Category: Columns

Months before comics writer Steve Gerber passed away, I had already been planning to write about him in “Comics in Context” this year. My subject was going to be the original Omega the Unknown comic book series, which Gerber and his collaborator Mary Skrenes jointly conceived and wrote for Marvel over three decades ago.

I first read Omega when it was originally published in 1976, but I didn’t particularly like or understand what Gerber and Skrenes were getting at. Still, I was a devoted follower of Gerber’s work and kept reading the series till its abrupt end with only its tenth issue. A few years later in 1979, after Gerber had left Marvel, writer Steven Grant devised an ending for Omega in the pages of The Defenders, whereupon the character sank into nearly total obscurity, remembered only in an entry in the 1980s version of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe‘s “Book of the Dead.” (Rereading that entry, I realized that I probably wrote it: the style seems like my own.)

Probably Omega would have remained forgotten had it not been for the highly acclaimed mainstream novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose past work, including a 2003 book titled The Fortress of Solitude, after Superman’s arctic headquarters, demonstrates his knowledge and love of superhero comics. Fortress also mentions Omega, whose series Lethem read as a boy, and when Marvel invited Lethem to write for the company, he chose to revive Omega. The project was announced in 2005, although the new series did not appear until late 2007. Marvel’s editor in chief explained that “winning the MacArthur Grant”–known as the “genius” grant–“put additional and unexpected demands on [Lethem’s] time”. Here’s yet another way the world of comics has changed in the 21st century: how often has winning a “genius” grant served as an excuse for a writer delaying a comics project?

But the fact that Lethem would be doing a high profile revival of the character provided sufficient impetus for Marvel to reprint the entire original series, and even the Defenders wrap-up and my Handbook entry, in a full color trade paperback titled Omega the Unknown Classic in 2005. Had it not been for Lethem’s interest, Marvel would not have awarded “Classic” status to Gerber and Skrenes’ original Omega stories. They would surely have remained neglected rarities in back issue bins, just as I expect that Marvel finally got around to reprinting Jack Kirby’s Eternals after three decades because Neil Gaiman was going to revive them.

Moreover, I notice that Gerber and Skrenes’ names don’t appear on the front cover or spine of the paperback. I presume Marvel’s rationale is that if it listed Gerber and Skrenes and Mooney, they’d have to list Scott Edelman and Roger Stern, who each wrote a fill-in issue, and Grant for the Defenders issues, and every artist who worked on any of these stories. I see the point, but Gerber, Skrenes and Mooney created the series and did the majority of work on the stories in this book. When Marvel has been trumpeting its association with mainstream novelists like Lethem and Stephen King, it seems unfortunate to me that the “Classic” Omega paperback’s front cover and spine treat the series creators as if they were anonymous.

I had decided to wait until Lethem’s ten-issue series ended later this year, and then write a “Comics in Context” installment comparing and contrasting Lethem’s series with Gerber and Skrenes’. But since Gerber died a few weeks ago, it makes more sense for me to write about the original Omega now, thereby concluding my trilogy about his groundbreaking comics work in the 1970s.

Rereading the original Omega after so many years was eye-opening: I had grossly underrated the series, and I can understand why Lethem found it so intriguing.

Perhaps what made Omega most challenging to the comics audience of the mid-1970s was that it depended upon mysteries that Gerber and Skrenes were in no hurry to resolve, and that, indeed, were left unsolved when the series met its untimely end.

The central enigma was the nature of the connection between Omega‘s two protagonists: the mysterious title character, an alien humanoid who rarely spoke and became a superhero on Earth, and a strange, precocious yet emotionally distant 12-year-old American boy, James-Michael Starling (named after comics writer/artist Jim Starlin). Gerber and Skrenes continually offered tantalizing hints and suggestions in their scripts but never an explanation.

