Back when I first started reading American comics (some twenty years ago now), buying them secondhand at dodgy market stalls, what I was especially looking for were back issues of The Defenders. For some reason or other the Dutch edition of that had started translating the series from issue eighty something, only to switch back to the low twenties a few issues onward, probably because the Dutch publisher had gotten a stack of back issues from Marvel. It was this that introduced me to Steve Gerber and it was strange, not at all like the slick superheroics I was used to from Marvel. A psychotic elf shooting random people? Supervillians joining a self improvement group? The Headmen, neverdowell evil scientists who try to transplant their brains into superheroes? Now that was just weird.
It was only later that I learned who Steve Gerber really was, one of the first proper writers, not just somebody who wanted to write good superhero stories, but somebody who used the trappings of the genre to tell entirely different stories. He was somebody who, had he not worked in comics but been a “real writer”, would have an obituary in the New York Times. I’m not kidding. Greg Hatcher said it best, two years ago, when he described the essential appeal of Gerber’s seventies work:
These stories all hit a theme that Steve Gerber comes back to again and again… the alienated loner that perceives the world more truly than the people around him can, but because of that becomes more vulnerable and endures more pain. I read a review somewhere of Hard Time that was busting Steve Gerber for using that theme, and I remember thinking at the time, Jeez, if you feel that way, why are you bothering to read a Steve Gerber book at all? Look at Howard the Duck and Man-Thing and Defenders and Omega… they’re all outsiders looking in. That’s what Steve Gerber does best. I think it was Stephen King that said that if you’re a lit’ry sort of writer you can get away with exploring the same theme from different angles, but if you do it in a pop culture outlet people will assume your head’s so empty it has an echo.
A very seventies theme of course, fitting the times, but also an universal theme. Of course it can lead to mopery and general emo wankness, but Gerber had the saving grace of being funny. The Defenders, much of Man-Thing and especially Howard the Duck were incredibly absurd, and Gerber could make you laugh at all this absurdity, but without mocking the characters. He showed how much you could do in a genre that had looked stale. As Mike Sterling puts it:
Howard sprang forth from Gerber’s other major Marvel work, Man-Thing, which at first glance appeared to be a more straightforward horror title, but still had its moments of satire and offbeat humor. In fact, through most of Gerber’s work, there’s a feeling of Gerber taking things about as seriously as they needed to be…he can turn on the horror or the drama when he needs to, but just as quickly he can hit you with a scene that has a feeling of “can you believe this? I’m writing it, and I can barely believe it” — but doing it in such a way that you didn’t feel
like the characters or situation were being mocked.
And more, he was one of the first champions of creators rights, the very simple idea that really, the people who create the characters, who write the stories and draw the adventures should be in control of them, that cartoonists aren’t interchangeable cogs, that it matters who writes the story. Nothing new in book publishing, but radical in the insular, slightly dodgy world of comics. That there are publishers like Vertigo today that operate largely as a book publisher would, focusing on creators not characters is partially due to Gerber’s struggles to keep control of his characters like Howard the Duck.
Steve Gerber did his best work at a time when comics where as low as you could get on the cultural totem pole, less respectable even than porn, so a lot of his work just disappeared once it was published, not getting the attention it deserved. It’s only recently that it has started to be reprinted and collected again. In some ways he could’ve done so much more in today’s comics industry, but you have to remember that it was in no small part to the battles he fought twenty-thirty years ago that has made it possible.
Thank you, Steve.