Like so many others, I was sorry to hear of Steve Gerber's death. I loved his comics as a teenager, and although I'd lost track of his career in recent years (I never read Hard Time, for instance), I still occasionally re-read my old issues of Man-Thing and Omega the Unknown. The Gerber series that affected me the most, however, and the one I remember most fondly, is his run on The Defenders (issues #20-41, and Defenders Annual #1), which took a middling super-team book into previously uncharted realms of ludic surrealism. Comics like the Moore-Bissette Swamp Thing and the Morrison-Case Doom Patrol are unthinkable without Gerber's trailblazing detournment of superhero comics.
In 1992, while honeymooning in Chicago, my wife Kathy and I stopped by a comic shop (which I think was Larry's Comic Book Store, on Devon, which closed in 2002) where there was cheap original art on sale. For 15 bucks, I could buy either a Gil Kane page (from his mid-1970s run on The Inhumans) or a page from Defenders Annual #1 (1976), written by Gerber and drawn by Sal Buscema and Klaus Janson. I bought the Defenders page. (It's the page where Nighthawk and the Red Guardian transport to Paris, and immediately see the Bozos behead a dummy in a guillotine.) I'd always liked Gil Kane's art more than Sal Buscema's, but I loved Steve Gerber's writing on The Defenders best of all.
I hope I'm not being callous here, but I found it bizarrely amusing that Gerber died waiting for a lung transplant, since a major theme of his Defenders issues is the malleability of the human body. Nighthawk has his brain removed from his skull and plopped into a metal dish, Ruby Thursday's head is replaced by a giant jewel, and a mad scientist gives Chondu the Mystic lamprey arms and chicken legs. In a better, weirder world, Gerber's story would've played out differently. Instead of dying, he would've had his head transplanted onto a gorilla's body, and he'd still be with us, still writing, his new simian fingers smashing down too hard on the computer keyboard.
Craig, so good to see your thoughts on Gerber.
Y'know, the guillotine reference in the DEFENDERS annual reminds me of Dr. Bong, from HOWARD THE DUCK, the former rock journalist who lost his hand during an on-stage guillotining gag at an Alice Cooper-type show. Bong's origin story was roughly a year after the DEFENDERS reference...
This inspired me to watch one of Alice Cooper's beheadings, on YouTube. I bet Gerber would have approved.
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | February 12, 2008 at 01:06 PM