Its time again for another Weekly Comics Hype. Im doing these alphabetically, but skipping around a bit, and we continue December with one of the very best books of the 1970s, Steve Gerbers rather remarkable Howard the Duck.
I discovered Howard in the early eighties, some time after Marvel had given up on him and before he was made the subject of one of the worst of all the bad movies made from comic characters. Id been loosely aware of the character, and didnt think much of the idea, but one day in the eighth grade, I found a beat-up copy of Howard #26 at the old Cobb Coin & Stamp at Cumberland Mall and gave it a try for a quarter. This book blew my mind.
It was part two of a three-part story pitting the non-superpowered, unathletic, hapless waterfowl with a bad attitude and a tobacco habit against the Ringmasters Circus of Crime and it wasnt like any Marvel book Id ever seen before. It had perhaps two brief action scenes and the rest was all talk, threats, drama, philosophy and a very strange, yet successful, attempt to humanize the odd criminals by letting them point out their own flaws. It was illustrated by Gene Colan, who, at the time I found this back issue, was phoning in some appalling work on DCs Wonder Woman, and yet this comic looked amazing, with a sense of character and life wholly absent from the DC work where I knew him.
This comic was written for people older than me. Since, at age thirteen, I was finally beginning to consider what my classmates were saying about comics being for kids and think twice about my hobby, its a damn good thing I bought this book. I spent hours rereading it, amazed by how a common criminal was treated by this odd writer, Steve Gerber. Barely employed, alcoholic, and now penniless after the Ringmaster robbed him, the story of this desperate family man hitting the bottle and holding up a neighborhood gas station just astonished me. So did the Ringmasters brief turn attempting to be a hero, as well as Howards practical absence from the spotlight this was a story about other people, and this bizarre, bad-tempered duck didnt drive the story at all, and it would have come to the same tragic end with or without the title characters involvement.
And Colans wonderful art stunned me. The man drove me nuts on Wonder Woman with all his shortcuts and laziness, and he made Wonder Woman ugly, giving all the cast a boring, plain appearance. Here, he was playing a different game entirely. Not only was the man drawing everything, and drawing it well, but this was a cast of boring, plain people, without life in their eyes. Even the most attractive member of the cast, the Circuss Princess Python, was just an ordinary person, a far cry from the glamorous supermodels who filled all of Marvels other books.
What the hell kind of comic was this, and how could I find more?!
Howard had first appeared in a 1972 issue of Adventure into Fear, an anthology horror book which had been taken over by stories of a mute swamp monster called the Man-Thing. Written by Steve Gerber, the title became more surreal and strange than actually horrific, and dropping in a foulmouthed duck from another dimension was just part and parcel of the strangeness. Howard clicked with readers and earned a pair of back-up stories in the irregularly-published, and unfortunately titled, Giant-Size Man-Thing, one of which considered what would happen when a dying Dracula, desperate for blood, takes a little from a cow. The story climaxed with a police officer taking one look at a duck who is trying to explain why hed just killed a cow with a stake to the heart while her fanged mouth was trapped in a radial tire, and just turning around and leaving. Possibly the truest moment in all of fiction, that.
Howard got his own book shortly afterward, and its simply amazing. It is a story about a crotchety everyman, who just happens to be a duck, scraping through life and trying to get by in Cleveland. He throws his lot in with an artists model named Beverly, but cant seem to get away from Space Turnips and giant gingerbread men. Howard and Bevs arguments about throwing away the rent money on cigars might not have made sense had I read them in 1975, but they rang very true as I got older. Not just the themes, but the language and the characters positions.
Ive always been intrigued by the news events of the 1970s which I was too young to understand when they were happening. While Howard the Duck doesnt directly deal with, say, Love Canal or Patty Hearst or Jonestown, what it does is put the 1970s in some kind of context with its keenly satirical edge. Fads like martial arts and the Moonies are parodied alongside timeless annoyances like public transportation and political conventions, and the decades vapid ugliness is exposed in a brilliant mesh of script and art. Something about Colans illustrations of Jerry Ford, one of Howards rivals in his unsuccessful 1976 bid for the White House, ring more true than photographs of the man.
