The Smark Avengers - Vol 4, Ep 23: The Funniest Era in DC Comics History? A Tribute to Keith Giffen

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

🦸‍♂️ What happens when superheroes act more like sitcom characters than godlike icons? Welcome to the chaotic genius of Keith Giffen’s DC Comics era. In this episode, Corey and Dylan celebrate the late, great Keith Giffen and his unforgettable comedic legacy—from Justice League International to deep-cut oddities like The Heckler, Ambush Bug, and more. We dive into how Giffen, alongside J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire, transformed characters like Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Guy Gardner, and Martian Manhunter into a dysfunctional, hilarious team full of heart and hijinks. It wasn’t just the headliners—Giffen packed the roster with oddballs like The Beefeater, General Glory, and Wally Tortolini, creating one of the most unique lineups in comic book history. Whether it was through absurd humor, fourth-wall breaking chaos, or heartfelt satire, Keith Giffen carved out an era of DC Comics that fans still cherish today. If you’ve ever wondered where superhero comedy truly found its voice, this is the episode for you. 💬 Let us know your favorite Giffen moments in the comments! Click the link for Dylan's radio show!: http://www.bouncedigitalradio.co.uk Click the link for Dylan's Twitch stream: http://Twitch.tv/spookylaroux Click the link for Jon's Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/bigjonbowski/ 👍 Like, comment, and subscribe for weekly comic deep dives, movie reviews, and nostalgic looks back at the weirdest and wildest parts of comic book history. 📢 #KeithGiffen #DCComics #JusticeLeagueInternational #BoosterGold #BlueBeetle #GuyGardner #AmbushBug #TheHeckler #ComicBookPodcast #MartianManhunter #BwahahaEra #DCComedy #JLI

I've already got an intro this time, how have you? I mean, I feel like this is the intro now. You're saying we got to start the show. You want to talk about your new microphone? Uh, microphone's good. It's, uh, it is a, it is a, it is a podcasting microphone. Yeah. Yeah.

You get to see it? I'm afraid to move it. Okay. Is it a sure? It is a blue. It's blue. Blue yaddy? Huh?

Yes. I believe so. You get to hear me adjusting little screws on it again. Yeah. This is what people like to hear. I was talking shop. I don't remember. I don't remember what it is.

Okay, fair enough. It's a good microphone, I believe. All right, well, that was a microphone talk. That was our podcast before the podcast. Everybody, welcome to the Spark Avengers. My name is Corey. With me is Dylan. Dylan, what is up?

Oh, I'm good. That's good. you. That's too bad. So, John is still, or John is absent. This will be the first episode without John. So, John is absent. Yeah, he's doing stuff. Yeah, he's up.

One week, he's been away for one singular week. He's, uh, because of all this stuff. Well, the operation went well, I hear. Yeah, I hope he could be able to fly now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's important that. we get a flightful John. I know that particular species of bird that is John is considered flightless like, you know, penguins.

But I think he needs that freedom. Yeah, he just needs to, you know, spread his wings, as I say. Yeah, I mean, I hear it's a very painful operation because they have to hollow out his bones. Well, they have to do an awful lot of reconstructive surgery. Yeah. Do you have to go to Turkey for that? It's very... Do we what?

Do you have to go to Turkey for that? I don't know. We'll have to ask him. Is that the kind of bird they turned him into, a turkey? Well, you would hope so. You wouldn't want them to turn him into an ostrich. No, no. Because that would have the opposite effect of what we wanted.

You don't want him to be big, long-necked, long-legged, freak, because that's what he already is. We need him to be, like, a little petite, uh, spy. You know? He's very, but he is very fast when he's running at full speed. Yes, but he doesn't want to be. He wants to fly. Yeah.

All right. I'm sure that's enough of that. It'll be happy. Yeah. So, so Dylan, the, today's topic went through a couple of changes as I was like thinking about it and putting stuff together. You know, I wanted to originally talk about comedy characters because I saw, a character that I had never heard of and did research on and was like, oh, this is really

cool and interesting. And then, like, I got to thinking more about it. And I was like, maybe it should just be like characters that break the fourth wall. And then that turned into like, or maybe we want to do like more focused on like silly characters. But ultimately, what I decided to do, because a lot of the characters I was thinking of all went back to one creator. I would like to take today's episode and focus on a period of.

comics that I don't think you're familiar with, which is affectionately referred to as the Boehaha era of the Justice League. Do you know what I mean by that? I mean, I could hazard a guess, but if it's a Justice League, there's a good chance. I don't know about it anyway. So we're going to focus primarily on the works of Keith Giffin. Keith Giffin passed away a couple years ago. But it's not just going to be him.

