December 30, 2008
A world he never made
As 2008 draws to a close, the memorial lists have arrived. Some of the names are to be expected. Paul Newman was an icon for decades whose stature as an actor and a star never entirely overpowered his reputation for decency as a human being. Albert Hoffman, Mildred Loving, and Bobby Fischer were all thrust into the spotlight as icons of their times. Some lived smaller lives: the leftist micro-capitalist Ron Rivera; blogger Doris "Tanta" Dungey, perhaps the most lucid explicator of madness at the end of America's great real-estate boom (the first mention I saw of her passing after her co-blogger's memorial message was from Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman). Some absences from these lists, however, must surprise no one.
Steve Gerber died this February. His fascinating and unsatisfactorily-ended Omega the Unknown, the story of an orphaned boy and a lookalike, silent alien, prompted Jonathan Lethem to take a crack at the series in in 2007, but that's not why anyone remembers him. He was responsible for the KISS comic and Foolkiller. Alongside the omnipresent Mark Evanier, he worked on the Dungeons and Dragons Saturday morning cartoon, the animated G.I. Joe, and Thundarr the Barbarian. They're not why he's famous either.
Thundarr was designed by Alex "Space Ghost" Toth and the legendary Jack Kirby. Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Stan Lee had revitalized comics in the Silver Age of the early '60s, creating Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and dozens of other characters, offering more emotional depth and teen angst to their readers in a world where superhero comics had seemed to be on their last legs. What they hadn't done is appeal to the Laugh-In crowd; a parody like Not Brand Ecch wasn't going to appeal to people watching Steve Martin and reading their older siblings' copies of The Realist. And so Gerber invented the cigar-chomping Howard, a humanoid duck with a suspicious resemblance to Donald.
The huge relative success of Howard is somewhat surprising in retrospect. Perhaps it's that there was always an underground audience for Disney parodies acting nasty. Perhaps Howard the Duck, like ELO or Zabriskie Point, is simply something that absolutely kills its time frame and to an audience of the very stoned. Perhaps it's simply that the idea of a wisecracking, pun-dropping character mocking his medium and constantly breaking the fourth wall hadn't yet been done to death. Regardless of the reasons, at the time it was hugely popular, and Gerber's original work, detailing the adventures of a trans-dimensional anthropomorphic duck stranded in Cleveland, Ohio, remains well-received even today. Howard was a small story, despite the presence of the odder denizens of Marvel's universe (including the villainous Doctor Bong) and Howard's run for the White House in 1976: the story of a duck hanging out with his (human) girlfriend in a world all too lacking in talking ducks, trapped, as the tagline put it, in a world that he never made. It was the ideal project for a class cutup. If the kernel at the center of satire is true contempt, the essence of parody is enthusiasm, and Gerber clearly loved comics. No one who didn't could have created Bessie the Hellcow.
Howard the Duck and its brief moment in the pop culture zeitgeist (a Stephen King reference or three; a short-lived newspaper comic spinoff; assorted ephemera) is why Gerber is remembered. Unless, of course, it's the other Howard the Duck: the waddling short guy in a duck suit, pitching woo to Lea Thompson. It's as bad as people say, an almost incomprehensibly terrible idea ("the sci-fi equivalent of Poochie... [with] the canned sarcasm of a wacky next-to-door neighbor on a mediocre sitcom. He’s all ersatz attitude and strained zaniness, a shortcoming only enhanced by the blank inexpressiveness of the film’s duck costumes"). It immolated director (and American Graffiti screenwriter) Willard Hyuck's career; he hasn't made a movie since. It nearly performed a great service by bankrupting George Lucas and preventing his late-career work; Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs for $10 million instead; Jobs shut down the medical imaging division and twenty years later sold the company to Disney for $7 billion.
The movie version of Howard the Duck was one of the most notorious flops — critically and financially — of its time, but it still brought in tens of millions of loss-making dollars, money Gerber didn't see. Why should he? He had no stake in the game, not even a voice in an adaption that he could tell was problematic; he was reduced, apparently, "hoping against hope that the script and the movie itself weren't as bad as I thought they were". The Seventies were a time when many unlikely performers rose to stardom. Howard, originally published in Gerber's Giant-Sized Man-Thing (an oversized comic book about a shambling swamp creature, the Man-Thing; any other implications are all in the reader's own dirty mind), proved to be a success. That success proved to be Gerber's downfall. When his throwaway character, invented entirely by him, proved to be commercially successful, Gerber wanted his cut. He claimed that his contract with Marvel meant that he owned the character. It was an argument that Superman's creators had fruitlessly pursued for years. Fighting a corporate giant, even a small giant like Marvel, took money; with Jack Kirby, who was having problems of his own with Marvel, he made a little comic called Destroyer Duck, an anthropomorphic duck also trapped in a world he never made. Only this one wasn't irascible, perpetually put-upon, and funny; this one was angry about injustice (and funny). Gerber meant it, too. He initially declared Lethem an "enemy for life" for reviving Omega the Unknown (an "expression of contempt"), before tempering his remarks after Lethem convinced him that the book was a labor of love:
I still believe that writers and artists who claim to respect the work of creators past should demonstrate that respect by leaving the work alone — particularly if the original creator is still alive, still active in the industry, and, as is typically the case in comics, excluded from any financial participation in the use of the work.... When a writer of Jonathan's stature agrees to participate in a project like this, he also, intentionally or not, tacitly endorses the inequities of the old system. I've tried for a couple of decades now to convince the rest of the industry that those inequities will end only when writers and artists — whether celebrities from other fields, like Jonathan, or longtime comics professionals, like myself — say 'no' to projects that make no provision for the original creators. I've failed. I find that endlessly frustrating.
If Gerber hadn't made his peace with the industry, he had at least learned to tamp it down. He claimed that he was "no longer angry" thanks to the settlement that ended his legal fight. But Gerber's unsuccessful struggle over ownership of Howard the Duck (and Howard the Duck) was the first steps towards the creators' rights movements of the '80s, but it wasn't a victory for him. Gerber continued to work sporadically in the comic book industry, and was able to publish new work as truly his own during the great comics explosion of the early Nineties (including Nevada, with DC's Vertigo imprint, a long-standing home for creator-owned properties). But his older work was never his. Three years ago, he asked his fans to rig a vote so that a character he created for Marvel wouldn't be revived. When Gerber died last February at 60 years old, he was writing a revival of Gardner Fox's mystic superhero, Doctor Fate. Endings to his series were written by his friends and colleagues Adam Beechen, Mark Evanier, Gail Simone, and Mark Waid. The character of Fate, created by Gardner Fox in 1940, will continue to be owned by DC. Lethem's Omega the Unknown concluded its ten-issue revival this summer. Howard remains a duck, the master of Quak-Fu, from the end of reality t' the middle of nowhere, and stuck in Cleveland until further notice.