And Colan? The man was a genius. He knew exactly how to draw beautiful people, like Bev, when the time was right. His use of shadow is thrilling, as are his use of angles and flair for visual drama. The reveal of the Kidney Lady, about whom more in a moment, in issue # 11 is just about unmatched in the medium.
What really impressed me as a teenager was how all the individual issues flowed together into one coherent story, with subplots running for almost a year at a time, but never requiring every issue be read to understand it. That was really new to me. Assembling a set of back issues took forever - # 2 and # 8 were particularly stubborn about being acquired but I never felt I had lost the plot as I read them in almost random order. The political story leads into a confrontation with the Canadian superpatriot Le Beaver, who organized a sex scandal to destroy Howards presidential chances, which led to Howards nervous breakdown, which led to him finally exploding in rage on a bus, which led to his incarceration in an asylum, which led to Howard becoming the new host for Satans energy on Earth. (This was a team-up with Marvels The Son of Satan character. <em>The Omen</em> and all its Hammer horror imitators were also big in the seventies.)
Parody and satire are part and parcel of any discussion of Howard, and they are done brilliantly, even if their subject has become obscure over time. A Star Wars riff makes as much sense now as in 1977, while the clean up society demands of Anita Bryant are still with us even if Bryant herself is mostly forgotten. But theres more to this book than parody. Howards a genuinely angry character, trapped in our world and lacking any real support system beyond a handful of friends and he cannot catch a break. Even becoming a human for an issue doesnt help matters at all; its a cruel and nasty way of robbing Howard of his last trace of identity. Without his size and feathers, theres nothing left to separate him from us horrible hairless apes. Hes been assimilated into the same culture which tolerates the Kidney Lady.
The Kidney Lady is, put simply, one of the greatest of all comic villains. Shes a violent, mentally ill, homeless woman convinced that Howard is a molester intent on stealing Beverlys kidneys. Thats all she is. Shes the one foe Howard can never defeat because shes a victim of the same society thats about to overwhelm Howard. Dr. Doom and Magneto wouldnt last two rounds with this broad. If that Marvel MMORPG ever gets off the ground, Im playing the Kidney Lady. Dont take a city bus anywhere in that game, Im warning you.
Unfortunately, the Circus of Crime story I found in 1984 or so was the last hurrah for Howard the Duck, although Marvel still had some ideas in mind for the trademark. # 27 was Steve Gerbers last one as scripter, and the last one reprinted in this wonderful Essentials collection. He and Marvel Comics parted ways in an ownership dispute. Two further issues followed, with fill-in scripts from Gerber plots, before Bill Mantlo took over for some of the worst comics ever seen. There were two final issues of the comic before they decided to publish it as a black-and-white magazine aimed at older readers for a year and a half. These were notable only for some early Michael Golden artwork, and for letting Gene Colan draw Bev naked a few times, finally confirming the prurient thoughts of some readers. Mantlo also decided to reposition the Kidney Lady as an old sorceress, an ancient enemy of Dr. Strange. That makes as much sense as repositioning the Green Goblin as a kindly postal worker.
The black and white magazine also resulted in a redesign for Howard. In one of those no, seriously moments, Walt Disney sued, claiming that Howard looked too much like Donald Duck. Marvel acquiesced to Disneys demands and made Howard taller, with a fatter beak, and redesigned his legs so he could wear pants.