Perhaps Gerber and Skrenes were attempting to draw their readers more fully into the stories and the characters through Omega‘s riddles, inducing the members of the audience to devise their own, personal readings of Omega‘s mysteries and metaphors. For years comics readers and even many comics pros have insisted on exposing secrets, even when the mystery is far more dramatically resonant than the rather prosaic eventual solution (as in Wolverine: Origin). Perhaps television series such as Twin Peaks, The X-Files and Lost have now made the popular culture more appreciative of works that draw dramatic and thematic power from their ongoing conceptual puzzles. This is one of the ways in which Gerber and Skrenes were ahead of their time in Omega. (On the other hand, Omega followed the television series The Prisoner, whose meaning continues to be debated four decades later.)

For the sake of argument, I’m going to ignore the Defenders‘ explanation of the Omega mysteries, which Gerber and Lethem both reportedly disliked. I prefer to speculate about other, more rewarding possible solutions, for which Gerber and Skrenes laid the groundwork.

The opening pages of the first issue (March 1976) show the costumed figure of Omega, on a clearly alien world, running towards the unseen source of destructive ray blasts. On the next page we will discover that Omega’s assailants are robots. Captions have fallen out of favor in today’s comics industry, but in Omega Gerber and Skrenes demonstrate one of the ways they can be used effectively. Omega‘s omniscient narrator provides a running commentary offering an interpretation of the characters and events we witness, thereby provoking us to raise further questions about them. The first caption tells us, “Some unforeseen factor interrupts the orderly flow of events, and without warning, a finely-tuned organism erupts in discord, violence.” In other words, Omega existed in a state of peace and order, which was suddenly disrupted by something–the robots’ attack–beyond his control. Not only do his enemies indulge in violence, but Omega must also turn violent in order to stop them. Although violence is a familiar, perhaps essential element of the superhero genre, Gerber and Skrenes nonetheless continually question the use of violence in their Omega series. In this opening scene, Omega may need to employ violence to defend himself, but the “finely tuned” is nonetheless thrown into “discord” by using it.

But why refer to Omega as an “organism,” rather than as a person? Gerber and Skrenes are distancing their narrator–and us–from both Omega and the action, encouraging us to adopt an analytic perspective–not unlike that of Omega and James-Michael, as we shall soon see.

Atop page two, as Omega hurtles at the robots, as the caption tells us, “The mind searches furiously for a key to it all: what is it? What went wrong? Why? How?” As noted, Gerber and Skrenes deny the readers such keys to the series, forcing them to hypothesize their own.

The narrator continues, “The body, meanwhile, does what it must, to survive!” as we see Omega smashing some of the robots with his superhuman strength. Notice that the narrator describes Omega’s body as if it operates independently of his mind.

That mind is portrayed as questioning and analyzing, while the body is driven by the primal need to survive, which animals share. That is an emotion, and, as we shall see, both Omega and James-Michael have analytical minds that usually seem disconnected from their capacities for emotion. One of Gerber’s recurring themes is that of the human being who distances himself or herself from certain emotions. Remember that in Gerber’s Man-Thing classic “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Man” (see “Comics in Context” #214: “The Essential Steve Gerber”), protagonist Brian Lazarus, despite the terrors that overwhelmed him, believed that he was becoming like a “computer,” unable to connect emotionally with others. The story’s female lead, Sybil Mills, made a habit of suppressing her own capacity for empathy and love. Are the attacking robots, with their inhumanly analytical, emotionless minds meant as metaphorical mirror images of Omega?

Next the narrator describes this black-haired, super-strong costumed alien as “this last of his superior breed.” Did Gerber intend Omega to be a variation on Superman, just as his earlier character Wundarr, from Adventure into Fear #17 (October 1973), more explicitly had been? Omega too will escape to Earth in a spacecraft, although as an adult, and live on his adopted planet as the sole survivor of his race.

Puzzlingly, the narrator then informs us that the “chaos” surrounding Omega is the result of “the pain and the passion and the fire“ (all terms indicating emotions) “to which he alone remains heir.” Do Gerber and Skrenes mean that Omega somehow induced the robots to attempt to destroy him? Or did they intend the robots to be externalized representations of the capacity for violence within Omega himself?