He had a longtime contributor in this period of time, which was J.M. Dammatus, who you would be familiar with as a Spider-Man writer, primarily. And also the artwork of Kevin McGuire, who the three of these guys came together in a very short period of time and pretty much redefined what the Justice League was for several years. And all of it came down to editorial mandates handcuffing them and making the best of a kind of rough situation. So I have made a PowerPoint again to kind of give you a visualization of what we're going to be talking about. Because really what I'm going to focus on is the period of time that Keith Giffin was one of the headwriters for the Justice League, where his unique sense of humor reframed what those teams were in the stories that were being told and what have you. So are you ready for that? Yes.

Perfect. So, this is the best of Keith Giffin's Baja-Haha era. This is the Justice League International, very famous cover on the left-hand side, art by Kevin McGuire. Dylan, do you recognize any of these characters? That's Shazam on the bottom right. Yes. That is Captain Marvel or Shazam.

That is Sebastian Shaw in the top right, top left. Not really, but okay. Not really, but okay. Top middle. Drax is a destroyer over there, the green guy underneath. Black Widow. If you see in the bottom left, well above bottom left is Wonder Woman.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Bottom left, Dr. Bong. Oh, he does a little have that. Dr. Bong looked to him. Yeah. The guy, the bottom middle appears to be some sort of green lantern.

That would be correct. I would hazard a guess to say that the man dressed up a little bit like a bat is probably Batman. Yeah. Yeah. Then the other guy, I don't know, the wizard. All right. Well, we'll find out who some of these characters are very shortly. but yes here is Keith Giffin

Keith passed away a couple years ago like I indicated but he was active in the comic book industry from 1976 to 2021 two years before his death prolific in the sense that he was consistently putting out things for DC Marvel image Dark Horse and Valiant in addition to that he wrote scripts for animated series like The Real Ghostbusters Ed Ed Nettie and High High Puffy Amiyumi and Keith very famously is the co-creator of Rocket Raccoon, Lobo, and the Jaime Reyes version of Blue Beetle.

Rocket Raccoon and Blue Beetle were both in movies very recently, and Lobo will be in the upcoming Supergirl movie played by Jason Mamoa. So his work still out there getting used pretty frequently. But we're going to be focusing specifically... Oh, go ahead. Wait. Oh, no. I was going to be like, wait, Lobo was going to be played by Jason Momoa,

but didn't he play Aquaman? But then I guess that they're rebooting. Total reboot. DC comic Marvel. So that's fine. Yeah, and honestly, forget that. Honestly, he's more of a,

I'd say he's going to be a better fit his Lobo than he was Aquaman. Okay. He's going to be. I heard he was really good. Oh, yeah, I really enjoyed the first Aquaman movie, not so much the second. But like he said, His personality is going to be perfect for Lobo, plus the look.

I mean, he looks already a lot like him. But we're going to focus on Justice League, like I said. So Keith's run on Justice League started with his writing partner, J.M. Demodis and Kevin McGuire. It began in 1987 and ran for five years, but it had kind of a rough start. So after the company-wide crossover's legends and crisis on infinite Earths, Giff and Demodas and McGuire were given the Justice League of America comic, but they were limited to who they were. could use due to the post-crisis editorial mandate that said characters had to be used more sparingly

because they were all about establishing this new continuity. So Superman could only be in Superman, Wonder Woman could only be in Wonder Woman, Flash, etc. So they were only allowed to use characters that were not in their own solo books, which was Martian Manhunter as the only classic Justice League character. And Denny O'Neill, who was the Batman editor at the time, felt so bad for the, for the trio that he let them use Batman as well. So everybody else that they were able to use were minor characters, new characters, or characters that they had acquired from Charlton Comics

that they had purchased in the late 70s, early 1980s. So this really actually worked for them. Keith Giffin had come off a stint writing for Legion of Superheroes, which are a bunch of characters from the future, and they all have really weird, really weird and distinct powers. So he had a reputation for a very unorthodox writing and using characters in ways that had never been done before. So he really got to flex his muscles and create characterizations for Guy Gardner, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, and others. And that mixed with his natural sense of humor and love of Looney Tunes and Bugs Bunny as well as sitcoms gave him.

him the idea of like, well, because we're using all these Misfit characters, what if we made Justice League a comedy book instead based more on like the sitcom MASH? So a lot of these characters you're seeing up here. Oh, go ahead. I'm familiar with the sitcom MASH. All right, perfect. So yeah, you'll, you'll get what I'm talking about shortly. So, um, Giffin's partnership with Demos and McGuire, along with that sense of humor and willingness to not take anything seriously led to Justice League International being a major success for DC that led to several spin-off titles. Justice League America, Justice League Europe, Justice League Task Force, Extreme Justice, and Justice League quarterly.

