R.I.P. Keith Giffen

As I've said before, I don't like to do a lot of obituaries here on the blog because if I got started on that, I'd never stop. Someone worth remembering seems to die pretty much every day; musicians, writers, artists, entertainers. All the people that make up a life of the mind. Once in a while, though, I hear news that makes me think I maybe should at least mark the date. 

It's not remotely predictable which celebrity death is going to trigger a sense of loss, either. Obviously, almost none of us knows any of these people personally but knowing the work sometimes makes it feel that way. Other times, it's just the name is so familiar, it feels weird to hear they're gone.

I had that momentary frisson this week, when I heard Keith Giffen had died. He's not the biggest name but there was a time when almost everyone I knew would have known who he was and what he did. Not that they'd all have liked it. He was a controversial figure in his prime.

Keith Giffen drew, wrote and did some mysterious thing that seemed to be both and neither, that made him responsible for several of my favorite comics of all time. If I had to pick a single comic-book run to take with me into space, where it would be the only thing I'd have to read for the rest of forever, I might go with Giffen's forty or so issues of The Legion of Super-Heroes, published at the cusp of the 'nineties.

Known as "5 Years Later" it wasn't so much a reboot of the longstanding teen title as a complete rewrite. It was the classic audience divider. People either loved it or utterly loathed it. As a quondam nihilist and lifelong Legion fan, I thought it was the best version of the title I'd ever seen. I still do. It still is.

It would be fatuous to go into expositionary detail about the plot or the characterization or the setting and how every expectation was confounded. If you aren't a fan you won't care and if you are you'll already know. The point is, Giffen tore up everything and started over and still kept everything and carried on, which is a hard trick to carry.

He didn't do it alone. Comics is a collaborative medium. Most of the dialog was handled by husband and wife team Tom and Mary Bierbaum, who did an exemplary job of it. Keith Giffen handled the plotting and initially did the pencils, later moving to layouts. I guess if it'd been a TV series, he'd have been the Showrunner.

5YL was Keith's second stint with my favorite super-hero team. He'd penciled The Great Darkness saga for Paul Levitz in the early 'eighties, another high-water mark for the title, He also worked frequently with another of my favorite comic-book professionals, writer Robert Loren Fleming, co-creator of what I always used to say was my favorite comic, Thriller, and he penciled another of my all-time favorites, the Defenders, one of the first series I collected on my return to the fold, having briefly dropped the medium when I was "too old for comics" in my mid-teens.

I didn't just like Giffen's ideas; I loved the way he drew and I especially loved his layouts. He was an exponent of the nine-panel grid, a rigid format that turned a lot of readers off but that I found exhilarating and weirdly stimulating. I just had to look at the shape of those frames to feel the chaotic energy dammed up behind the restraining frames. It felt electric.

One of the things that continues to surprise me about modern life is the way people who used to be utterly unknown to all but a small cadre of obsessives now merit mentions on the national news and lengthy obituaries in the quality press when they die. At the time Keith Giffen was doing his best work, I don't believe there would have been a single newspaper, television or radio program in the UK that would have marked the passing of a comic artist of his stature with so much as a single word.

That said, Keith never attained the stature of an Alan Moore or a Grant Morrison even within the industry. He was a comic fan's favorite more than any kind of breakthrough artist and even among comics fans he was always something of an acquired taste. The dark and disturbing direction in which he took the LSH was atypical of his work in general, which tended more to the comedic than many super-hero fans found comfortable.

He was responsible for bringing Ambush Bug into the world, an act for which there are many who'll likely never forgive him. He gave us Lobo (Ditto.) and Rocket Racoon, thanks to the movies now the best-known of his amoral, anarchic, anti-heroes. 

He also turned the Justice League of America into a sitcom, something he'd previously helped do to Marvel's Defenders when he penciled that excellent series from Steve Gerber's idiosyncratic and irreverent scripts. Strangely, for an artist with such a gift for visual discipline and intensity, he probably leaves us with a reputation as a humorist above all else.

