Steve Gerber – Wis[s]e Words

Your Happening World (June 19th through June 22nd)

Published on June 22, 2014Leave a comment

Blog fodder for June 19th through June 22nd:

Arcfinity – We’re reading BARRICADE by Jon Wallace – In case you are thinking otherwise, I was not scouring the text for these solecisms, setting out to set you up, but like all people who are preparing a review I was keeping notes throughout the reading. The protocols around a first novel by a young writer do matter. I kept noting all the bad stuff (much more than reported here), but I was looking for good bits with which to try to encourage you. I found none. It gradually dawned on me that I was wasting my time. Barricade was unyielding in its awfulness. It was a book I did not wish to write about.
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, The Archipelago of Arrogance | TomDispatch – Yes, guys like this pick on other men's books too, and people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.
Lesbian Historic Motif Project at The Rose Garden – My goal here — beyond the selfish utilitarian aspect of organizing my research — is much in parallel with that of sites like the Medieval People of Color blog, or Kameron Hurley's award-nominated essay "We Have Always Fought". I want to help change the unexamined assumptions about the place and nature of lesbian-like characters in historic fact, literature, art, and imagination. I want to do it to help other authors find inspiration and support for the stories they want to tell. And I want to do it to affect the reception of my own writing.
All Quacked Up: Steve Gerber, Marvel Comics, and Howard the Duck « The Hooded Utilitarian – This article is a history of the editorial and business relationship between Marvel Comics, their representatives, and the late writer Steve Gerber (1947-2008). Its focus is their dealings over Howard the Duck, Gerber’s signature character.
Ptak Science Books: Ueber-Spectacular Understatement Department: the Happy Post-Apocalyptic America and the “Awkwardness” of Holocaust, 1962 – How rich we'd all be after the bombs dropped!

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 39: Essential Howard the Duck Vol. 01

Published on October 19, 20101 Comment

cover of Howard the Duck Vol. 01

Essential Howard the Duck Vol. 01
Steve Gerber, Gene Colan and friends
Reprints: Howard the Duck #1-27, annual 1, Marvel Treasury #12 and more (January 1976 – September 1978)
Get this for: Gerber’s best work for Marvel — five stars

Get down America! Essential Howard the Duck Vol. 1 collects the complete original run of Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck, the greatest cult hero of seventies Marvel, the one comic that captured the spirit of the seventies. Whether that still makes it interesting thirty years onwards is another question entirely. A question everybody needs to answer themselves, but for me I found these stories still surprisingly relevant and good.

As you probably know, Howard got his start with a cameo appearance in an early issue of Gerber’s Man-Thing, just one casualty in a reality war, taken from his own Earth and trapped in a world he never made. He was an instant hit, got two solo adventures in Giant-Size Man-Thing (no sniggering please), then his own series. Steve Gerber wrote all his appearances, including a teamup with The Defenders in Marvel Treasury Edition #12. The series took off, became a cult hit and more than that, one of the few real breakout titles Marvel had in the late seventies, popular enough to get a newspaper strip and much later a not very good movie. But that was after Gerber had left, as Marvel’s higher management fucked him over. All his writing on Howard was of course work for hire and hence continued by other hands after he quit, but none of it was any good. Howard the Duck only worked for Gerber, because he was Gerber.

It looks so easy, the Howard the Duck formula. Create some absurd villain, add a dash of parody, mix in a bit of social commentary and don’t forget the cynicism, add an ill humoured duck (or drake rather) and his girlfriend, then serve it all up with standard Marvel superhero soap opera plots. Yet only for Gerber would this work. Most other writers would just overdo the parody elements, making the Duck into a secondrate Mad imitator or got too absurd and Howard stopped to make sense. It’s the easiest trap to fall into as a writer, to think satire and humour are easy, that you can use a formula to produce it, that all it takes is some obvious parodies and some dime a dozen absurdity to make a Howard the Duck story.