And about a decade after their run ended, they came back together for two mini-series called Formerly Known as the Justice League, and I can't believe it's not the Justice League. So I did include the Abwaha Hala panel, because like I said, this is what they kind of became synonymous for was the more slapsticky absurd sitcom-esque humor. So what we're going to do is we're going to take a look on some of the characters that Giffin and Demodas and McGuire wrote and reinvented as well as their kind of big iconic Justice League storylines that were, like I said, very absurd and silly. So we're going to start with Blue Beetle.

The Blue Beetle character was acquired for. from Charlton Comics. He was created by Steve Ditko. After Ditko left Marvel, he wanted to make his own Spider-Man. So he took Blue Beetle, which was an early comic book character from the 1930s, that had like special powers. And that Blue Beetle was incredibly popular back then because he had like his own radio show and everything. So the Blue Beetle then was a guy who had like a magic, like a magic scarab.

They gave him powers. So when Steve was making his own Blue Beetle, he created Ted Cord as like a student of Dan Garrett, the original Blue Beetle, who just couldn't get the scarab to work for him. So he used his money and his intelligence to invent a bunch of gadgets to help him fight crime in his own way. So when they acquired him for Charlton Comics, that's what led Giffin to select him because it was a character that no one was really going to use. Blue Beetle had a solo title that ran for about 27 issues after the acquisition from Charlton. But after that solo series ended in 1986, no one was really doing anything with him. So made him perfect to get picked. And also as a side note, Blue Beetle was the character that Alan Moore based Night Owl off of when he was creating Watchmen.

Anyway, in Justice League International, Giffin used Ted as one half of the, kind of the comedy duo of the team Blue Beetle and Booster Gold or Blue and Gold as they were referred to and these guys were constantly coming up with schemes and plans to either get famous, get

money, get girls, or just because they were bored. So we were mentioning MASH. Ted was based off of his personality was based off of Hawkeye Pierce. So we're

going to look at the second half, which is Booster Gold. Okay. So Booster Gold was originally a pro football player that was busted for gambling and became a security guard at a Superman Museum. Because he had access to a time machine that was in the museum, he stole a bunch of gadgets from the museum and went back in time, to our time period, to become famous using his knowledge of the future and all of these future gadgets and created the person, the persona of Booster Gold.

Basically, he was kind of a take on 1980s greed. Like, his old logo, the S and Booster Gold was a dollar sign. Because he was also like a corporate-sponsored hero for a period of time as well. But anyway, Booster Gold ended up maturing a lot due to a lot of personal tragedies. And now when he's like being a goofy idiot, it's to hide the fact that he's charged with protecting the time stream and making sure things happen the way they're supposed to. But Booster Gold was brand new to DC Comics. He's created by Dan Juergens in post-crisis.

So because he was totally brand new and his solo title had ended, again, perfect pick for Justice League International. So if Blue Beetle was supposed to be Hawkeye Pierce, Booster Gold became Trapper McIntyre. So he was the other half. So he was usually the more selfish of the two, the more greedy of the two. the dumber of the two. And he also had a tendency of talking Blue Beetle into really bad ideas and then needed Blue Beetle him out when they ultimately went wrong. So what are these two guys going to do?

They're going to go to Kui Kui Kui Island and create a casino and hotel resort. So yeah, that was ultimately their plan. The Justice League had access to this remote. Island that they used as a teleportation spot. And so Blue Beetle and Booster Gold ended up stealing the Justice League's budget, you know, money, creating this hotel resort. And we're going to cash out on that. But ultimately, they got in trouble with Maxwell Lord, who at the time was not a villain for Wonder Woman,

but was the another personification of 1980s greed and excess, the public relations person for the Justice League. And some supervillains showed up at the casino and ended up winning a lot of money that they were not supposed to win. And ultimately, the casino got destroyed because the island, Ku'i-Ku-Kui Island was actually sentient and alive like Krakawa and decided that it was bored being where it was in the ocean and wanted to move somewhere different. So the island started to move and destabilized everything on the island and the casino and hotel collapsed. So, uh, Beatle and Booster ended up costing the just league a lot of money and time and effort. Okay.

Thoughts on, uh, Ku-Koo-E-Kooey Island. Why three kuis? Because, uh, comedy being, uh, things in threes. What does Ku-y mean? It's just a silly word. Okay. Yep. No more questions.