Most of what I've been talking about happened quite a while ago although Keith was still working in comics until fairly recently. I need to catch up with the comics he wrote and drew in the first decade of the new millennium. I bet they're great. Everything of his I've ever read was at the very least good. Most of it was excellent.

Not everything we once loved stands up to re-examination but Keith's work does. I re-read the whole of 5YL only a couple of years ago. It was even better than I remembered. 

I think I might read it again. And those Justice Leagues, too, if I can find them.

In The Phone Booth

 

I have an odd relationship with DCUO. In one sense, I've been playing it since beta but it would be more accurate to say I don't really "play" it at all. 

Mostly, I log in when I notice there's free stuff. It's a game that gives away quite a lot of nice things. Sometimes you have to do something to earn it, a mission or some quests, perhaps (Do superheroes do quests?) but more often than not all you need to do is log in.

Of late, I also try to remember to pop into the game as each new Episode arrives. Some time ago Daybreak (or whatever the new spin-off company's called... hang on... I should know this... no, it's gone) changed the way the regular content updates work. Instead of only being relevant to veterans there's now a limited period when the new content appears in an "event" version which anyone can enjoy. (Okay, anyone over level fifteen, but you can get to level fifteen on your first day. Probably. Don't make me go prove it).

Unlike others, I wasn't all that taken with the last update, Wonderverse. I'm not much of a Wonder Woman fan and I found the open world area quite confining and claustrophobic. I love the idea of open world raidlike bosses that never stop popping and which you can zerg down. I just didn't much like that particular implementation. 

I had higher hopes for this latest update, which follows much the same format, not so much because I'd heard the devs had iterated for user-friendliness but mostly because it's set in the thirty-first century and stars the Legion of Super Heroes.

I love the Legion. As I may have mentioned. I was looking forward to meeting them and taking a good look around their version of Metropolis, maybe getting a peek inside the clubhouse. I don't imagine they call it a clubhouse any more, come to think of it. They're all kind of grown up, now. Well, compared to the thirteen-year olds they appeared to be in the 1960s stories I grew up with. Although not as grown up as the magnificently cynical and jaded thirty-something Legion Keith Giffen gave us. 

Yeah, okay. Point taken. If I start critiquing the comics this is going to run long. Longer. Stick to the game.

This afternoon I ran all four of the big boss fights, some of them several times. I also did all of the daily and weekly missions. I haven't yet done the instanced mission, set in the Legion's headquarters. 

I was going to do it before I wrote this, for completeness sake, but then Mrs. Bhagpuss came in and asked if I fancied some sausage rolls and we had a cup of tea and watched an old Only Connect on YouTube and then she casually dropped into the conversation that Biden had won Pennsylvania and by the time I got back to my computer it was getting to be too late to do the instance and write about it tonight so I thought I'd leave it for tomorrow. Maybe it'll deserve a post of its own, although I doubt it.

What I've seen of the DCUO version of the thirty-first century so far I've enjoyed but I can't say it feels much like the future. It doesn't look an awful lot like any version of the Legion's Metropolis I've seen before, either. There's always the caveat that I haven't read any comics featuring the LSH that were published after the turn of this century. Last I heard, the entire Earth had been destroyed anyway, so you can see how far out of date I am.

For all I know, the current official take is that every building in Metropolis a thousand years from now is panelled with jade. The ones in DCUO certainly appear to be. They look very pretty. Not particularly fututristic but, hey, how would we know? 

There's a minor controversy on the forums over the phone booths. For some reason that particular form of street furniture, already archaic in 2020, has become an essential part of life again a millennium from now. They even feature as a key part of one of the quests. While it's obviously a cute nod to the origins of the Legion as an artefact of the 1950s, the time when Superman still looked around for a handy phone booth to change out of his Clark Kent duds, it does seem kind of hard to imagine exactly what the functionality might be.

