Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Visionaries of Tomorrow Pat Broderick

Best known for his excellent work on "Firestorm" and "Captain Atom", Pat Broderick also owns a small piece of Legion history, having drawn a smattering of Legion stories during Paul Levitz's 1980s run, including #284-285, the first two issues of said run.

It's solid work IMO, and I like to imagine what might have been if Broderick had become the regular Legion penciller instead of Keith Giffen (my opinion of Giffen is well-known on these forums.) He probably would have only been there a relatively short time (I can't think of any book Broderick drew for longer than about 25-30 issues), but I think it's nice to imagine how he would have drawn, say, The Great Darkness Saga. Does anyone here know how Broderick ended up on Firestorm instead of Legion?

From the Legion Companion: -

TLC: How long did you intend on staying?

PB: I intended on staying at least for a good year, to get used to it, but then they had expanded their line and they offered me Firestorm. It was, I felt, a good move to make. But I did enjoy doing the Legion. I went back and did a few fill-ins and always liked the characters. It was a good book.

Oh, that's great. Thanks, thothkins.

So if he'd stayed for a year liked he'd originally wanted to, he would have drawn the Great Darkness Saga.

[wistful]Ahhh, what might have been...[/wistful]

Talking about Broderick in the Gym'll's Firestorm thread reminded me of this thread.

I really can't say enough about how great Pat's Fury of Firestorm and Captain Atom runs were. His handful of Legion issues were first rate, too.

However, it's hard for me to imagine the part of Paul's run with Giffen with Pat instead. Keith was such a true collaborator with Paul that I doubt the GDS would have turned out nearly as awesome without him there. Keith was a lot more than the artist during his run and has proven himself more than such since (yes, even though he also had a good number of duds). Maybe Pat just didn't get the right opportunity or maybe hasn't gotten the credit where he may have been due, but I doubt he has pure wild creative juice Giffen had and has.

That said, Pat is sorely under-rated and under-appreciated by fandom at large. His style is unique and doesn't directly evoke immediate comparisons in my eyes. (I dunno....maybe a little Dick Sprang?) I'd encourage any fan of '80s comics to seek out his work on Firestorm and Captain Atom, especially.

Sprang's a good comparison. I see a bit of vintage Starlin there, too.

I won't go on an anti-Giffen rant, instead I'll just say I think his contributions to GDS are part of the reason I find it Levitz's most overrated storyline. I'd almost rather Levitz had worked on GDS with an artist who was more detached.

Obviously, Giffen's very polarizing. You're one of the fairly rare critics of him in the GDS era, though. I've always loved it, of course. Hard for me to be unbiased about the era that made me a lifelong LSH fan, you'll understand. (I'm sure you feel the same when Bob Harras's Avengers run isn't always well-regarded.)

And I know that this ain't his thread, but fellow Legion veteran Cary Bates really knocked it out of the park with Pat on Captain Atom! Cary has a fairly milquetoast reputation that's pretty well-deserved, but he and Pat must've really been the right combo! The book definitely began to wane when Pat left.

Absolutely, Lardy. As I've often said, I think that the Bob Harras/Steve Epting run was the exact Avengers equivalent of the Legion's Five Years Later. The difference, of course, is that I love the former and am...ambivalent about the latter.

And Cary Bates' Captain Atom stories were great, although I think credit should go to the collaborations from his editor, Denny O'Neil, and his co-writer, Greg Weisman (who worked alongside Bates from the first issue, even though he didn't get credit til later.)

I loved his work with Gerard Jones on Green Lantern back in the day:



I met him at a convention a few months ago and he was a really cool guy.

Glad you mentioned Broderick's work on GL, Braal Janitor.

For some reason, that's the one Broderick run that always slips my mind. Not that there's anything wrong with Broderick's art, but it was more because Gerard Jones' scripts never seemed to gel (this is something that Jones himself has opined about his own GL work. That said, I've read Jones' plot synopsis for what originally would have been Emerald Twilight, and I think it would have been really good.)

That's right! Pat did some great work on GL (I think it was after Captain Atom?) and some great Batman stories, including Batman: Year Three!

