Remembering Keith Giffen

Beloved comics writer and artist Keith Giffen passed away this week after suffering a stroke on October 8th; Giffen was 70 years old. Although best-known for his large body of work for DC Comics, over a career that spanned five decades, Giffen also created comics for publishers like Marvel Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Image Comics, and Valiant Comics.

Born in Queens, New York in 1952, Giffen broke into comics after spending a year at the NY School of Visual Arts with feature stories in the Marvel Preview anthology series during the mid-‘70s, where he and writer Bill Mantlo co-created one of Giffen’s most beloved and enduring characters, Rocket Racoon, who would later find fame on the silver screen in the MCU Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

In a 2020 interview with writer William Colosimo for Back Issue magazine, Giffen talks about the creation of the misanthropic mammal. “To be honest with you, he was a throwaway character to me,” said Giffen. “I never dreamt it would reach this level with Rocket Raccoon. But then, that’s been my career, mostly. I thought Lobo was a throwaway character. I’m really bad at predicting which characters are going to go someplace. But Rocket was just a…‘eh, we needed a funny animal character… eh, let’s do this.’ It was literally that thought.”

Giffen’s early art style was heavily indebted to the great Jack Kirby (as were many artists of the era) but, after a hiatus from comics, Giffen got back in the game with DC’s Legion of Super Heroes title in 1982, which featured artwork more closely resembling the hyper-realistic style of George Pérez and Jim Starlin that had become popular in the 1980s. Giffen’s precise artwork and sense of humor – he’d often include “easter eggs” in his panels like humorous messages on signs in the background of the action, or he’d hide the faces of Marvel Comics characters in unlikely places – helped make Legion of Super Heroes DC’s second best-selling book behind Pérez’s über-popular New Teen Titans.

This success raised Giffen’s profile and led to him pairing with co-writer J.M. DeMatteis and artist Kevin Maguire to revitalize the moribund Justice League title. This team worked together on Justic League for five years (a lifetime in the comics universe) and resulted in a 1987 spin-off series, Justice League International, which utilized some of the DC pantheon’s lesser-known heroes.

Before his ground-breaking tenure with Justice League, however, Giffen had created another of his most enduring characters, the ultra-violent mercenary and interstellar bounty hunter Lobo. Originally appearing in the Legion spin-off series, The Omega Men, Giffen meant for Lobo to be a parody of Marvel’s popular X-Men character Wolverine. The character took on a life of his own, however, and a 1990 mini-series, Lobo: The Last Czarian, which was plotted by Giffen, written by Alan Grant, and drawn by Simon Bisley, retconned the character’s origin and created a veritable Lobo cottage industry. Subsequent mini-series include Lobocop (a RoboCop parody) and Paramilitary Christas Special (where the Easter Bunny hires Lobo to assassinate Santa Claus) while a Lobo solo comic ran for 64 issues between 1993 and ’99. Lobo has also made the jump to Hollywood, the ruthless but comical Czarian appearing in numerous DC animated series; a feature-length movie starring Jason Momoa is also in development.

In a 2006 interview with Rik Offenberger of Newsarama, Giffen stated “I have no idea why Lobo took off. I came up with him as an indictment of the Punisher, Wolverine, bad ass hero prototype and somehow he caught on as the high violence poster boy. Go figure.” Several of Giffen’s “tossed off” characters found unexpected popularity, however. He created the humorous, self-aware character “Ambush Bug” to provide comic relief, first appearing in a 1982 issue of DC Comics Presents where overwhelmingly positive reader response led to the character resurfacing in various DC titles, including the Superman-oriented Action Comics and, ultimately, a pair of Ambush Bug mini-series and several specials.

As a freelancer writer and artist, Giffen created comics for a number of independent publishers throughout the 1990s, including the best-selling Trencher mini-series for Image Comics and writing existing titles like X-O Manowar and Magnus, Robot Fighter for Valiant Comics. After a hiatus of several years from the comics business, working in television and movies creating storyboards for shows like The Real Ghostbusters animated series and the Cartoon Network’s Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, Giffen returned to comics, working on Marvel’s Defenders series as well as writing several mini-series for the publisher, including Annihilation and Drax the Destroyer, which brought several Guardians of the Galaxy characters back into prominence before the release of the first movie.

Giffen also played a major role in DC’s 2006 reboot of the company’s entire comics line as the weekly 52 series’ breakdown artist. As he told Newsarama, “I am the layout guy, I am the storyboard guy. I am there to facilitate and help the four major writers: Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and of course, Mark Waid. I take the scripts and break them down into visual stuff, not because we don’t think we have artists who can tell a story, we have amazing artists, and each of them is turning in their A game. We are doing this because we have a weekly book and within a month we have a weekly book with three different artists working on it. It is important that visually and layout wise that the book has the same internal rhythm.” It was during the 52 series that Giffen co-created the new Blue Beetle identity, teenager Jaime Reyes, who has since appeared on screen in the 2023 Blue Beetle live-action film.

Giffen continued writing until sidelined by his health, working as recently as 2019 on an Inferior Five series for DC with popular artist Jeff Lemire. Giffen’s sharp sense of humor even survived his demise, with the comics lifer instructing his family to post the following epitaph to his Facebook page: “I told them I was sick…anything not to go New York Comic Con. Thanx Keith Giffen 1952-2023,” the comics legend signing off with his signature phrase (which his characters frequently spoke), “Bwah ha ha ha ha.” Keith Giffen, R.I.P.