The following is an interview that appeared in David Anthony Kraft's Comics Interview #66 (1989) with Keith Giffen (then JLI/JLE plotter) and Andy Helfer (then JLI/JLE editor). Original interview by Patrick O'Neill, reproduced without permission.

Through they are the editor and plotter of what has been called "the funniest superhero comic book being published today," JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL's Andy Helfer and Keith Giffen take their work very seriously. Heffer and Giffen think about what they do, and care very deeply about how it is received. But that should come as no surprise. The real mystery here is, given the decades of foundation justice groups have at DC, how did they come up with the idea to play JLI for comedy. . .

PATRICK DANIEL O'NEILL: JUSTICE LEAGUE developed partly out of LEGENDS, and obviously it continues a concept at DC that dates back to the '40s. You guys have taken a different tack on it this time, it's being played with a much lighter touch than in the past. What made you guy's decide that that was the way to go ?

KEITH GIFFEN: You're making the wrong assumption, there was never a conscious decision to go that way, it evolved into that.

ANDY HEIFER: Well, I don't know, I think that part of it-

KEITH: I didn't walk into it thinking it would be a funny book.

ANDY: When it came time to do it I very consciously felt that we had to do something very different than what was out there. I had had a lot of talks with various people about the grim and gritty focus of so many comics that DARK KNIGHT... I mean it went on before DARK KNIGHT, but DARK KNIGHT really-

KEITH: Made it trendy.

ANDY: It made it something that everyone else was doing, and everyone aspired to have that kind of character. We had arguments, discussions about this, among the editors, among freelancers. There was always the question of does that constitute something good, can something that's not grim and gritty be good? Do we just want to see Wolverine ripping people apart, Batman facing whatever dilemma he's facing, or is there a region for levity, for some other kind of approach? Keith and I were sitting around one day and we were looking for an outlet for it-Keith was coming off of SON OF AMBUSH BUG and he was looking for work and I was looking to work with him-

KEITH: I used to bother you-for two years I used to walk into your office and say, "Give me JUSTICE LEAGUE!"

ANDY: So I asked Keith, and we were talking about how to justify what we wanted to do, which was add an air of humor to the whole thing. The thing that we hit on was the concept of the fraternity of heroes. When a superhero is running around helping people or fighting villains, they have to have a persona, they have to be a hero, they have to be someone that you look to, but when they're all together, when the door is closed, it doesn't really matter and they can let their hair hang down, be a very different kind of person. It goes back to SpiderMan, I guess; when SpiderMan first started, the juxtaposition between the guy who was always joking when he was fighting and the guy who was plagued by doubts-it's another kind of spin of that kind of duality.

KEITH: JUSTICE LEAGUE is really a buddy book.

ANDY: Yeah, with lots of buddies. (Laughter. )

KEITH: When I get together with my friends it's not always this existential shriek of angst, we don't sit around and bemoan the fact of our existence, there's usually a lot of wisecracking back and forth and we try to have as good a time as possible. Why should these guys be any different?

ANDY: What goes on in Mensa meetings? We don't know what goes on because we're not members of that club, they could take all their clothes off and run around naked for all we know. (Laughter). But when they come out on the street they all have their public image. So who knows, if you're in the Justice League you could just go and close the door and take your clothes off.

PAT: In terms of working method, you 've had from the beginning an unusual tripartite creative team Keith's doing plots, Kevin Maguire or Ty Templeton do the finished art, and Marc DeMatteis writes the scipt. How do you break down what 's plot, what's script, what's art? Looking at it, Keith, it's very obvious that underneath that somewhere is your work, in terms of the art style.