That's all that was, just silly words. well I need to hear all right well next up we have Guy Gardner so Guy Gardner as you pointed out is one of the Green Lanterns specifically when Abin Sur passed away and the Grand Lantern Ring needed a new host

it had to choose between Hal Jordan and Guy Gardner as the two human beings with the most willpower on the planet ultimately the ring went to Hell Jordan because he was closer but Guy Gardner and Hal Jordan have very different ideas of willpower

Hal Jordan's is a lot of personal bravery and facing fear, and Guy Gardner is more of a in-your-face kind of personality and not backing down to the point of being incredibly arrogant and a dick. So eventually Guy Gardner did grow up and become a important member of the Green Lantern Corps, but at the time of publication, there were three human Green Lanterns. There was Hal Jordan, John Stewart, and Guy Gardner, and Giffin and Domodas couldn't get Hal Jordan because he was the main Green Lantern. and ultimately decided that of the two remaining ones, Guy Gardner had more personality that they could exploit.

So Injustice Lee Giffin used Guy as his foil. So Guy Gardner was the pain in the ass character, constantly getting into fights with people, constantly annoying people, constantly being just being a massive dickhead, which is appropriate with a bowl cut. Yeah, I like the hard cut. He's also being played by Nathan Philean in the upcoming Superman movie. That has been out for two weeks now. So, Oh, it's coming out two weeks ago. So anyway, yeah, if you've seen Green Lantern, I,

that is accurate to Guy Gardner, just a massive tool. Good guy, but just an absolute asshole. So the iconic moment that Giffin and Demontas came up with for Guy Gardner was one punch. So at the beginning of the series, Guy Gardner wanted to, to assume leadership of the Justice League because he was a green lantern and was given basically authority over sector 2814, which is the aspect of space that Earth is contained within. So he obviously thought that he, you know, A, was considered one of the more powerful members of the team and also had a level of authority as a space cop already. So he was constantly jockeying for leadership position. And ultimately, these clashes with authority put him nose to nose with Batman.

And eventually, Guy Gardner decided that he was just going to fight Batman for leadership, took off his lantern ring, and before the fight could even start, Batman knocked him out in one punch. As you can see here, that's the panel, and the Blue Beetle laughing stating one punch twice. So this scene has been referenced and reimagined and used multiple different ways. Guy Gardner has been knocked out with one punch multiple times. He's knocked out other people multiple times. It's been in cartoons. I wouldn't be surprised if it's featured in the Superman movie.

It's kind of what guy's known for. But he got to a point that Giffin eventually said, all right, that's enough amages to it. It was just a joke. Can we just move on from it? Because like I said, it was happening in multiple comics at the time. That's a bad thing to be known for. Yeah.

Did you get basically jobbed out? Yeah, over and over. again. Over and over again. Not a good look. All right. Well, we're going to move on to the Martian Manhunter. So John Jones is the last of his kind. He's parallel to Superman,

except his home planet was Mars. And he ended up stranded on Earth after an experiment with teleportation went wrong when he was pulled from his home planet in his own time in the past to present-day Earth. He ended up using his shape-shifting abilities to take on the

form of a human who became a detective, because that's what he was on Mars, a detective, and ended up becoming a founding member of the Justice League. So like we mentioned earlier, when editorial mandates stated that characters could only be in their solo titles, Martian Manhunter obviously has a hard time holding a solo title. It's usually he'll get a mini-series every now and then or will be featured in a backup,

but predominantly John Jones is going to be featured in Justice League more so than anything else. So that's where he ended up. So oddly enough, despite being green with shape-shifting powers and literally being from another planet, John was the straight man of the group. He was there for Blue Beetle and Booster Gold to bounce their antics off of, there to deal with Guy Gardner's, you know, brash personality, to deal with Shazam's childish personality, because part of that post-crisis was Captain Marvel was still very much a 13-year-old boy in a grown man's body.

It wasn't like he assumed a different identity. he was still very much Billy Batson. So anyway, yes, John ended up becoming the leader of Justice League when Batman stepped down. And Giffin and Demos, they gave him something very subtle that gets referenced, and I believe is actually featured in the Superman movie. And that is his love of Choccos. So Chakos are the DC Universe brand of Oreos. And the very first time we really see that is a moving company is taking the Justice League's equipment

into their new headquarters and they comment on the fact that there are massive crates of choccos being delivered to Martian Manhunter's room. To the point that as a joke, Booster Golden Blue Beetle ended up buying all the chakos within like a several mile radius to see what would happen if John couldn't get them. And he ended up turning essentially into the Incredible Hulk and going on a

fucking rampage. So there's our panel here. very much in line with how Booster and Blue Beetle were with kind of getting in trouble because they thought something would be funny and it turned out backfiring very badly for them. Okay. Can you go back to the previous? Oh, you probably can't go back in the previous panel, can you?