It’s the same as with the old Batman television series, often imitated but never equalled by both other tv shows or comics, because none of those imitators ever got their heads round the idea that the secret was to treat Batman and his world seriously, that there are rules. In Howard’s case the menaces might be even more absurd but Howard still has to deal with them: a nine foot ginger bread man can still kill him if he doesn’t eat him first. Gerber wrote Howard the Duck exactly as he would a more “serious” superhero series and Howard’s villains like Space Turnip Man might be dumb or crazy, but they make sense in their own context. More importantly, Howard always is more than just a comic fowl (sorry), but a true tragic figure, a reverse Ben Grimm, a human trapped in a world of monstrous talking hairless apes.

What made Gerber’s Howard the Duck more than just the lazy parody his successors turned it into is that it was the story of his own struggle of living in seventies America. He can be incredibly blatant in this, (e.g. the Reverend Yucc and his Yuccies) and there is a lot of angst about politicians and Madison Avenue brainwashing and all that, but these are just the most obvious ways in which Gerber’s own emotions seep in the stories. The infamous issue sixteen, a fill-in issue needed because Gerber was blowing his deadlines, is the best example. Instead of the usual reprint or inventory issue, Gerber instead offers a stream of consciousness illustrated essay on his own hangups about Howard, a dialogue between the writer and his creation. It’s the highlight of the series.

Though Gerber was the driving force behind Howard the Duck Gene Colan should be mentioned as well. He portrayed all absurdities with the same ease as he would’ve illustrated a Daredevil or Tomb of Dracula story, without drawing undue attention to the wackiness. It doesn’t hurt that the man could draw either.

Howard the Duck was perhaps the best Marvel put out in the seventies. You need to have this volume.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 37: Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02

Published on October 17, 2010

cover of Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02

Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02
Steve Gerber, Michael Fleisher, Chris Claremont and friends
Reprints: Man-Thing #15-22, Giant-Size #3-5, Man-Thing v2 #1-11 (March 1975 – July 1981)
Get this for: The second part of Gerber’s run — four stars

The Marvel Essentials series is meant to sell you characters, rather than creators — buy a volume and you get a big slab of Spider-Man’s adventures, or the Fantastic Four’s — but with some series this approach just doesn’t work. Man-Thing is one such series. Only one writer ever got a handle on the muck monster and nobody before or after him really knew what to do with him. That writer was Steve Gerber of course, whose work dominated the first volume of Essential Man-Thing. The second volume collects the remainder of his run on the first Man-Thing, but also the complete second, 1979 series, written by Michael Fleisher and Chris Claremont. It’s clear neither of them got the Man-Thing as Gerber got him.

Man-Thing is after all a difficult character to write. He’s completely passive, with no motives of his own, solely responding to the emotions of the people around him. You can’t have the usual Marvel soap opera with Man-Thing, it’s difficult to get him to fight recurring villains and really the best thing you can do with him is to use him in morality tales. Which both Gerber and his successors did, with the difference that Gerber had his finger on the pulse of the seventies and the talent to make use of it. He was also able to see the absurdity in his stories, which helps a lot when reading much dated relevant stories. But he also moved people with his stories, especially “the Kid’s Night Out” from Giant-Size Man-Thing #4, as witnessed in this remembrance by Fred Hembeck. In it Man-Thing is the avenger of a fat kid who died of exhaustion during gym class, while the people that tormented him mouth platitudes at his funeral, lashing out in anger when his one friend challenges their lies. It’s dated yes and I’ve read hundreds of such stories, but I can see the power it must have had on people like Hembeck back then

For an example of how not to do a Man-Thing story, we need look no further than Giant-Size Man-Thing #5 and a Len Wein story. Wein, who created Manny’s counterpart at DC, Swamp Thing, should’ve been able to handle him, but his story of two young lovers running away into the swamp to get away from their feuding parents is a) cliche and b) very very dull, a sort of third rate EC Comics shock story. That’s the mistake in many of the non-Gerber stories, taken it all too seriously and going for shock rather than creativity, upping the death count along the way. It doesn’t make them any better.