The phone booths confused the hell out of me for an entirely different reason. I was fighting Validus when I happened to notice my character looked absolutely nothing like herself. She had somehow acquired a form-fitting body suit and a full-face helmet, neither of which I'd ever seen before. 

I spent a few minutes playing with the options but I couldn't work out how to change back. I wondered if it was something that some villain had done to me in the fight. After all, both the Emerald Empress and a mind-controlled Saturn Girl were running around Metropolis. Either of them could have mesmerized me into thinking I was a chicken if they wanted so no doubt they could convince me I'd changed my wardrobe.

 

Eventually (and I'm talking about twenty minutes later) I worked out I'd done it to myself with the phone booth quest. If I'd bothered to pay attention I'd have seen the line in the description that told me to use the booths to disguise myself as a Legion trainee. This is how they dress, it seems.

The big fights were fun although as usual I suffered from playing the wrong character. I really should re-roll or respec or something. I have several characters but the one I like to play is basically a brawler. She likes to get up close and hit people, repeatedly, with a big stick. Occasionally she kicks someone up in the air for a change of pace. 

As a tactic this does not fly when fighting open world raidlike bosses as a level 26 with a CR of 310. As soon as the big AEs go off, down she goes. I'd be a lot better off playing one of those super-types who stands a hundred meters back, channelling beams of colored light. I saw plenty of those. My character does have a ranged attack but it's pretty feeble and I have to keep hammering the right mouse button which makes my hand cramp.

Even so, I had a good time fighting two-fifths of the Fatal Five and the corrupted versions of the three Legion founders, Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy and Lightning Lad. The fights were fun (we didn't win all of them, either), the loot was good (I got several upgrades and some nice furniture for my Lair) and I dinged twenty-six. I'll try and remember to run the sequence a few more times before the open access goes away. Maybe I'll even get to thirty, which is the cap for actual levels, after which it's the infinite CR hamster wheel. 

While I was playing DCUO something else good happened. By sheer chance it happened to be the day of the Extra Life Twitch fundraiser (I have it runing in the background as I type) and there were gifts. Very nice gifts, incuding an awesome flying pet and some great "postcards" that turned out to be enormous posters to put up around the walls of my base.

I probably spent longer fiddling with that than I did fighting baddies. It's the housing options that have kept me logging in these last few years, if I'm honest. I like the combat well enough and I'm always curous to see the various familiar characters but DCUO is not what you'd call a narrative-driven game. I don't think anyone logs in for the stories. There'd have to be something more to hold my attention and base-building is that something.

 

We'll see if this turns out to be my bi-monthly visit done or if the lure of the Legion pulls me back a few more times. I guess if they can't do it, no-one could. I did get a trinket that procs Quislet as a combat pet and I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. I ought to give that a go.

Come to think of it, that means I got two different flying, silver metallic drone pets in the same session. That's kind of weird...

Anyway, if anyone wants the Extra Life freebies (there are a lot of them and they're good) they just said on the stream that they'll be available in-game until the end of this month. The Legion episode is available in its Event version "for a limited time", which probably means until the next Episode, which certainly won't be until next year.

Don't miss out!

That 31st Century : DCUO

I'd call myself a Legion fan. I certainly have a lot of the comics. I bought them as they came out, in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s... And last year I bought a dodgy dvd from the Phillipines with every Legion series digitized so now I pretty much have them all - at least until someone makes some more, which someone probably already has.

Of course, there are fans and fans. I knew a few Legion "fans" in the eighties and nineties. I'm not saying my devotion's on that scale but still, I do really like the Legion.

Possibly the main thing I like about the Legion is there's so many of them. That's the point, isn't it? The Legion is called "the Legion" for a reason. It's because there are a lot of them. 

Look at it. The Legion of Super-Heroes. It's right there in the name, isn't it? I mean, when you think of a legion of... well, of anything... there pretty much has to be a lot of them, doesn't there? Definitely more than, oh I don't know, three.