It was this Howard who appeared in that feature film, and a final pair of color comics, # 32 and # 33, published around that time. # 32 at least has some nice Paul Smith artwork, but # 33 is a real oddity, and one worth tracking down. Apart from the original appearance of the Essentials cover art by Brian Bolland, with much better coloring, it has a genuinely splendid story by Christopher Stager, in which a weary, depressed Howard wins a sweepstakes, millions of dollars and the constant presence of Ed McMahon, yet cant seem to find a distraction from Wheel of Fortune, back in its Ill take the porcelain dalmatian for $500, Pat days. Stager must have been a pseudonym. This insightful, funny story has never been reprinted, and I dont know that Ive ever seen Stagers work again.
Other Howard stories have appeared from time to time for Marvel to keep the trademark alive, and one Marvel regime even patched things up with Gerber for a one-off team-up with Spider-Man, but it wasnt until Joe Quesada took the reins at Marvel and established their short-lived Max line for mature readers that Steve Gerber was willing to return to the duck for something properly solid which stands as a fine companion to the original run: a six-part mini-series illustrated by Phil Winslade.
The 21st Century Howard makes a couple of concessions to the years (the malicious Dr. Bong has been pining for Bev for a really long time), but Gerber otherwise picks up where he left off, with Howard and Bev still struggling just to manage subsistence level and living in a junkyard. The targets of the satire include boy bands, who really are manufactured here, Vertigo Comics and their authors, and the flesh-fest comics like Witchblade from Top Cow. But, as ever, there are meatier targets among the comedy and action. The final half seques effortlessly into a discussion about the real motives of religion and its opposition to, or at least hinderance of, what might be Gods plan. Gerber and Winslade had earlier teamed for the splendid Nevada from DC/Vertigo and they make a fabulous team.
More Howard adventures probably arent in the immediate future, at least not with their creator at the helm, and so they consequently wont be worth reading. Gerber is currently writing the acclaimed Hard Time for DC, and relationships with Marvel have probably been strained by the companys frankly bizarre decision to revive Gerbers obscure 1970s character Omega the Unknown, co-created by himself and Mary Skrenes, in an upcoming series without their input.
Nevertheless, Gerbers entire Howard canon, save the mid-90s Spider-Man team-up and the two 1970s issues he did not finish, is available in these two volumes. Your local comic shop would enjoy your custom; new books ship each Wednesday, so why not stop in after work tonight?
I discovered Howard in the early eighties, some time after Marvel had given up on him and before he was made the subject of one of the worst of all the bad movies made from comic characters. Id been loosely aware of the character, and didnt think much of the idea, but one day in the eighth grade, I found a beat-up copy of Howard #26 at the old Cobb Coin & Stamp at Cumberland Mall and gave it a try for a quarter. This book blew my mind.
It was part two of a three-part story pitting the non-superpowered, unathletic, hapless waterfowl with a bad attitude and a tobacco habit against the Ringmasters Circus of Crime and it wasnt like any Marvel book Id ever seen before. It had perhaps two brief action scenes and the rest was all talk, threats, drama, philosophy and a very strange, yet successful, attempt to humanize the odd criminals by letting them point out their own flaws. It was illustrated by Gene Colan, who, at the time I found this back issue, was phoning in some appalling work on DCs Wonder Woman, and yet this comic looked amazing, with a sense of character and life wholly absent from the DC work where I knew him.
This comic was written for people older than me. Since, at age thirteen, I was finally beginning to consider what my classmates were saying about comics being for kids and think twice about my hobby, its a damn good thing I bought this book. I spent hours rereading it, amazed by how a common criminal was treated by this odd writer, Steve Gerber. Barely employed, alcoholic, and now penniless after the Ringmaster robbed him, the story of this desperate family man hitting the bottle and holding up a neighborhood gas station just astonished me. So did the Ringmasters brief turn attempting to be a hero, as well as Howards practical absence from the spotlight this was a story about other people, and this bizarre, bad-tempered duck didnt drive the story at all, and it would have come to the same tragic end with or without the title characters involvement.
