Gabbin' 'Bout Giffen: The Great Darkness Saga

Screw It, We're Just Gonna Talk About Comics

We go back towards the beginning of Keith Giffen's career, when he was "just" an artist. Specifically we examine his work with writer Paul Levitz on the 1983 Legion of Super-Heroes story "The Great Darkness Saga." This 5-issue story showed The Legion facing super powerful "shadow villains" who seemed to be clones of people from the distrant past. When it's revealed to be Darkseid --- it was one of the first times a character from Jack Kirby's New Gods came into the DC proper in a major way. The story was also epic in scope, had huge surprises and full of great character moments. Though it's more traditional than much of Giffen's later work, it's masterfully done. We assume Giffen was helping with the plotting here (he would soon be credited as a co-plotter on upcoming issues). We can see Keith learning lessons he would apply in the Annihilation mini-seres that we covered two episodes ago. His art is very traditional in this story, though we see a few glimpses of the abstract experimental style that he would adopt in a few years.