As Omega shoots energy blasts from his hands, the narrator continues, “The energy–the creative force–could be disciplined only so strictly, held seething in check only so long, before it burst forth–ravaging, mindless, uncontrollable.” Gerber and Skrenes seem to be saying that Omega only has a limited ability to discipline and even suppress his capacity for violence, which will inevitably “burst forth,” overwhelming his rational control.

What do Gerber and Skrenes mean by referring to Omega’s energy as “the creative force”? I confess I feel perplexed by this. Does Omega somehow represent the creative artist, whose abilities can either be used constructively or twisted to negative ends?

Omega realizes that there is a solution. He falls to his knees, rendering himself vulnerable to attack, as the omniscient narrator, apparently describing Omega’s thoughts, informs us that “An organism ceases to live when it ceases to grow.” In the next panel a robot blasts Omega with its ray gun. The narrator, unperturbed, goes on: “The element of change, which loomed so terrifying”–like a robot assassin, or death itself?–“was in fact the only hope of salvation.” So as the robot launches a attack on the hero, the narrator invokes a term that could refer to Omega’s fate in the hereafter. “To resist, to dam the flow, to go rigid“–as in repressing emotion?–“was to abandon all hope,” a phrase associated with Dante’s gateway to hell. This sequence closes with a close-up of Omega screaming in pain, as the narrator tells us that Omega must “wait for the ordeal to be over.”

What sort of “growth” and “change” is it that entails an “ordeal” that seems to entail submitting to possible death? Of course, the Joseph Campbell “hero’s journey” involves symbolic–or even real–deaths and resurrections. In submitting to the robot’s attack, Omega may be crossing a Campbellian threshold from his old life through actual or metaphorical death into a new sort of existence.

This sequence also reminds me of the climax of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, a decade and a half later (and if you haven’t read it, skip the rest of this paragraph). Responsible for the death of his son, and incapable of change (in conventional terms, anyway), Morpheus allows himself to be slain in punishment. A new embodiment of Dream, a young boy, takes his place. Gaiman depicts the new Dream ambiguously: the new Dream is simultaneously Daniel, a human boy who has been elevated to this supernatural status, and is the old Dream reborn under what is termed another “aspect.” What coincidental relevance might this have to Omega?

Gerber, Skrenes and Mooney segue from the close-up of Omega screaming to the panel that introduces James-Michael Starling, in the exact same pose, wearing the exact same facial expression, “shouting,” as the narrator tells us that “the agony,” meaning Omega’s, “may span a universe.” James-Michael awakes, but cannot remember his dream apart from the “feeling” of “cold and “desolation.” But the implication is that through that dream James-Michael saw and perhaps somehow experienced what just happened to Omega. The series will explicitly confirm that James-Michael sees Omega in his dreams. So, at the very least, there is a psychic bond linking them.

But is there more than that? If James-Michael sees Omega in his dreams, is it possible that James-Michael somehow “dreamed” Omega into existence? Were Gerber and Skrenes commenting on the way that young boys imagine themselves to be the superheroes they read about in comics? Is Omega a projection of James-Michael’s fantasies of the ideal hero?

Certainly there are similarities between Omega and James-Michael. Omega is the last of his kind, and therefore has presumably been leading a solitary existence. James-Michael has been living in a home in the mountains with his parents, who have home schooled him. He says he has met other children, but they “bored” him. Hence, apart from his parents, James-Michael has likewise led a solitary life.

But now James-Michael’s parents are leaving the mountains and moving to New York, and they insist that he attend school there. His father tells him, “You must begin to interact with other children. . .meet other kinds of people. . . .” (With his black hair and glasses, James-Michael’s father looks something like Omega disguised as Clark Kent.) Later his mother asks him, “But the prospect of facing the unknown–learning, growing–don’t you find that exciting?” There’s that notion of growing, again. Omega and James-Michael each resists the idea of changing until outside factors abruptly alter his peaceful status quo.

