGION I knew I was blowing up Earth. I come on a series and I know a target that I want to hit, and when I hit that target I look around and decide if I’ve got another one further down the line that I can go for. If I don’t, I’ll leave the book as amicably as I can, and if I do, I’ll proceed.

MW...: Your X-O work was kind of awkward, to say the least.

KG: Yeah well, you know what that’s called? They paid me.

MW...: [laughs] You sort of came on in the middle of something, and you left right in the middle of something.

KG: Yeah, I came in under weird circumstances of who’s doing what, and is this person on this book, and I kind of left the same way. No, I didn’t leave the same way, let’s be honest, I blew myself off of the book. I didn’t want to be involved with it anymore and I just figured, okay, get my ass kicked out.

MW...: I thought PUNX was one of the funniest and most irreverent comic I’ve read in a very long time.

KG: Oh, thank you. I enjoyed doing it.

MW...: Where’s number four? [laughs]

KG: [sighs] This is during the wild times at Acclaim, during the bad times at Acclaim, and between three and four I went from wanting to work at Acclaim to not wanting to. And I took the steps necessary to see that I wasn’t. Let’s leave it at that.

MW...: So does the fourth issue not exist then?

KG: Number four exists. Yes, number four exists, up to, and including, the pages that were drawn. See, the ending of PUNX, basically everything was heading towards a basketball game. To carry it even farther, to make it even weirder, the final battle was a basketball game played with armament drawn by Ernie Colon in his Richie Rich style.

You know, I’ve got all these little issues that no one is ever going to see.

MW...: Acclaim actually solicited a PUNX II done by Ty Templeton...

KG: Yeah, I have no idea what happened to it. I heard that happened, but Acclaim owns PUNX. I have no claim to that. I walked in and they asked, “What kind of book would you like to do?”, and I spilled it out and they said, “Fine” and I did it.

MW...: Just as an aside, I loved the “After-BirthQuake” joke. [laughs]

KG: Oh, I’ll never pass up a chance to bite the hand that feeds me, ever. They pulled some of the nastier stuff out of there, because I really went after them. “We’re Acclaim, we’re desperate, and this time we’re begging you!” But yeah, certain things came out.

MW...: We talked briefly about your “Five Years Later” version of the Legion, and I wanted to expand on that a bit.

KG: Okay.

MW...: What exactly happened in those five years? You only really started to let on what went on in the later stages of yours and the Bierbaum’s run, and I wondered if there was ever any plans to spill the beans and do the “Five Year Gap” story.

KG: Yes, there was. We dropped hints and then, eventually, we were going to go back and start spelling it out. But I’d never spell it out completely. Again, I wanted a gap between myself and Paul, and I figured Legion fans have never been shy about filling in the gaps themselves, let them argue about it. I took away the question of Jan’s sexuality, let them have something else. But I was never going to go back and say, “Here’s what happened step by step”, but little incidents there were going to start cropping up.

MW...: So you weren’t going to give an entire...

KG: I was not going to do a chronology, no.

MW...: You caught quite a lot of criticism with what’s come to be known as “V.4”, or Volume Four of the Legion...

KG: Oh yeah, or that Legion, yeah.

MW...: [laughs] I know you had a lot of problems at the beginning of the series as a result of your having to destroy and recreate the universe, I think, four times in as many issues...

KG: [sighs] Yeah.

MW...: ...was that editorial wrangling?

KG: Yes it was. And we were always thrown into the position of trying to salvage as much of the past as we could. I actually turned them down when they said, “Why don’t you just wipe everything out and start from scratch?”, and I said, “I won’t do that.”

MW...: It’s kind of ironic considering...

KG: That’s what I was being accused of doing.

MW...: [laughs] Yeah.

KG: And I was the one who finally had to leave the book because I would refuse to do it. I refused to invalidate Paul and all the other people that came before me.

Do you think I wanted to do Laurel Gand? Fuck no, I didn’t want to do Laurel Gand but I had to find some way of salvaging as much as possible of [the] Supergirl stories that were told.

Do you think I wanted to make Mon-El Valor? No, we were not allowed to have anything to do with Superman including the El surname.

No Superboy, no this, no that. We were scrambling to plug as many holes as possible to maintain as much of Legion continuity as we could. And then we were being savaged as the barbarians who were tearing it to pieces. I know how to tear things to pieces, if I wanted to tear it to pieces, there would be no question about it.