ANDY: That look that is definitely there is, to my mind. . . the necessity of it is that Keith can't type. (Laughter.) Keith is the most visual thinking person that I know, it's actually easier forKeith to draw out a page and describe what's going on with little notes than it would be for Keith to type a page of plot. It's a blueprint. What happens is Keith sets the foundation for the visual look and the story look. . . Let me step back, it's funny because what I tell the artist is what I tell a guy who wants to draw comics for the first time, and that is take a page of a comic book, define what the meaning is, define what the story of it is, and redraw it the way you would tell the story. In other words- KEITH: Just make sure that the Batman punch is on the page, the information is relayed.

ANDY: And because Keith is such a good storyteller many people say, "Hey, he did it the best way I know how, I'm gonna do that." So no matter who was drawing JUSTICE LEAGUE, it has the same kind of visual integrity.

KEITH: It has the same rhythm, the storytelling has the same rhythm, that's the way I look at it. I figure I set the rhythm for the book.

ANDY: People always have the option, and on occasion they will deviate 180 degrees from what Keith put down, and usually it improves because of that. It's like you do it the good way first, and if you're going to change it you have to make it better. So it's actually a great advantage for people because they have the first thoughts down on paper already, so a variation they take is because the basic story has inspired them to go one step better. It's an ideal thing, if I could I'd have Keith plot all of his books. The great thing about it from an editorial point of view is that you sit down to to go through the plot and you actually have a comic book in your hand, it's like instant comics!

PAT: How much of what the reader perceives as humor is Keith's work, and how much is Marc's dialogue? (Pause.) I realize every reader reads it differently. . . how much of the final product, in terms of where the jokes are if you will, is in Keith's plot?

ANDY: I would say that's around 80 per cent. Would you say that, would that be a fair representation?

KEITH: Marc handles all dialogue. I might put down a couple of little notes describing the situation, but I look upon the book as like a silent movie, so the more visual humor would be mine. And as far as I'm concerned Marc has carte blanche with the dialogue. He'll put stuff in dialogue that I'll pick up on and throw back to him in another issue. It's kind of hard to actually separate it, but anything you catch in dialogue is Marc's. If it's a visual gag or something like that, usually that's come from me.

ANDY: The banter comes from Marc.

KEITH: Yeah.

ANDY: Picture WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY? - you remember that one! (Laughter.) I mean instead of being a serious James Bond situation, when Keith hands it over it does have funny situations in it, but it goes far beyond what Keith put in there initially. Sometimes we have to pull back. Very often, because we have such a good letterer on the book, Bob Lappan, who can actually fit all of that stuff in and not make it look as though people are defending themselves against rampant balloons, that allows more of the interplay. There's a lot more back and forth dialogue in JUSTICE LEAGUE than in most other books just because of the physical space limitations that practically any other letterer would run up against. Lappan allows for so much more copy, and so more verbal interaction, to take place. That's why Bob is the letterer on THE SHADOW, because I do the same sort of back and forth stuff on THE SHADOW and Bob is really the only person who can do the book. As a matter of fact the new book that we're doing, MISTER MIRACLE, I got the lettering back- Marc DeMatteis is writing it, and it's more of a smile book than a laugh book -but he did that same kind of back and forth thing, and when I got the pages back we had to have half the pages redrawn because the lettering just overwhelmed the drawing. So you can't underestimate Bob Lappan's contribution because he really lets us talk. It's like using a quality tape versus a cheap tape, you get so much more frequency and so much more range out of a high quality tape.

PAT: You've got a spinoff coming out soon, JUSTICE LEAGUE EUROPE. Do you foresee that being in the same tone?

KEITH: I don't foresee it being as overt as JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL. I'm sure there's going to be the camaraderie and the "wink wink nudge nudge" kind of situations, but JUSTICE LEAGUE EUROPE will have more serious moments than JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL has.