James-Michael is precociously intelligent, and speaks in a formal, adult manner. As we shall see, like Omega he has an analytical intellect that is divorced from his capacity for emotion. In nearly her last words, James-Michael’s mother tells him, “The intellectual needn’t exist in scholarly isolation.” James-Michael may be only a boy, but Gerber and Skrenes seem to be signaling that he also represents the cerebral adult who cuts himself off from social interaction or experiences beyond his own, safe ivory tower. Remember that Brian Lazarus was a writer who lived alone.

James-Michael’s mother advises him, “Open up, James Michael. Your life is just beginning.” Gerber and Skrenes put that entire last sentence in bold lettering. I wonder if they might have intended it to be not just figuratively but literally true. There is no proof in the comics that James-Michael existed before that moment he woke up screaming like Omega. James-Michael may recall leading his life before that, but how can we be certain that those memories are real?

The narrator told us that the serene state in which Omega lived changed abruptly due to “some unforeseen factor.” You could describe what next happens to James-Michael the same way. A truck collides with the Starling family’s car. James-Michael revives to see the severed head of his mother, who turns out to be a robot. She warns him not to listen to “the voices,” and then her head melts into metal sludge before his eyes. The deaths of parental figures play a role in many superhero origin stories, but this is one of the weirdest and most horrifying.

Presumably James-Michael’s “father” was also a robot who met a similar fate, though, perhaps significantly, Gerber and Skrenes never show us the father’s remains. Is it possible that he was not a robot and survived? Is it possible that the mother who was in the car was human and survived, and left a robot duplicate of her head with her unconscious son. But why would they abandon James-Michael like this? And if James-Michael’s “parents” really were both robots, who were his real parents? Or didn’t he have any parents?

The newly orphaned James-Michael is understandably unable to cope mentally with the horror, and hs “body succumbs to its state of shock“; again, Gerber points to a disconnect between a character’s mind/logic and his body/emotions. “One reality recedes, another takes its place, equally grim, equally horrifying,” the narrator states, as the scene shifts from James-Michael to Omega. Is the narration implying that James-Michael and Omega share the same consciousness, which has just shifted from James-Michael’s world to Omega’s? (Think of Desmond in the February 28, 2008 episode of Lost, “The Constant,” in which his consciousness shifts between two different locations in time and space.)

James-Michael saw flames rise from the scene of his automobile accident. On Omega’s world “Here, too, columns of flame shoot skyward.” Throughout the original series, Omega and James-Michael’s lives repeatedly parallel each other in various ways. Forced to leave his homeworld, Omega has figuratively become an orphan like James-Michael. Both have unwillingly embarked on journeys to a strange new place, which, in both cases, turns out to be New York City.

The story again segues from a close-up of Omega to a close-up of James-Michael, as he awakens in he Barrow Clinic in New York City. Here he is attended by a nurse, Ruth Hart, whom attentive Marvel readers of the 1970s would recognize as the girlfriend of Gerber’s fictional surrogate, Richard Rory from Man-Thing. Although James-Michael was “thrashing” in his sleep, once he wakes up he is abnormally “calm” and “analytical.” Moreover, whereas a normal boy would be anguished over losing his parents, James-Michael seems to be almost indifferent to their deaths. He is capable of feeling emotion, as his dreams demonstrate, but in his waking life he seems cut off from his own feelings.

The solitary James-Michael also refuses to talk to Ruth, who confesses to clinic head Dr. Barrow that she has difficulty “relating” to people. Nonetheless, since Dr. Barrow is unable to keep James-Michael in the clinic as a charity case, Ruth agrees to let him live at the apartment she shares with her roommate Amber Grant.

Amber is a wonderful character: feisty, funny, liberated and sexy, she immediately hits it off with James-Michael and becomes his mentor in the ways of the world. (Is it a coincidence that Amber is originally depicted with the same color hair as James-Michael’s mother?) She’s such a good character that it’s surprising that, as far as I know, Marvel has not used her since the original Omega storyline, even though her job as a freelance photographer for The Daily Bugle could easily lead to appearances in Spider-Man and other series. In these dark and dismal times for the superhero genre, though, it may be a blessing in disguise for a character to remain safely in obscurity, lest one of today’s writers subject her to fates like rape, mutilation, madness, and murder.

