OK, I’m gonna go on a bit of a rant here, because I’ve been stewing over this for a while and I need to get it off my chest. I don’t find the “Keith Giffen comedy books” (don’t know what else to call 'em) to be funny. At all. In fact, I think they’re incredibly obnoxious. There have now been three occasions when I’ve accidentally stumbled across a Giffen “funny” book (DC Retroactive: JLA – The '90s, Defenders [2005], Starman [1988] #35) and each time my immediate thought while reading them has been “What the hell is this crap?”. (I think I also read a couple Ambush Bug issues [DC Comics Presents and Secret Origins] that did nothing for me either.) I find them off-putting. Distasteful. His style of humor is the class-clown, elbow-to-the-ribs, nose-tweaking, back-slapping type that I just cannot stand. It’s not that I lack a sense of humor. When I read the “funny” books that he’s written, I know where and what the jokes are. I just don’t laugh. I sit there stonefaced. I know that I’m supposed to be laughing, but I don’t. I feel like a stick in the mud. Then, I think, maybe I should lighten up, not take things so seriously. They’re just comics, after all. But no. They’re just not funny to me.
Worse yet is that, most of the time, Giffen ropes J.M. DeMatteis into this nonsense with him. J.M. DeMatteis is one of my absolute favorite comics writers… when he’s on his own. I find him to be incredibly thoughtful, his writing almost poetic. It’s evident that he truly cares about the souls of the characters that he’s writing about. But when he’s paired up with Giffen, it’s like when the smartest kid in class gets seated in the back row next to the class clown, and he starts goofing off too, and his work starts suffering, and his grades start slipping. You hate to see it.
Mostly though, I think the reason that I despise these books so much is not just that I find them unfunny, but that I find them disrespectful. Yes, disrespectful. I don’t know what other word to use. I like my superhero characterization treated with some seriousness. And so did the writers and artists who created and worked on those characters for years, sometimes decades, before Giffen and his sometime partner-in-crime DeMatteis came along and made a mockery of them. Don’t get me wrong. A little levity and humor is a good thing, even welcome. You need some light-heartedness to balance out the darkness that these stories often descend into. But there’s a big difference between having fun and making fun. Taking established characters that were created and developed by others with a serious intent and turning them into jokes just absolutely rubs me the wrong way. The Justice League, the Defenders, Starman… they had always been treated with seriousness before Giffen and DeMatteis (and Peter David, on the Starman issue) got their grubby mitts on them and, thankfully, that seriousness was reestablished after they left. If they want to engage in such tomfoolery in their own books with their own original characters (as they did in Hero Squared/Planetary Brigade), that’s perfectly fine. More power to them. But these established teams and characters should never have been allowed to be turned into jokes.
In conclusion: “Bwahaha”? No. Boohoohoo.
(You and me both, Canary. You and me both. Booster knows what’s up.)
/rant