On the art side, most of it is by dependable Marvel veterans like Jim Mooney, Ed Hannigan and Don Perlin. None of them are bad and some like Hannigan do their best work here, but it’s not as good as the art in the previous volume, which of course boasted Mike Ploog, who is hard to improve on. It’s the standard seventies Marvel house style on display here, when Manny really needs something special.

Not a bad volume and Chris Claremont at least tries to do what Gerber does seemingly effortlessly, but in the end it shows that some characters can only be handled by one specific writer.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 33: Essential Defenders Vol. 02

Published on October 13, 2010

cover of Essential Defenders Vol. 02

Essential Defenders Vol. 02
Steve Gerber, Sal Buscema and friends
Reprints: Defenders #15-30, Giant-Size Defenders #1-5 and much more (July 1974 – December 1975)
Get this for: Gerber and Marvel’s only non-team team — four stars

The Defenders is one of the …odder… ideas for a title Marvel ever had. Take four heroes never known for being easy to work with, with nothing in common and make them into a “non-team”. Sure, the Silver Surfer, Hulk, Doctor Strange and Namor the Submariner all are “big guns”, but putting them together in one series, especially the Hulk? Hadn’t Marvel learned that lesson with The Avengers? And yet… It worked sort of, worked enough to get them their own series after a trial out in Marvel Feature but at least to me it never really gelled until a certain Steve Gerber joined the title…

Essential Defenders Vol. 2 contains the first half of Gerber’s run on The Defenders, but it starts with Len Wein on writing duties. Wein treats the Defenders as a fairly standard superhero team, having them e.g. fight Magneto and the Wrecking Crew. Once Gerber takes over things get weirder, more offbeat, slightly more existentialist. By this time only the Hulk and Doctor Strange remained of the original team, with Valkyrie and Nighthawk as new members, plus various co-stars, including Yellowjacket, Daredevil, Luke Cage and the Son of Satan. That core group of the Hulk, Doctor Strange, Valkyrie and Nighthawk works well together, especially with the Hulk softened up a bit to make him more of a teamplayer.

Now The Defenders used to be my favourite Marvel team back when I first started to read superhero comics and the Gerber stories collected here were one of the reasons why. Two stories in particular stand out. The first is the Defenders clash with the Sons of the Serpents, Marvel’s go-to club of dimwitted but dangerous racist tools. Here once again the twist at the end of the story is that the guy using them is *gasp* Black and only using them for their own personal gains, as it was more or less in their earlier Avengers appearances. What Gerber does differently is to pay more attention to the damage done by the Serpents, has more of an eye for the reality of America in the Seventies than earlier writers using the Serpents had.

The other story is the Guardians of the Galaxy story that ran from Giant-Size Defenders #5 to Defenders #29, which turned me into a fan of them as well. Especially interesting there is issue 26, which has a recap of how the far future of the Guardians came into being, complete with trademark Gerber social commentary — “we valued dry armpits and the three billion dollar aerosol industry over our flowers, our food and ultimately our health” — as the depletion of the ozone layer leads to the widespread use of bionics by the mid-eighties…. Gerber also manages to tie-in the old Killraven series into this future history by the way.

The volume ends with Gerber’s most famous creation, Howard the Duck teaming up with the Defenders in Marvel Treasury Edition #12, which I found to be a bit meh. Howard is an acquired taste and for the most part has aged badly, apart from in a few classic stories. He’s just too seventies. Gerber does much better with the Defender’s characters: more so than any other team you feel that the core members are friends just hanging out rather than coming together to fight crime, which I’ve always found appealing.

The art throughout the volume, with some exceptions including a great issue by Gil Kane, is by Sal Buscema, who is not at his best here. It’s serviceable, rather than good. His pedestrian art undermines some of the pizazz of Gerber’s writing; you’d want a more interesting artist to interpret his plots like on Man-Thing or Howard the Duck. On the other hand there is the fact that Sal Buscema’s style is easy to understand, clean and clear and for a somewhat more mainstream title like The Defenders this may be a more suitable style.