I can. Here we go. I figured it out. All right, what the fuck is about this picture? Well, so this is from that same storyline where Blue Beetle and Booster Gold stole, or not stole, but purchased all of the Chakos. So that is Martian Manhunter sitting on a throne of Chakos. with beetle and booster gold being buried underneath them.

Okay. And, of course, he gets a glass of milk. Because you can't eat biscuits without milk. Yep. That's what I'm told. All right. That's all I needed to hear. All right, perfect.

So we're going to move away from, like you said, those were just kind of examples of characters that were existing that Giffin gave his own take on. and then something like a big moment in the comic book that they became known for. So I'm going to kind of focus on characters that Giffin created or reimagined that maybe not have had their own unique moment, but were very memorable in their own way. So the first is manga Khan or Lord Khan or Lord manga Khan. And basically, he is a sentient gas being inside of a suit of metal, who,

is, for all intents of purposes, a used car salesman. He is a leader of a bartering firm known as the cluster, and basically anything of value they can find, they will take and resell. He also suffers from a condition where he cannot help but give these really long soliloquies, which was a parody of how characters would go on big, long tangents in the 1960s in comics where you know you would get your villain explaining his horrific origin or his master plan while the hero is stuck in a trap lord manga con does that but he can't help it it is a medical condition for him

so he ended up using that to his advantage and started the manga con school of melodrama so he could teach other villains how to do this for themselves if they wanted to go that route. So he popped up every now and then in the Justice League comics, ended up becoming kind of a hero, kind of a villain, and, you know, like I said, I think his last appearance were the miniseries in the 2000s. But the way that you can kind of view the cluster is they were sort of the space QVC, if you're familiar with what QVC is or home shopping network.

So an example of this is they captured Mr. Miracle, and when they discovered that he was a new god, they immediately went. to Apocalypse to try to sell him to Darkside because they're like, oh, Darkside would want this guy back. Let's sell him. At one point, they tried to take over Earth so they could sell Earth to various

different invading alien forces that would want him. So, like I said, that's kind of what manga Khan was known for. Okay. Our next characters, The Injustice Gang, aka the Justice League Antarctica. So the Justice League of Antarctica were a group of inept villains who were always turning up in the pages of the book.

They saw themselves as the archimesis of the Justice League, but they were so low-powered and kind of pointless that they more often than not were dealt with without the Justice League even realizing they were dealing with the Justice Gang. But they ended up actually becoming members of the Justice League after they accidentally stopped a group of terrorists while stealing a diamond. and so they became Justice League Antarctica and were given their own base in Antarctica basically to get them the fuck out of the way so that the Justice League could do real work. They would show up in the Justice League Quarterly comic with some sort of a silly storyline.

One of them being is their headquarters was attacked by carnivorous penguins. But ultimately, Justice League Antarctica was disbanded when Maxwell Lord realized that they didn't really serve a purpose and we're just wasting his money. Who are the characters? So the man up front in the hood is Major Force.

The man in Orange is the Clue Master. The bald man is, I believe, multi-man. The man with the clock face is Clock King. And the large barefoot man in the back is Big Sur.

So Major Force was the most competent of them. He was a... able to sort of like cause earthquakes. Clu Master is a low rent riddler. Multiman has the ability that he's immortal, but every time he dies, he comes back to life with new powers. Clock King is a dude obsessed with clocks.

And Big Sur is really strong, but also really dumb. So as you can see, not the most lethal villains for the Justice League despite their best efforts. Yeah. Well, Clock King did this point. best. Yep. I mean, look at him. Yeah. All right. Next up is Nort. So, uh, Nort is from the planet Newt, and he joined the Green Lantern Corps at the suggestion of his uncle Newman. He is a very incompetent character, uh, but he is considered brave and loyal and honorable,

despite being clumsy. Uh, but yes, it was revealed that Nort and Newman were given their rings by the weaponers of Chord, which are enemies of the Green Lanterns, uh, who basically sought to discredit the Green Lantern Corps by giving rings to really stupid people. However, he is recognized a member of the Green Lantern Corps and became the leader of Justice League Antarctica. Bigiffing co-created Nort along with Jamestimonis. He was supposed to be a foil and a parody of Green Lanterns because Green Lanterns are supposed to be space cops and they wanted to point out that much like the real police, there are

some police officers that are clumsy, incompetent, and generally inept. But his... A little, like a dog. Yes, he is a space dog for all intents and purposes. But his appearance and his personality were modeled after Ed Norton of the Honeymooners, which is our second time in our slideshow here where Keith Giffin used his love of sitcoms to influence character design. By the way, Nort just recently turned up in the Green Lantern Comics again.