When Amber first meets James-Michael, he is playing chess with himself. “I can’t play chess alone anymore,” Amber tells him. “I keep anticipating the other me’s next move before I turn the board around.”

James-Michael responds, “It’s easier. . .when you feel like two people all the time, anyway.” Aha. The divided self is one of the great themes of the superhero genre, with such famous examples as Clark Kent and Superman or Bruce Banner and the Hulk. You don’t have to have a literal secret identity to relate to the idea that there are different sides to your personality, as Amber indicates.

When James-Michael talks about feeling “like two people,” Amber replies, “Yeah, I can dig that. The voices get pretty loud sometimes, don’t they?” James-Michael becomes excited that she too hears the “voices.” James-Michael may indeed be “hearing” voices in his mind, as the story has previously indicated, whereas Amber is speaking figuratively. Presumably she is referring to the subconscious mind. Again Gerber and Skrenes are pointing out that the fact that certain characters in the superhuman genre literally have multiple selves is a metaphor for the multiple aspects of any person’s psyche.

So James-Michael and Amber have something in common, and they quickly bond. Not only that, but meeting Amber has aroused another sensation in the 12-year old James-Michael, on the verge of puberty: “Who is she?. . .Why does he feel. . .ever so slightly. . .aglow?”

His reverie is interrupted when one of the robots from his dreams invades his bedroom. In the manner of comic book robots, it talks aloud to itself: “Unmistakably the correct target. Yet it has altered its proportions. Smaller. . .more compact. . . .”

This is close as Gerber and Skrenes come in the series to explicitly defining the connection between Omega and James-Michael. The robots’ target, obviously, has been Omega. This robot identifies James-Michael as Omega, albeit in “smaller” form. In other words, James-Michael is Omega in a different form.

Yet the adult Omega immediately arrives and battles the robot, who notes, “Re-evaluation is called for.” The adult Omega and the child James-Michael exist simultaneously.

Yet they still seem to be, somehow, the same person in separate forms. There is another key passage in the next issue, in which Amber and James-Michael walk by Omega, who is wearing ordinary Earth clothing (and is unrecognized by the boy). “Grow up to look like that,” Amber tells James-Michael, “and I’ll forget my position on monogamy and marry you!” James-Michael is bewildered, asking, “Merely because I would resemble that man?” There we have it: Omega looks like an adult version of James-Michael.

Maybe the resemblance could be explained if James-Michael were Omega’s son, somehow displaced through time and space. But Gerber and Skrenes seem to be pointing in a different direction.

I wonder if Omega is Gerber and Skrenes’ variation on the original Captain Marvel. The child Billy Batson can magically transform into the super-powered adult hero Captain Marvel, who presumably looks like Billy all grown up. (In the original stories he cannot simultaneously exist in his Billy and Captain Marvel forms, although in Jeff Smith’s recent Shazam series, they can in certain circumstances.)

Gerber and Skrenes may supply another hint in issue 3 when they introduce Freddie, a crippled boy who heroically hits the supervillain Electro in the shin with his crutch, giving Omega the opportunity to defeat him. One of the original Captain Marvel’s allies is the crippled boy Freddy Freeman, who can magically transform into the superhero Captain Marvel Jr.

Let’s return to the final pages of issue 1. As Omega battles the robot, James-Michael, watching, “feels” a “cold, calculated loathing“ “as though it were his own“: “And yet, it is not his own. . .and yet, it is. . . .” James-Michael must be sharing Omega’s “loathing” of the robot, just as he feels the same pain that the robot inflicts on the costumed adult. (It’s like the title characters of Alexandre Dumas’ 1845 novella The Corsican Brothers, who share an empathic bond. Remember, too, how the Man-Thing’s empathic power enables him to feel the emotions of others.) James-Michael’s analytical mind is bewildered by this unexpected emotion. Finally, James-Michael unleashes energy blasts from his hands, just as Omega can, destroying the robot, and leaving burn marks on his hands resembling the Greek letter omega! If Omega and James-Michael are somehow the same person, these connections make more sense.

