neez

I had a glib little work anecdote to relate, but I've come home to startling news.

Steve Gerber has passed away.

Most of you are probably thinking, "Who is Steve Gerber?"  Short answer: creator of Howard the Duck.  Better answer: one of the best writers the comic book industry ever produced.

Steve was important for one big reason.  Through his work and its emotional resonance, its quality of craft, and its thorough entertainment value, he fostered something akin to a friendship with his readers.  Only the best artists manage this, and I consider it a hallmark of greatness.  The ability to put enough of yourself into your work to make it personable, but to temper it with a certain universality, this is an immensely difficult talent to even have, let alone develop.  Steve Gerber did that quite well, and it shows through the devotion of his fans and the critical assessment of his canon.

For me personally, it's really sad.  Gerber's work holds a special position in my life.  You see, I learned to read partially from comics, so I was interested in them from an early age.  My uncles amassed an impressive and eclectic collection through the 60s and 70s, and I delighted in having them read to me and subsequently reading them myself.  The smell of old musty newsprint is still one of my favorites.

I moved away from my grandparents' house and that cache of literary treasures when I was nine.  Action figures took predominance over comics in my imagination; I still had those and they were readily available.  My consumption of comics was limited to rare visits to the old homestead, and even then it took a considerable amount of convincing begging to get my uncles to grant me passage.

So I just played with toys, learned to ride a bike, and ran around with the neighborhood kids.  My parents weren't very specific about what I'd watch, and around ten or so I saw the Howard the Duck movie.  To my addled little prepubescent mind, this was one of the greatest cinematic achievements in celluloid history.  I watched it over and over, I implored to rent it every single trip to the video store, I fucking loved that movie.  Unknown to me at the time, it would sit at the center of an epiphany later on in life.

I think I was twelve (my recollection of age is sometimes shoddy).   I was living at  the grandparents' house again, my family was between homes.  My uncles, who lived their whole lives in their parents' home, had a rock band and lived a veritable Lost Boys existence, had an extended group of friends.  One of these friends, Alan, was a devout KISS fan.

One fateful Saturday, he was trucking it up to the big city, Charlotte, NC, to attend the region's biggest comic book event, the Heroes Convention.  He offered to take me along as he hunted for KISS memorabilia,  and I managed to extort 20 bucks from some family member to blow.

So we got up there and this place is unlike anything I've ever seen.  There's that old newsprint smell in spades, and I'm sure it sparked some chemical reaction in my feeble little brain.  Alan bid me farewell, established a meeting point and time, and I was off on my own for the afternoon.

Looking around I quickly ascertained $20 wasn't going very far.  I was smart enough to know I had to be extremely selective, and I was inexperienced enough not to be enticed by a lot.

So I hopped from booth to booth, my curiosity steadily bowing, digging through long boxes and marveling at toys and posters.  This was an entirely new world, like crash landing on an alien planet.  There were signposts in Spider-Man and Iron Man and Aquaman and Superman, but there was so much more to discover.  I had no idea where to start.

Until I knelt at a yellow old box of comics under a table, perusing the protruding tabs with titles scrawled on them.  There I saw something familiar: Howard the Duck.

It was like a wave of euphoria, friends, that same tingle you get when you hear a really good song.  At first I thought, "No way!  It can't be!"  But to my astonishment and delight, I pulled it out.  It was true.  Howard the Duck #3.

The Duck looked a little different, but the cover was nevertheless intriguing.  He was dressed in martial arts garb, flying through the air, webbed foot extended, knocking back a gang of toughs.  Chomped in his beak was his trademark cigar, and the caption read MASTER OF QUAK FU, a phrase I recognized from the movie.

I asked politely if I could open the bag and flip through it, then vendor said sure, so I set about that.  I flipped through, and it was glorious.  It was like all the old comics I read as a kid, same realistic art style, same simple, faded coloration, same smell, but it had Howard the Duck in it.  I had found my purchase.

I don't remember the exact prices, but I bought all I could, which ended up being Howard the Duck #s 3, 4 and 5 (they didn't have 1 and 2 in that particular box).  I didn't explore any further.  I went straight to a chair and read #3 in its entirety, loved it, and promptly devoured #4.  #5 I read in the car on the way home.

Maybe it's childhood nostalgia (I'd like to think it's more the quality of the work) but to this day that is still one fantastic triptych of comic books. 

This cathartic experience lead to the rekindling of my fascination with comics.  A couple years later I met Maine - who was also a comic book fan - and he introduced me to one Erik Larsen's work on Spider-Man.  This solidified my obsession.  But without Howard the Duck - and more specifically Steve Gerber - that obsession would have never taken hold.

And now here I am years later, and comics are an integral part of my life.  I endeavor to make them professionally, and I've made some great friends through the fan community.  None of this would have happened, I can easily say, without the work of Steve Gerber.

I'd been reading Steve's blog for a couple months now, and I knew he was in a bad way.  But his missives still had a spark and liveliness, an essential humanity, that had me convinced he'd pull through.  Of course I wasn't privy to the seriousness of his condition (he died of pulmonory fibrosis, awaiting a lung transplant)  but the tenacity  Mr. Gerber exhibited throughout his life and its struggles and up 'til now somehow gave me hope.  Not just for Gerber himself, but for everybody, anybody, myself.  Through reading his blog I felt like I'd gained some small sliver of insight into who he was: a sensitive, exemplary human being.  The world is poorer in his absence.

I never even got to say thanks.