And Colans wonderful art stunned me. The man drove me nuts on Wonder Woman with all his shortcuts and laziness, and he made Wonder Woman ugly, giving all the cast a boring, plain appearance. Here, he was playing a different game entirely. Not only was the man drawing everything, and drawing it well, but this was a cast of boring, plain people, without life in their eyes. Even the most attractive member of the cast, the Circuss Princess Python, was just an ordinary person, a far cry from the glamorous supermodels who filled all of Marvels other books.
What the hell kind of comic was this, and how could I find more?!
Howard had first appeared in a 1972 issue of Adventure into Fear, an anthology horror book which had been taken over by stories of a mute swamp monster called the Man-Thing. Written by Steve Gerber, the title became more surreal and strange than actually horrific, and dropping in a foulmouthed duck from another dimension was just part and parcel of the strangeness. Howard clicked with readers and earned a pair of back-up stories in the irregularly-published, and unfortunately titled, Giant-Size Man-Thing, one of which considered what would happen when a dying Dracula, desperate for blood, takes a little from a cow. The story climaxed with a police officer taking one look at a duck who is trying to explain why hed just killed a cow with a stake to the heart while her fanged mouth was trapped in a radial tire, and just turning around and leaving. Possibly the truest moment in all of fiction, that.
Howard got his own book shortly afterward, and its simply amazing. It is a story about a crotchety everyman, who just happens to be a duck, scraping through life and trying to get by in Cleveland. He throws his lot in with an artists model named Beverly, but cant seem to get away from Space Turnips and giant gingerbread men. Howard and Bevs arguments about throwing away the rent money on cigars might not have made sense had I read them in 1975, but they rang very true as I got older. Not just the themes, but the language and the characters positions.
Ive always been intrigued by the news events of the 1970s which I was too young to understand when they were happening. While Howard the Duck doesnt directly deal with, say, Love Canal or Patty Hearst or Jonestown, what it does is put the 1970s in some kind of context with its keenly satirical edge. Fads like martial arts and the Moonies are parodied alongside timeless annoyances like public transportation and political conventions, and the decades vapid ugliness is exposed in a brilliant mesh of script and art. Something about Colans illustrations of Jerry Ford, one of Howards rivals in his unsuccessful 1976 bid for the White House, ring more true than photographs of the man.
And Colan? The man was a genius. He knew exactly how to draw beautiful people, like Bev, when the time was right. His use of shadow is thrilling, as are his use of angles and flair for visual drama. The reveal of the Kidney Lady, about whom more in a moment, in issue # 11 is just about unmatched in the medium.
What really impressed me as a teenager was how all the individual issues flowed together into one coherent story, with subplots running for almost a year at a time, but never requiring every issue be read to understand it. That was really new to me. Assembling a set of back issues took forever - # 2 and # 8 were particularly stubborn about being acquired but I never felt I had lost the plot as I read them in almost random order. The political story leads into a confrontation with the Canadian superpatriot Le Beaver, who organized a sex scandal to destroy Howards presidential chances, which led to Howards nervous breakdown, which led to him finally exploding in rage on a bus, which led to his incarceration in an asylum, which led to Howard becoming the new host for Satans energy on Earth. (This was a team-up with Marvels The Son of Satan character. <em>The Omen</em> and all its Hammer horror imitators were also big in the seventies.)
Parody and satire are part and parcel of any discussion of Howard, and they are done brilliantly, even if their subject has become obscure over time. A Star Wars riff makes as much sense now as in 1977, while the clean up society demands of Anita Bryant are still with us even if Bryant herself is mostly forgotten. But theres more to this book than parody. Howards a genuinely angry character, trapped in our world and lacking any real support system beyond a handful of friends and he cannot catch a break. Even becoming a human for an issue doesnt help matters at all; its a cruel and nasty way of robbing Howard of his last trace of identity. Without his size and feathers, theres nothing left to separate him from us horrible hairless apes. Hes been assimilated into the same culture which tolerates the Kidney Lady.