Green Lantern and some characters had to go to hell to retrieve a mysterious item, and they ran into Nort, who they were surprised to see because Nort wasn't dead. And Nort basically just accidentally stumbled into a portal to hell and had been stuck there for a few months. So it's kind of what he's known for. Okay. Next up is the beef eater. Michael Morris was the chief of the British Embassy for the Justice League, who also really wanted to become a member of the Justice League.

So armed with a power rod he inherited from a Nazi fighting granddad and a mask, he became the beefeater. So his ambitions to be a great hero were thwarted by his utter incompetence. So even though he had this powerful item, he never hit his intended target, accidentally hit other his teammates most of the time. But he was based off of the character Basil Faulty from Faulty Towers, to the point of his character design being very tall and lanky and being demanding. and tactless and incompetent. He also had a very insufferable and demanding wife based off of Sybil and an equally incompetent assistant

that was modeled after Manuel, the waiter from Fulte Towers. I mean, if we're gonna, if you're gonna model a superhero after anybody, I don't think one of the most incompetent people in television is the kind of person you want to model. your superhero after is it not necessarily but that was yeah it was kind of it's again kind of Keith Giffin's love of comedy imagine you were like I got to create a new

character the character I'm going to create is basically the guy from the office you're like okay what was that how to do with the comics oh don't worry about it yeah yeah well so I realized yes I think we met I I just, sorry to stop you in the middle of your thing. Sure. I realized that before we started this, I was eating biscuits, cookies, as Corey would call them. You were like, there's going to be a biscuit-related thing coming up later. I think we missed it, didn't I?

Yep. You did ask about them as well, so I was like, okay. I did ask about it, and I'm like, yep, there it is. And then I was sitting here waiting and going, where's the biscuit guy? And then I'm like, oh, it was, we already, it was like four slides ago. I got it. There you go. But yes, Beefeater shows up very rarely.

His most recent appearance was in 2023, which I believe he was killed off in. Oh, thank God. All right. Next up, we have General Glory. Joseph Jones was a soldier during World War II who gains his powers directly from the statue of liberty by reciting the magic words, Lady of Liberty, hear my plea for the land of the brave and home of the free. So he was meant to be a parody of Captain America. He even had his own Bucky named Ernest E. Ernest.

And so he was kind of there as to act as a foil against generation, most of like the characters and readers of Generation X. But he was meant to kind of be a joke because he was a blind patriot to the United States who just could never believe that his country could do anything wrong. I think this character would probably be popular today. What gives you that idea? I don't know. If you get him a red hat, he'd do very well.

He's very hansy with the American flag, which seems to be a thing. Yes. All right, next we have Wally Tortolini. Wally Tortolini was a gossip journalist. too was desperate for his story on the Justice League and would even dig through their garbage trying to find something but after his stories were rejected he ended up meeting a villain

named Sonar who took him to a bar for villains where he got tied up in a game of poker and won a bunch of their gadgets so with all these empowered weapons he wanted to go on a rampage against the city as revenge for his stories never getting picked up and read but before an army of agents ended up

arresting him and taking all of his stuff Wally Tortolini here. The amazing tortellini man. What's the hat? Let me actually, so all of those gadgets, like you said, are from other villains. Let me tell you what those gadgets are. I think I know what the sword does.

Yes, that is the Cavaliers sword. Of course it is. Of course it is. Who else's sword would it be? Exactly. His abilities, by the way, are. gambling and journalism. So that is Black Rock's Power Stone,

Brainstorm's helmet, Crowbar's Crowbar is somewhere here, might be tucked behind him, Black Mass's wristbands, which he is not wearing, the Cavalier's Sword, Quakemaster's Jackhammer, which you cannot see, and Sonar's Sonar Gun, which is right here. Okay.

So those are the gadgets of Wally Tortolini. Should we just glossed past? him. Well, I mean, did you have any comments for Wally Tortolini? I think I'll save that. I mean, look at him. Yeah. Not a thing to say about that guy is there. Not really. No.

So, this picture was drawn and put in the memorial for Keith after his passing. It was featured in several DC comics at the time. So some of the characters here we've already discussed a little bit. But these are characters he had a hand in inventing or repurposing. So, you know, Maxwell, Lord, Blue Beetle, Ambishbug, Lobo. We'll talk about a couple more of them here. So these are characters that weren't in Justice League International, but at the time, because of the sales of Justice League

and the popularity of the comic, Keith was given a lot of, you know, a lot of space to play, so he got to create some more stuff. So the first is the character that inspired this whole period, which is the heckler. So... Okay. I discovered this character very recently, and I was like, how did I not know this person existed?