OMG, I've never read Batman: Year Three! Thanks for mentioning it, Lardy. I don't get to the comic book store very often these days, but I'll look for it next time I'm there.

I thought Year Three and its companion piece "A Lonely Place of Dying" (the latter with Jim Aparo and George Perez on art) were both excellent and a wonderful way to transition into the Tim Drake era as Robin.

I'll be sure to check out A Lonely Place of Dying as well.

This was where I first saw Pat Broderick's art.

Very nice. I'll have to try to track those down.

Thanks, LWL.

Broderick and Giffen collaborated on the Post-Crisis Ragman, which I quite enjoyed. I hated Giffen's "new Look" art on other projects, but the meshing with Broderick made for something interesting, and certainly fitting to the story at hand (and the covers were great).

http://www.comicvine.com/ragman-1-bones-of-the-defenseless/4000-185586/

It's too bad this version of the character didn't catch on. One of the (Many) disappointments in Shadowpact was having a talking Ragman.

I'm wary of anything with Giffen's name on it, even when he's collaborating with someone I do like such as Broderick. Thanks anyway, Dave.

(It took like two days to find this thread...I forgot about the Visionnaires forum!)

My first memory of Pat Broderick comes from a time I saw him on TELEVISION! It must have been '93 or '94, at the height of the comics boom, and one of those channels that sells things all day was having a whole evening dedicated to comic book stuff. Of course, they were getting it all wrong about how comics are made, what the best stories of all time were (one guy even saying Jim Lee's X-Men #1 was the greatest comic book of all time because it sold the best). As a 13 year old I was outraged and complaining to my mom who was giving me the wonderful "sure, hon, absolutely" smile. And then Pat Broderick comes on, and starts to do some drawings right there in person which I think were being auctioned off on the spot. Pat ends up being this incredibly nice and polite guy, who also makes sure to correct all these hucksters about various aspects of comic book history and the business.

At the time, Pat was doing both Alpha Flight and Doom 2099, and that is how I tend to remember him. Like so many others in the early 90's, his style had adhered slightly to the early Image wave though it wasn't ugly or anything--it was actually quite good. (Greg Laroque is another great artist whose style changed during that brief era, but even though it was similar to the Jim Lee crew, it was still great). IIRC, his Doom 2099 was actually pretty popular. I know kids in my neighborhood were reading it even though my Dad had no intention of collecting something so ridiculous.

On that show I was watching I remember they made a big deal out of the fact that Broderick was doing two different series at once when many of his peers couldn't get out a single monthly title on time.

I never had any idea Pat was the same guy who drew all those Firestorm covers I went totally bonkers about when I was a kid. As I think I've mentioned before, my love of comics started when I was a real little kid, and that was often because either my Dad or uncle would read me the Silver Age Marvels, or I would go through the entire runs of the Flash or Firestorm and look at the covers one after another. I would just flip through the first 70 or so Firestorms and stare mesmerized at the artwork.

Uh?

What's so ridiculous about Doctor Doom surviving into 2099? He has access to the highest technology and is an incredible mystic as well.

I was being facetious Fanfie, though I probably should have put a smiley. The whole "2099" thing was a hard pass for my father at the time because he thought it was too gimmicky. It was one of those decisions he probably spent one second on and moved on, thus leaving a 12 year old Cobie unable to check out PAD's new series (Spidey 2099) or the series some of my friends were reading (Doom 2099 and later X-Men 2099).

I wonder what your dad thought of Ravage 2099.

Probably the same thing he thought of 90's Nomad, Terror Inc, "Fate", the post-ZH Manhunter, Pitt, Bloodwulf, Deathblow and oh so many others...

Thanks for clearing that up, Cobie.

And, personally, I think the first half of the 90s had a lot more good than bad stuff. It was the second half of the 90s that was overwhelmingly bad, so much so that I almost stopped buying comics altogether in 1997, and didn't get back into them until 2004 (which was spectacularly bad timing, but that's a whole other discussion.)

I personally think the latter half of the 90's was better than the first half.