The Kidney Lady is, put simply, one of the greatest of all comic villains. Shes a violent, mentally ill, homeless woman convinced that Howard is a molester intent on stealing Beverlys kidneys. Thats all she is. Shes the one foe Howard can never defeat because shes a victim of the same society thats about to overwhelm Howard. Dr. Doom and Magneto wouldnt last two rounds with this broad. If that Marvel MMORPG ever gets off the ground, Im playing the Kidney Lady. Dont take a city bus anywhere in that game, Im warning you.
Unfortunately, the Circus of Crime story I found in 1984 or so was the last hurrah for Howard the Duck, although Marvel still had some ideas in mind for the trademark. # 27 was Steve Gerbers last one as scripter, and the last one reprinted in this wonderful Essentials collection. He and Marvel Comics parted ways in an ownership dispute. Two further issues followed, with fill-in scripts from Gerber plots, before Bill Mantlo took over for some of the worst comics ever seen. There were two final issues of the comic before they decided to publish it as a black-and-white magazine aimed at older readers for a year and a half. These were notable only for some early Michael Golden artwork, and for letting Gene Colan draw Bev naked a few times, finally confirming the prurient thoughts of some readers. Mantlo also decided to reposition the Kidney Lady as an old sorceress, an ancient enemy of Dr. Strange. That makes as much sense as repositioning the Green Goblin as a kindly postal worker.
The black and white magazine also resulted in a redesign for Howard. In one of those no, seriously moments, Walt Disney sued, claiming that Howard looked too much like Donald Duck. Marvel acquiesced to Disneys demands and made Howard taller, with a fatter beak, and redesigned his legs so he could wear pants.
It was this Howard who appeared in that feature film, and a final pair of color comics, # 32 and # 33, published around that time. # 32 at least has some nice Paul Smith artwork, but # 33 is a real oddity, and one worth tracking down. Apart from the original appearance of the Essentials cover art by Brian Bolland, with much better coloring, it has a genuinely splendid story by Christopher Stager, in which a weary, depressed Howard wins a sweepstakes, millions of dollars and the constant presence of Ed McMahon, yet cant seem to find a distraction from Wheel of Fortune, back in its Ill take the porcelain dalmatian for $500, Pat days. Stager must have been a pseudonym. This insightful, funny story has never been reprinted, and I dont know that Ive ever seen Stagers work again.
Other Howard stories have appeared from time to time for Marvel to keep the trademark alive, and one Marvel regime even patched things up with Gerber for a one-off team-up with Spider-Man, but it wasnt until Joe Quesada took the reins at Marvel and established their short-lived Max line for mature readers that Steve Gerber was willing to return to the duck for something properly solid which stands as a fine companion to the original run: a six-part mini-series illustrated by Phil Winslade.
The 21st Century Howard makes a couple of concessions to the years (the malicious Dr. Bong has been pining for Bev for a really long time), but Gerber otherwise picks up where he left off, with Howard and Bev still struggling just to manage subsistence level and living in a junkyard. The targets of the satire include boy bands, who really are manufactured here, Vertigo Comics and their authors, and the flesh-fest comics like Witchblade from Top Cow. But, as ever, there are meatier targets among the comedy and action. The final half seques effortlessly into a discussion about the real motives of religion and its opposition to, or at least hinderance of, what might be Gods plan. Gerber and Winslade had earlier teamed for the splendid Nevada from DC/Vertigo and they make a fabulous team.
More Howard adventures probably arent in the immediate future, at least not with their creator at the helm, and so they consequently wont be worth reading. Gerber is currently writing the acclaimed Hard Time for DC, and relationships with Marvel have probably been strained by the companys frankly bizarre decision to revive Gerbers obscure 1970s character Omega the Unknown, co-created by himself and Mary Skrenes, in an upcoming series without their input.
Nevertheless, Gerbers entire Howard canon, save the mid-90s Spider-Man team-up and the two 1970s issues he did not finish, is available in these two volumes. Your local comic shop would enjoy your custom; new books ship each Wednesday, so why not stop in after work tonight?