But the heckler is Stu Mosley, the co-owner of a diner in Delta City by day, and by night he fights injustice and slightly goofy criminals as the heckler, with the power to annoy the hell out of anyone in a brightly colored costume. So the heckler did not have powers, but had a Bugs Bunny zaniness to him that allowed him to pester, bother, and annoy criminals until they got so flustered they either gave up, or accidentally hurt themselves in the process. So the heckler was designed as a means for Keith to show higher-ups that he could write a Bugs Bunny comic for DC, but ultimately he was the deciding factor in ending the series at issue six due to low sales. But as you can see here, the heckler has a, his mask has a big white grin on it,

and the words ha-ha-ha written all over his chest. Funny that ended up to six issues after low sales. Who could have predicted? I have actually read some of these, and they are actually pretty fun if you are a Looney Tunes kind of fan. The most famous of Keith's characters, and the last one we will talk about is Ambush Bug. So Ambush Bug is the name. His name is supposedly Erwin Schwab, but he has mental problems, so he's not really sure of what reality is around him. His origin is disputed, although the most commonly accepted origin is that he is

from Brum L and the planet Schwab, who sent his clothes from his supposedly doomed planet, hoping that his wardrobe would survive, only to have it intercepted by a giant radioactive space spider. In the resulting crash, only two articles of clothing survived, the ambush bug costume, which was subsequently found by Irwin, and Arg Lee, a Argyle sock with a Dr. Doom-like complex, completely with a metal mask. So Ambushbug is considered an absurd character and is rarely used by other writers than Keith. He still exists in D.C. He pops up all the time. He's very popular amongst creators, so he gets a lot of cameos.

But Ambush Bug is sort of the Proto Deadpool. He was a character that broke the fourth wall all the time, was constantly making inside jokes and references to other comics and writers and the publisher, as well as what happening over at Marvel. And Ambushbug's power were basically the ability to break the fourth wall into teleport. Originally, he was designed as a Superman villain to kind of just pester and annoy Superman. But ultimately, the character was really popular, so he became a joke character. And we get his own miniseries and books and, like I said, a lot of gags and jokes that picked fun of the comic

book industry. Why Ambushbug? Well, so Ambushbug is a type of bug. and it was sort of him poking fun at Spider-Man and the various bug-themed characters in comics like, you know, Ant-Man and Black Widow and the Wasp and it's like you have all these characters that are named after bugs so he found in, you know, he was like,

what about an ambush bug, which is a real bug? Okay. All right, so, so Dylan, like you said, that was a brief look from a very interesting period of comics the like you said, referred to as the Boehaha era of Justice League, where it was a comic book that was written like a sitcom with silly plot lines, jokes, and goofball characters. So, really, any thoughts that you have on that?

When you said that, when you introduced it to begin with, I thought what we got here is like an old, even one of those old-timey comics where they didn't have the tone right. You know, there's, like, loads of those old Batman comics were, like, Batman wasn't as super serious as he is today. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, Jokers, pulling his boners or whatever.

And I'm like, oh, okay, this is what I was good. This comic was way more recent than I thought it was going to be. Yeah. I thought you were talking about, you know what you mean? Like, this is going to be, like, from the 60s or whatever. And you were like, hey, 87. I'm like, what the fuck? We were alive for this.

What the fuck? We were. attacking me but like think of all the other shit that happened in the comics in like 1987 or like a Rhinai kind of time you know and this guy is doing like we gotta get the laughs in the fucking ambush bug and the

hackler do you mean like yeah it's I mean it's good that he went a different route but it's an interesting choice well and that's kind of like why it was as successful as it was because it was a contrast to like you said the comics at this time was starting

to get more cynical and dark and adult themed. And then you had like this sort of homage to 1970s like three's company and whatnot of, you know, your weekly sitcom joke where characters have misunderstandings and it results in something wild and absurd happening. So like I said, it ran from 1987 into like 1995, 1996 and it ended on such a, um, I'll call it a strong note. So the Justice League International was all about goofs and jokes and ha-haz, and that ended essentially with Doomsday and the death of Superman. Because when Doomsday first showed up, one of the first things Doomsday did was beat the fucking shit out of the Justice League International.