In the opening pages of issue 4 the narration makes clear that Omega does not know why he feels compelled to remain on Earth when he could leave in his spaceship at any time. (Indeed, of all the planets in the cosmos, why did Omega come to Earth if not for James-Michael’s presence there?) But the series repeatedly shows that Omega feels a responsibility to protect James-Michael. Why? Does Omega subconsciously sense a fatherly obligation to shield his younger counterpart from harm?

In the opening pages of issue 1, the narrator told us that “An organism ceases to live when it ceases to grow,” and that “the element of change” was “the only hope of salvation.” Had the adult Omega “ceased to grow” so he somehow triggered the creation of a new, younger self–James-Michael? It’s as if, instead of sending his son to Earth, Superman’s father Jor-El was himself reincarnated as a child on Earth. Was that the “change” that Omega found necessary?

In issue 2 James-Michael and Omega each finds a place to live in the dangerously downscale Manhattan neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen. (This was years before Frank Miller turned Hell’s Kitchen into the main locale for Daredevil or its subsequent gentrification.) In general, in each story what happens to Omega somehow parallels what happens to James-Michael.

This hall of mirrors effect extends to other characters, as well. In the second issue James-Michael encounters Bruce Banner, who transforms into the Hulk and battles Omega. Banner/Hulk, of course, is a prime case of duality in the superhero genre, having two physical forms, one an emotionally repressed intellectual and the other embodying uncontrollable power. So it is very appropriate that the Hulk is the first guest star in the Omega series.

The original Omega series abruptly ended in issue 10 with a shocking cliffhanger (spoiler alert through the end of this paragraph), as Omega was gunned down by police. Steven Grant’s wrap-up of the Omega saga in Defenders cleverly connected the dots to solve the mysteries in a way that was true to the letter of the series but not its spirit. For example. he established that Omega and James-Michael were separate beings, artificially created by those alien robots. Omega really was dead (although he had easily survived a bullet to the head in issue 6!). James-Michael, unable to contain the “uncontrollable” Omega energies, went into an insane rage but finally incinerated himself rather than harm his friend Dian. (It’s rather like the later “Dark Phoenix Saga” ending, isn’t it?) For readers who cared about Gerber and Skrenes’ two protagonists, this was surely unsatisfactory and depressing.

In 2005, after Marvel announced that Lethem would be writing the new Omega series, Gerber wrote in his blog that “Omega was one of only two series from my early days at Marvel that I really did care about in a personal way. The other, of course, was Howard the Duck.” He explained that “Much of Omega‘s content was derived from personal experience, both mine and Mary’s. We drew heavily on our own childhoods for aspects of James-Michael’s story and on observation of our neighborhood – Hell’s Kitchen in New York, circa 1975 – for the setting of the book.”

Gerber was infuriated that Marvel planned to have someone other than himself and Skrenes revive Omega. His anger at Lethem subsided after he and Skrenes were put in contact with him. Gerber stated that “As best I can tell, Jonathan is a very nice guy who was acting with the best of intentions.” and that Lethem “claims he was unaware of my history with Marvel, including the lawsuit over Howard the Duck, until the present incident arose; I choose to believe him.”

But I find this disturbing. In the world of corporate comics, it seems that often it does not even occur to editors or writers that maybe the original writer of a property should get first crack at working on a revival. Or that it would be unwise for the company to alienate important creators from its past. Yet I know of case after case in which comics writers are slighted in this fashion. Didn’t Lethem ever wonder what Gerber and Skrenes would think of his writing the series they originated?

Despite making peace with Lethem, Gerber still contended “that writers and artists who claim to respect the work of creators past should demonstrate that respect by leaving the work alone — particularly if the original creator is still alive, still active in the industry, and, as is typically the case in comics, excluded from any financial participation in the use of the work.”

