Giffen forever!

We've lost so many truly great comic book talents in recent years, and I am still dealing with the fact that there's almost nobody left from the Silver Age, and that the writers and artists I grew up reading in the 70s and 80s are next on death's dance card.

Especially when we lose someone like Keith Giffen, a monumentally great comic creator.

There is a vast chunk of my comic collection that has his name in the credits somewhere. I've got all the Ambush Bug he ever did, from the random appearances in Action Comics to the last beautifully bizarre mini-series; I have all the Heckler and Trencher comics; and all the Lobo he ever did.

I have almost all of his Legion of Super -Heroes, and all the Justice league comics he ever touched, and that's a significant chunk of brilliance right there. Even the weird offshoots, like his short Suicide Squad or Freak Force runs, there was always a base level of competency and craft that wasn't always so obvious in his contemporaries.

When I first starting seriously collecting comics, it wasn't hard to figure out that this Giffen guy was the business. As an artist, the slickness of his early work - with all those smooth as hell Larry Mahlstedt inks - evolved over the years, (maybe picking up a little too much influence from the artists that inspired him), becoming a stunningly craggy monstrosity in literally one page of his last proper Legion comic.

The art would have been enough to cement him as a legend. The laughs were always the most wonderful bonus.

The fact that his death was announced with two classically crap gags is everything I liked about the writer/artist/everything. That irreverent sense of humour, with a real touch of irony often lacking in other American creators. Lobo might be his greatest joke that 99% of the character's audience never got, but the Ambush Bug comics were so packed with gags there were always bound to be something that hit.

And he could be so much more than the bwa-ha-ha, with genuine pathos and humanity seeping through. Because while they might have been clowns, it meant you actually gave a shit about Booster Gold and Blue Beetle in a way you never, ever would again, and when you had villains like Despero tearing through the team, it really hurt. 

Such a sprawling canvas on which to show the world his ideas, and Giffen still knew when to come in tight on those hard close-ups of faces; while delivering action scenes with real verve and momentum, and crafting stories and themes and characters building over years and decades of comics. 

His name on the credits was always an absolute guarantee of quality, and Keith Giffen might be lost to us forever now, but I'm proud to still have so many of those credits in my collection.