To each their own, variety of opinions makes the world go round.

Pat Broderick has drawn a Micronauts cover for this issue of back issue out now

We are currently discussing the mid-280s issues of LSH in the Legion forum Re-Reads, which include work by Broderick.

One of my favorite pages from LSH #284, courtesy of Legion of Super-Bloggers:

For some reason, I've kept forgetting to add this:

Broderick worked with Doug Moench on a not-uninteresting 80s DC mini-series, "Lords of the Ultra Realm." It was a rather Zelazny-esque kind of fantasy, as I recall.

I picked up #4 of this. I hadn't had too many Baxter comics. Actually, this might have been one of, if not the, first. I remember the colours really popping. I'd get the same feeling when I'd later get lots of Baxter Legion in batches.

It was a pivot issue. Our hero had lost friends in the previous issue, and came back across from our Earth to a fantasy one. There, he met Squatamoton (sp), who could turn food into a mush that he scoffed. He was the Lord of Greed. Our hero fought Zorla, the Lord of War. Zorla would kill his own men to inflict a mortal wound on the hero. There was quite a lot of horror to the dark Lords. There was a guy who had a creature living inside his chest that would devour servants. Similar to the villain at the start of the Kupperberg/ Lightle Doom Patrol. Then there was a guy who sucked the life out of bikers, to gain the energy to get back into his own world. There was a reference to a Lord of Madness, just defeated by the hero. I don't recall the Lords of Light being as well thought out. But even they turned on the hero in this issue. Broderick's art was impressive, and it was the reason I'd later pick up Captain Atom (from a little book shop). Thinking back, there was some Vietnam subtext to it, that I'd have been too young to appreciate. I did end up getting the resto f the series. It might have been nostalgia, but issue #4 was still the stand out for me.

The series has a house ad showing headshots of the Lords of darkness, with the tagline "Nicer Guys You Could Find In Hell."

Thanks for chiming in on Lords of the Ultra Realm, Thoth.

I hadn't thought of this before until you pointed out the Vietnam subtext, but this was really more of a 70s Marvel kind of story than an 80s DC kind of story -- Moench had previously written one of Marvel's best left-of-center 70s offerings, Master of Kung Fu. Also, he and Broderick had worked together for Marvel in the late 70s/early 80s on Captain Mar-Vell's solo book -- it was solid space-opera, but unfortunately, it wasn't as innovative as Jim Starlin's earlier run, and the interim creative teams had done so much damage that Moench & Broderick's sterling show couldn't keep it from being cancelled, and Mar-Vell being killed off by Starlin in an overrated graphic novel.

In 20-20 hindsight, Broderick had better chemistry with Moench (and, later, with Cary Bates & Greg Weisman on Captain Atom) than he did with Paul Levitz. Broderick was at his best when he could do big, open, splashy layouts, which he couldn't do on Legion because of the density of Levitz's scripts (not entirely a bad thing, just better suited for some artists than others.) Sometimes I wonder what a Moench/Broderick Legion might have been like.

Glad to you hear you liked Broderick's art on LotUR enough that you picked up Captain Atom. And I agree with you that LotUR issue 4 may very well be the high point.

Belatedly joining this thread, but in addition to those few issues of the early Levitz Legion, he also drew the "Cham and Gim undercover against Starfinger" portions of issues 46-49 of the Baxter series, while the regular artist, Greg LaRocque, drew the "Conspiracy against the Time Trapper" portions of those issues, making the two parallel stories clearly distinct. Coincidentally strangely enough, neither were the artist on the conclusion of either story. Barry Kitson (not looking at all like the distinctive style he'd soon sport in L.E.G.I.O.N. '89+ and all future work) drew the conclusion of the Starfinger story in Annual # 4, and Keith Giffen, with his new style, drew the conclusion of the Time Trapper story in issue # 50.

Thanks, Chaim.

Any fans here of Broderick's "Micronauts" work? I, personally, like it better than Michael Golden's.

EDIT: I missed this 2014 post from Thoth Lad from the previous page of this thread:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=818589#Post818589