ANDY: Part of the thing here is . . . we've run out of characters from cancelled books, basically. (Laughter.) You can't play characters who have their own books -I mean we do that with Batman and Captain Atom, and people say Batman would never put up with this stuff, but beyond the fact that Batman would never put up with this stuff, he's never really compromised as a character. You know, it's Batman with children, basically- what would Batman be like if he had kids. But now we've run out of characters we want to do who don't have their own books. So we'll be using characters like the Flash, Wonder Woman, and we have to have more consisteney. We're playing fast and loose with. the DC Universe as it is, but too fast and too loose is-

KEITH: Even so, you don't want to come across like you're Johnny OneNote. JUSllCE LEAGUE EUROPE I hope will have a distinctly different feel from JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL.

PAT: Other than Flash and Wonder Woman, who are the scheduled members of JLE?

ANDY: We're still playing with the lineup, we're still in negotiations for some of these characters.

KEITH: Currently it's Animal Man, the Elongated Man, two Justice League International members who will switch over to the Justice League Europe-it looks right now like it'll be Captain Atom and Rocket Red. Am I missing anybody? Flash, Wonder Woman... Maybe eventually new characters will walk in.

ANDY: I do expect there to be a certain fluidity between the two books, simply because-

KEITH: They are one organization, Justice League International, and one happens to be headquartered at the European embassy.

PAT: None of the characters you 've mentioned, except Rocket Red who is from the U. S. S. R., have previously been based in Europe. How are you going to deal with that?

ANDY: Well, some of the characters were supposed to be. There are two who started out as JLE characters but didn't finish up that way, the Icemaiden and Green Flame. Well, Green Flame was from a South American country-

KEITH: Brazil.

ANDY: But Icemaiden was from Denmark. But that idea was lost somewhere along the line. That was fine, I wasn't that upset with that, and hopefully Keith has plans to introduce regional characters.

KEITH: You could get away with Wonder Woman being European based if you could figure out where Themyscira is.

ANDY: I don't think we're supposed to say. (Laughter.)

KEITH: The key to dealing with characters who have their own books, in JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL or in JUSTICE LEAGUE EUROPE, is when they leave the embassy I don't follow them home. My concern is when they are on Justice League business, when they're in the books. It's not for me to say where Paradise Island is or follow up with what Wonder Woman is doing with Mercury. I'll keep tabs with George for the continuity.

ANDY: If Denny came in and said, you know, Batman was fighting this guy who took over the Wayne Foundation, there might be a thought balloon in some quieter scene where it says, "What am I going to do about the Wayne Foundation?" But for the most pan we have our hands full, to go outside that front door, as Keith said, would make it company wide crossovers every month, it would just be too much. Also it would deter from the enjoyment, because frankly right now you don't have to read any other DC books to enjoy JUSTICE LEAGUE, and that's part of the benefit of it. I think one of the reasons why it does so well is it has a much wider range of potential readers than many books that are so bogged down in the continuity. Continuity is something that I think the few crave, but it's also kind of an elitist thing where it keeps those people in in and keeps new people out. The people who are in don't mind it because they know where it's at-

KEITH: But it tends to diminish rather than enhance.

PAT: Speaking of elitism and things like that, and longtime readers; with the distinct difference in tone that the JLI has, as compared to JLA or JSA, have you gotten any complaints from oldtime fans saying this is not proper, this is not the way the book should be?

ANDY: I've gotten far more on THE SHADOW than on JUSTICE LEAGUE.

KEITH: I go through letters sometimes and haven't come across any like that.

ANDY: There's been one or two, in the beginning. When it first started they said, "Wait a second, what's going on here!"

KEITH: We really haven't done anything that would get those kind of people angry anyway. I mean the characters are presented consistently. If the character doesn't have a book then we have every right to have him grow and develop in this book. If a character has his own book, we're handling him.

ANDY: We do get letters from people who say that Batman would never stand up for that-the letters when they do come negative are directed to the treatment of a single character, never of the group as a whole. You know, some guy likes Elongated Man and he says in this 1966 story he said this, he would never do what he did in that issue.

KEITH: So in the last 20 years he changed his mind.

ANDY: But that's only two years in comicbook time. (Laughter. )

Note: The rest of the interview is not related to the JLI.