FA+
Shop
Howard the Dick
4 months ago
General
Wow -- open a box I haven't looked in for 20 years, and there are my old issues of Shanda the Panda, Wild Life, Genus Male -- and the 2002 Howard the Duck miniseries by Steve Gerber and Phil Winslade.
You may never've seen the original HtD comics from the 1970s, a satirical riff on pop culture and politics that became a surprise bestseller for Marvel (and spawned both a newspaper comic strip and a George Lucas movie that's somehow better than I remember it). I haven't read the original series in decades, but I agree with the Amazon reviewer who opined that if the great cultural critic HL Mencken had been around in the '70s, he would've recognized a kindred spirit in Howard the Duck.
Created by Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik as a throwaway character, Howard's a born malcontent, an intellectual with none of the privileges of academia or the professional elite. A freak cosmic accident whisks him from Duckworld and deposits him in the human world, where he becomes a literal alien, the ultimate illegal immigrant. His only weapons are his wits, and they're trained on his greatest enemy, middlebrow culture -- the well-intentioned art, stories, and political narratives that keep us "contented in our stupidity, but neither happy nor free." (Howard seems to be, at least spiritually, a student of Dwight Macdonald.)
Published just as the adults-only underground comix of the '70s were transitioning to the creator-owned independent comics of the '80s, HtD was emblematic of the changes that American comics were going through: hipper, smarter, more skeptical of the values their creators (and readers) had been raised on. Still, Gerber's conflicts with Marvel led to him being kicked off the book, then turning around and suing the company over ownership of the character. The lawsuit dragged on for two years before the litigants reached a settlement, after which Howard was effectively limited to a series of cameos for the next two decades.
In 2002, Gerber and artist Phil Winslade (with superb cover paintings by Glenn Fabry) concocted a six-issue sendup of the edgy, "alternative" comics of the time, with Howard drawn as a giant rodent for most of the story -- a slap at Disney as well as a nod to Gerber's own 1980 graphic novel, Stewart the Rat (Gerber never forgave Disney for forcing Howard to wear pants, claiming people would confuse him with Donald Duck). The final issue, in which Howard literally has a conversation with God, is worth the price of the series, but you get the sense that the writer has taken the character -- initially based on a college friend but for many years now Gerber's cartoon alter ego -- as far as either of them could go.
If the point of Gerber's stories is that the absurdity of existence means there's a thin line between tragedy and farce, the 2015 HtD revival by Chip Zdarsky and Joe Quinones is almost comforting by comparison. It's not about spoofing other people's work, it's about treating Howard as part of the Marvel Universe, awkwardly interacting with its other characters. He's now a private detective who spends much of his time hanging out with superheroes, but whatever.
You may never've seen the original HtD comics from the 1970s, a satirical riff on pop culture and politics that became a surprise bestseller for Marvel (and spawned both a newspaper comic strip and a George Lucas movie that's somehow better than I remember it). I haven't read the original series in decades, but I agree with the Amazon reviewer who opined that if the great cultural critic HL Mencken had been around in the '70s, he would've recognized a kindred spirit in Howard the Duck.
Created by Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik as a throwaway character, Howard's a born malcontent, an intellectual with none of the privileges of academia or the professional elite. A freak cosmic accident whisks him from Duckworld and deposits him in the human world, where he becomes a literal alien, the ultimate illegal immigrant. His only weapons are his wits, and they're trained on his greatest enemy, middlebrow culture -- the well-intentioned art, stories, and political narratives that keep us "contented in our stupidity, but neither happy nor free." (Howard seems to be, at least spiritually, a student of Dwight Macdonald.)
Published just as the adults-only underground comix of the '70s were transitioning to the creator-owned independent comics of the '80s, HtD was emblematic of the changes that American comics were going through: hipper, smarter, more skeptical of the values their creators (and readers) had been raised on. Still, Gerber's conflicts with Marvel led to him being kicked off the book, then turning around and suing the company over ownership of the character. The lawsuit dragged on for two years before the litigants reached a settlement, after which Howard was effectively limited to a series of cameos for the next two decades.
In 2002, Gerber and artist Phil Winslade (with superb cover paintings by Glenn Fabry) concocted a six-issue sendup of the edgy, "alternative" comics of the time, with Howard drawn as a giant rodent for most of the story -- a slap at Disney as well as a nod to Gerber's own 1980 graphic novel, Stewart the Rat (Gerber never forgave Disney for forcing Howard to wear pants, claiming people would confuse him with Donald Duck). The final issue, in which Howard literally has a conversation with God, is worth the price of the series, but you get the sense that the writer has taken the character -- initially based on a college friend but for many years now Gerber's cartoon alter ego -- as far as either of them could go.
If the point of Gerber's stories is that the absurdity of existence means there's a thin line between tragedy and farce, the 2015 HtD revival by Chip Zdarsky and Joe Quinones is almost comforting by comparison. It's not about spoofing other people's work, it's about treating Howard as part of the Marvel Universe, awkwardly interacting with its other characters. He's now a private detective who spends much of his time hanging out with superheroes, but whatever.
I always figured part of the problem with that film's reception was just due to the advertising. From what I remember, a lot of the pre-release publicity went out of its way to avoid showing you what Howard actually looked like, and having Lucas' name attached to it (only as exec producer; he wasn't directly involved in making it) led a lot of people to anticipate that Howard must be some revolutionary new advance in effects technology... and when the film came out, those people were inevitably disappointed that Howard was "just" a guy in an animatronic duck suit.