The best of Gerber’s Defenders is still to come and not in this volume, but it’s a great starting point for the series. Most of the bugs have been taken out of the series here and you get the start of what made The Defenders tick for so long.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 14: Essential Marvel Two-in-One vol. 1

Published on September 24, 2010

cover of Essential Marvel Two-in-One Vol. 1

Essential Marvel Two-in-One Vol. 1
Steve Gerber, Bill Mantlo, Sal Buscema and friends
Reprints: Marvel Feature #11-12, Marvel Two in One #1-20, 22-25 and more (January 1974 – March 1977)
Get this for: Seventies superheroics — three stars

We’ve already had a volume of Essential Marvel Team-Up, so now it’s time for that other classic teamup title: Marvel Two-in-One. Whereas the former had Spider-Man as its main character, Marvel Two-in-One had The Thing, Marvel’s second most sympathic character. It may seem a strange choice at first to have him as the lead — why not Mr Fantastic or the Torch instead — but it works. The Thing has many of the same qualities as Spider-Man: an everyman, powerful but kind, with problems all his power can’t solve and somebody who you can imagine having a beer with. What also helps is that you can put him in almost every situation and have it make sense, as this volume makes clear; something you can’t do with e.g. Daredevil.

Essential Marvel Two-in-One Vol. 1 contains the last two issues of Marvel Feature, #11-12, the first twentyfive issues (excluding #21) of Marvel Two-in-One plus the first annual, as well as crossover issues with Marvel Team-Up (#47) and Fantastic Four (Annual #11). Issue 21 was excluded because it featured Doc Savage, who Marvel no longer has the rights to. Marvel Feature was a failed tryout title that had also featured an attempt to revive Antman amongst others and it’s clear that this was used to try the waters so to speak.

The first nine issues of Marvel Two-in-One were written by Steve Gerber, picking up one loose thread from his Man-Thing stories: Wundarr, the Superman analog with the brain of a two year old turns up again and Thing becomes his uncle Benji, though he isn’t too pleased about it. Gerber also has teamups with some of his other characters: first the Guardians of the Galaxy, then Doc Strange and the Valkyrie from The Defenders. After Gerber left, Bill Mantlo took over the writing duties, with some fill-ins from people like Chris Claremont, Roger Slifer and Roy Thomas, the latter doing a crossover with his WWII teams Invaders and Liberty Legion. None of the writing, not even Gerber’s is particularly great, with most of the stories being simple “Heroes meet, misunderstand each other, spar a bit, then tackle the real villain together”. The real interest lies squarely with the featured heroes and villains.

Those featured here are a nice mixture of the well known and the obscure. Apart from the ones mentioned above, there’s Thor, Iron Man, Daredevil, Captain America and the Fantastic Four, but also Tigra, Scarecrow, the Golem, the Son of Satan and Morbius to name just a few of the more obscure. For some of these teamups you quickly suspect that they’re mostly done to close up some dangling plotlines from their own just cancelled series. Scarecrow is one of those, a horror hero that had had two previous appearances and had been intended for his own series, which never got off the ground; Marvel Two-in-One #18 concludes his story. As to the villains featured, few are that interesting: also rans like Miracle Man or the Puppet Master or the Basilik, as well as some new ones cooked up especially for the series like Sword of Judgement.

The art for the most part is not … the best … Marvel featured in that period. It’s mostly uninspiring but dependable artists like Herb Trimpe, Bob Brown, Ron Wilson and Sal Buscema, who are all capable of better work than is on display here. As is Gil Kane, normally a welcome sight in a volume like this, but his work in issue one and two is no more than adequate. The art does fit the stories, that’s the best you can say of it.

Marvel Two-in-One would get better much later on, especially when Mark Gruenwald was writing it and George Perez handled the art, but that’s a long way away yet from this volume. It is the sort of comics I grew up with, but for those who didn’t, you’re not missing that much here.