I think that, for the most part, that LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES run is probably some of the best work I’ve ever done in terms of storytelling, in terms of character and just moving things along, yeah.

And boy, that nine panel grid backfired on me. I looked at the price of a comic book and thought, “Look how expensive this is. If I use nine panels per page, I can give them twice as much story. More bang for the buck.” Whoah, no. No one liked that. Do you think it’s easy to draw nine panels a page?

MW...: I think most of the comic buying public do, actually. [laughs]

KG: I guess they think it is because they thought, “Oh look, he’s taking all these shortcuts. He’s not doing this, he’s not doing that.”

How much story are you getting?

”Oh, screw the story, where’s the splash page.”

MW...: That’s what I had meant when I defended comic books as being more than just ten minute reads earlier. When I first started collecting LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, it was with your run, and I found that when I sat down to read LEGION, that was pretty much all I read that day. I wanted to read the story, and then the Omnicom, and the text pieces and the letters page...

KG: Yeah, we wanted a dense book. We wanted a book that you could at least say, “I feel like I got my money’s worth.” But again, we were attacked, and that’s when I just dug in and said, “No, no, no, no, no. Uh-uh, on this I really believe that I’m right.”

What was so confusing? You know what’s odd, it was only confusing to the guys who were too familiar with the old Legion and were trying to shoehorn this into a perception that wasn’t there. For the new people coming onboard from scratch, there was no confusion at all.

Krinn, right? To you he’s Rokk Krinn, later on you find out that he used to be called Cosmic Boy, but people go, “Well, how are they supposed to know that Rokk Krinn was Cosmic Boy?” They’re not! As long as they know he’s Rokk Krinn!

MW...: I remember Jason Pearson commenting on the nine panels shortly after he took over the book from you, and he said that he had tried to do it the more conventional way, but found that the sheer volume of characters and material warranted the grid.

KG: Yup, for the LEGION book it did because we were telling very tightly focused stories. [sighs]

It was a great book to work on, it was a fun time for me, and yet it was also a very frustrating time for me because I’m not the kind of person who goes to the fan press and starts banging on the desk and screaming. We had enough people supporting us and the book was doing well enough that I felt satisfied, D.C. felt satisfied - up to a point, you know? But had I not been fresh off of JUSTICE LEAGUE, which was their best selling book for a while there, I doubt I would have gotten away with it.

MW...: How many editors did you guys go through on that title, anyways?

KG: Oh, twenty seven, twenty eight, I don’t know. [laughs] Every time I turned around there was a new editor. Every time I turned around there was a new restriction, every time I turned around a new piece of continuity was jumping up to bite me in the face, it was just mind-numbing. And that infamous “Hourglass” issue was churned out overnight because we found out we couldn’t use any of the Superman mythos anymore.

MW...: Do you look at your run on LEGION as the most that you could invest yourself into a book without it being creator owned?

KG: At that point, yeah. Very much so.

MW...: Because you really made your mark on that series. At that time, if anybody mentioned LEGION, there was almost a sort of ownership of that corner of the D.C.U. that was Keith Giffen’s. I think that’s one of the reasons why you may have been criticised so harshly.

KG: I was messing with their kids. You see, you’re going to cause a lot of flak when you come onto a book no matter what, especially when you’re replacing a long-standing team, or a long-standing writer like Paul. I was ready for that. What I wasn’t ready for was the fact that the book was not being judged on it’s own merit. A lot of incidentals were getting in the way. And those people who hated it, fine. Your opinion is as valid as anyone else’s, and it was always offset by those who loved it. And those who loved it, loved it fervently.

So...A little piece of Legion history.

MW...: Something that most people don’t bother taking into account is the fact that you weren’t working on the book alone, you were collaborating with Tom and Mary Bierbaum who did the scripting.

KG: We used to have long talks about that too. It was as close a collaboration as I’ve ever had. It started off being extraordinarily tight, almost panel by panel. It loosened up and then it reached the point wherein we would just call and shoot the shit for a while so we got the basic gist of the story, and then the both of them would run with it. It was a long acclimating period.

Don’t forget, Tom and Mary Bierbaum were two of the staunchest old Legion supporters. It was very hard for them to...Let me put it this way, when I finally won them over, I figured if I can win them over I can win anyone over.

To be concluded in Part Three of our interview with writer/artist, Keith Giffen