Like Blue Beetle almost died, Booster Gold, got his arm shattered. he doomsday did a number on the Justice League International and that was kind of the end of the J.L.I and when the Justice League reformed, it was more serious and different characters kind of came in. And ultimately it led to that was the pathway that led to Grant Morrison's JLA run where, yeah, the characters then went back to the iconic versions because that was essentially it. the DC wouldn't let there be a Justice League lineup with the big-name characters for about 10 years after Crisis on Infinite Earths. They had that Avengers problem that the 90s had where we were talking about like the brown leather jacket era of the Avengers where the Avengers lineup was like Black Knight, Cerses, Hercules, and like, you know, Captain America was around sometimes. Iron Man was doing his own thing with force works or whatever. So it was, the 90s were a really weird time for team books.

So we're a time for anybody. It really was. So like I said, that's that period of time when they left the Justice League International, doomsday wiping them out, and then essentially 10 years passed, and they come back and do these mini-series of jokes. Justice League International did come back on two separate occasions, but they were handled much more seriously by Keith Giffin. So there was a series called Generation Lost

That was kind of like characters Who had you know characters who had been part of Justice League International coming back together To stop Maxwell Lord who had you know at that point had become a villain In addition to that when the 50 the new 52 launched after fast Flashpoint there was a new Justice League international book that Keith Giffin was a writer on But it did not have any of the jokes or the humor that the original had which ended up resulting in low sales for that book. Justice League International only lasted 12 issues in the new 52 in comparison to a five-year-ish run,

you know, before that in the 90s, the 80s and 90s. So the Justice League International name has a reputation and his reputation with a very devoted fan base that I'm a part of. Like I said, I love JLI. I think it's so goofy and dumb and random that it is. a, you know, kind of a breath of fresh air in the world of superheroes. And just like some of the clashes were great. I mean, Hawkman ended up joining the JLI, and he fucking hated everyone because he was constantly going on rants about how the team was a disgrace and they were besmirching the

name of the Justice League and what have you. But ultimately, that is Justice League International in Keith Giffin's era, his jokes and goof characters. He had many more tons of storylines. Like I said, his career was from the 1970s until pretty much when he died. So a lot of material to cover. But I wanted to hit some of the sillier aspects to kind of define that era. Plus, you really wanted to make a PowerPoint. I do enjoy making a PowerPoint, which we will have another one next week if we're going to cover the topic that I think we're going to cover. John's illegitimate children. Well, kind of. If John's illegitimate children were professional wrestlers who went on to be in superhero movies or TV shows because there are a lot of instances

where WB or WCW wrestlers were guest stars in some TV show or even a movie playing a iconic DC comics or Marvel character. So we'll we don't know that the John's children weren't that. Yeah, they could very well be. I mean, for all we know, John's children. children were secretly macho man ready savage just one sitting on another one's shoulders yeah so because john's not here to tell us where his movie count is for the year we'll jump straight ahead dylan because i remember this time the correct day of the week what happens for you on monday

nights thank you very much cori i uh do a radio show on the radio nice thank you you can see why I'm on the radio I'm a very magnetic personality that always knows what he's talking about I play a lot of like weird music you probably never heard of

some music you've never heard of some music you have heard of but it's always the stuff you don't want to listen to you know yeah like if people want to listen to Sun Garden I'm like I'm going to find the worst Sun garden song I'm going to play that so is it just black hole sun

who's not the worst Michael's a great song Great song Don't even You know I could find a worry Oh I'm sure you can I do not doubt that Soundgarden has some real clunkers in there That's the thing

That's the one that everybody wants you to play And I'm like no no no I'm not I'm gonna play something different Oh I'd make them sorry I play that song five times in a row Oh no no no no I would play. I was going to say I'd play

Ty Cobb, but I'm not allowed to play that one because... Curseing. They swore a lot in that one. Yeah. A lot of cursing. But, a play of other songs.

Granchie music, music I like, all the stuff. You can listen to it. It's at 9 o'clock to 11 o'clock on Monday nights. UK time. So if you listen to this across the globe,

just Google what the UK 9 o'clock DM conversion is for yours. And you can listen to it. If you go to Bounce Digital Radio. in the UK on your browser you can listen to it whenever you want so well not whenever you want just whenever I'm on it's on I guess yeah yeah you should listen to when I'm on you can listen it whenever the else is on too but like you should really listen to what I'm on like you do like you do you'll know whenever I'm on there's like a lot of talking about like Easter eggs

or something stupid like that you know yeah um aside from what you got going on I have another podcast called large old cup uh 27 28 minutes an episode and talk about whatever happens to be going on in my head at the time that we record because that's what it is. I record it and then I immediately post it without editing it whatsoever. So until next time, which I believe, like you said, I think we're going to talk about times of professional wrestlers appeared in TV shows or movies as superheroes or supervillains.

I'll go ahead and wrap it up and just say goodbye. Goodbye. What's that on the wind? A whisper on the wind. Buh-Ber! It's John from outer space. He flew all the way up in the space.