Seriously, who calls three of anything a "legion"? Goldilocks and the legion of bears. The legion of blind mice. The legion of stooges. Doesn't work, does it?

And yet somehow, these days, whenever the Legion turns up anywhere there always seem to be just the three of them. Usually it's the original three, the founders: Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad. 

There's at least some kind of excuse for having those three feature in Smallville. It's a nod to the team's legendary first appearance in Adventure Comics #247, the April 1958 issue of what was then the home of Superboy's own strip. 

 

It was the Legion's appearance in the Supergirl t.v. show that kickstarted my own superhero renaissance a few years back. I can't remember how I happened upon the trailer on YouTube that featured their upcoming guest slot but I do remember it was enough to get me to buy the dvd. 

Yeah... no it wasn't. That actually doesn't make sense. I'm misremembering my own timeline because the Legion didn't make it into Supergirl/Arrowverse continuity until Season Three and I'm pretty sure I was watching long before then.

Faulty memories aside, the point stands. When the Legion appears in Supergirl, guess how many of them show up? Everyone who said three, give yourselves a cookie.

The writers at least get a bonus point for picking a different three. Saturn Girl's there, again, but this time she's flanked by Mon-El and Brainiac Five. 

Call me cynical if you like but I have to wonder if that choice had anything to do with the budget. We are taling about a show that aired on the CW, after all. Cosmic Boy and Lightning Lad have powers that require at least some notional special effects, however cheesy. Brainy and Imra can pretty much slide by with a furrowed brow and a pained expression. 

Then again, they sprung for Brainy's Metron chair, so maybe not.

Why am I going on about all this, here on a blog supposedly dedicated to Massively Multiple Role-Playing Games? Isn't it obvious? 

DCUO's next big update, coming in November, is "LONG LIVE THE LEGION" . Not before time. As SJ Mueller, DC Universe Online Creative Director, puts it in the press release, "Players have been asking for a Legion of Super-Heroes episode for as long as I can remember".

I know I have. Except I was kind of hoping it would be, oh, I dunno, maybe the actual Legion? As in a bunch of them? I mean, it's a video game, right? No actors to pay, no special effects budget. You could have twenty or thirty standing around for much the same price as three, couldn't you? Silently, if you wanted to keep the voice-acting costs down.

But no:

"The episode will feature new and returning allies and adversaries, including founding members Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy, and Lightning Lad as well as their foes Mordru, Emerald Empress, and Validus".  

Them again! What are the odds?

Okay, there is some wriggle room, obviously. It does say "including". Maybe the PR person just picked out the best-known names. Maybe the writers used the founder factor as a peg to hang the story on (god knows every other writer has) while extending the narrative deep into the roster.

We can dream. Dreaming works. Ask Dreamer. If not, how did we get Dream Girl in Supergirl? Okay, she's not actually Dream Girl, just a distant ancestor who happens to work in the same office as Kara Danvers, but it's close enough. Plus she's really good.

 

It doesn't matter, of course. I'm a Legion fan, remember? Any Legion is good Legion. Well, it isn't but it's better than no Legion, that's for sure.

I'm excited to see what DCUO gives us. There's an open-world version of 31st century Metropolis, although "open world" means something a litle different in DCUO to what it means elsewhere. There's also a chance to see inside the Legion's HQ, which I'm betting won't be the iconic, archaic fifties-retro finned spaceship version but could be the big L-shaped one, maybe...

And there are the villains to enjoy, if enjoy's the right word. Mordru is a freakin' big deal in both Legion and D.C. continuity. He's on the Darkseid would-be destroyer/ruler of the universe end of things so that could be... fun? The Emerald Empress has had her moments. too. Validus is just a fifty-foot tall monster with lightning coming out of his head but hey, what more do you want in a world boss?

The update launches in November (no exact date yet) and comes with "level-agnostic event versions of the content available free to all players for a limited time". I'll be there!

Probably not for long but I'll be there!