RIP Steve Gerber (1947-2008)

Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck (1976-1978ish) alternately tickled and troubled me when I was a kid. I was a bit too young for it, honestly; some of its satiric bits were lost on me, and some of its plot twists were, well, disturbing, like Howard's nervous breakdown (replete with straitjacket). But even at that age, I recognized that it was something special, something apart. I enjoyed its eccentric characters: the Kidney Lady, Winky-Man, Dr. Bong, and, of course, Howard himself. I looked forward to reading it. And so after Howard I always perked up when I saw the name "Steve Gerber" on anything. I kept the Howards that my brother Scott and I bought, whereas I got rid of most of my other comic books, Kirby excepted. Even now I remember many individual issues of Gerber's Howard, down to gag lines and panels and oddball plot elements, despite having not read most of the run for the better part of twenty years.

So it was with sadness that I learned of Gerber's passing. He died yesterday, Sunday, February 10. Tom Spurgeon has a wonderful, thorough eulogy up for Gerber at his site, and Mark Evanier has a memorial up as well. Please look. Gerber was a pioneer of left-field, writer-driven genre comics, a la Vertigo, and a satirist with a distinct sensibility that, surprisingly, remained strong and sharp even in what seems like it should have been a watered-down mainstream comic.

RIP, Steve Gerber. Thanks.