How workable would such a policy be? Should every Batman story have to receive the approval of Bob Kane’s widow? On the other hand, DC Comics doesn’t allow anyone to do new stories with Neil Gaiman’s Morpheus or commission sequels to Watchmen or V for Vendetta, even though Alan Moore is unlikely to work for DC ever again. (Sometimes, though, I wonder if some future DC administration will decide to do a Watchmen sequel or new Sandman series about Morpheus without the original creators. And I would bet that there would be writers lining up to work on them, while professing admiration for Gaiman and Moore.)

Gerber publicly proposed that Lethem “simply retitle the story and rename the characters”: “Make the book your own, and I’ll have nothing to complain about”. Lethem’s series is still titled Omega the Unknown, but whether because of Gerber’s request or not, he has renamed other characters: for example, the boy protagonist is called Alex, and his nurse is Edie. I would be unhappy if Lethem’s Omega is meant to supplant Gerber and Skrenes’ version in Marvel’s official continuity. But perhaps the use of different names means that Lethem intends these to be different characters than the original cast, and that history is now mysteriously repeating itself with variations.

I’ve only read the first four issues of the Lethem Omega so far, so it’s still too early to judge what he intends to do with the concept. So far, however, I am disappointed. The new version lacks the original’s rich subtext of metaphors, its psychological complexity, and its vivid characterizations and dialogue.

But I am grateful that Lethem’s revival of Omega redirected my attention to Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes’ original version, which impresses me far more today than it did when I read it over thirty years ago. As Lethem described it at the 2007 New Yorker Festival, the original Omega does indeed seem like a potentially great work, left in a fragmented state. And “the Omega flap,” as Gerber called it, reminds me that Steve Gerber’s legacy to American comic books is not simply his collection of memorable characters and stories, but also his pioneering work throughout his career fighting for comics creators’ rights.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

Inevitably when I write about the late Steve Gerber’s most celebrated comics series, I feel I have to make the following statement. Yes, most people only know Howard the Duck from the dreadful 1986 movie adaptation, which is one of the most notorious disasters in Hollywood history. Yet Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck comics series was one of the most brilliant achievements in the medium of its time.

Introduced by writer Gerber and artist Val Mayerik in the Man-Thing story in Adventure into Fear #19 (December 1973), Howard immediately captured the imaginations of Marvel readers, and of Gerber, as well. The duck won his own backup series in Giant-Size Man-Thing, and soon graduated to his own comic book, which was a tremendous, if short-lived, hit.

Though he was a bad-tempered talking duck, like Donald and Daffy, Howard was also a cleverly conceived variation on the type of Marvel hero pioneered by Stan Lee. If Spider-Man felt alienated from society, Howard’s situation was even worse. Displaced from his otherdimensional world of talking waterfowl, Howard was marooned on the world of humans, or “˜hairless apes,” as he called them. According to his series’ catchphrase, Howard was “trapped in a world he never made.”

In his book Disguised as Clark Kent, Danny Fingeroth explores how Jewish-American comics writers’ sense of being outsiders informed the superhero series they wrote (see “Comics in Context” #200, 201, 202, 203, 204). Gerber shared this background and Howard is the ultimate outsider. Wherever he went, Howard encountered startled humans who disbelievingly exclaimed, “You–you’re a duck!” as if Howard was not already well aware of the fact. In other words, everyone he encounters reminds Howard that he is not like them. The principal exception is his companion Beverly Switzler, who accepts and loves Howard, despite the difference in their species.

Moreover, Howard is a talking duck, like those we see in animated cartoons and comics in our childhood, who has been transplanted into a world of adult humans. I suspect that Howard represents our inner child, thrust into the world of adulthood. As such, he had special relevance for Baby Boomers who continued reading comics as they grew into adults, shifting away from the innocence of children’s comics into material for more mature audiences.

Whereas so many humor comics produced by the mainstream comics companies for this maturing audience were second or third-rate imitations of Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD, Gerber’s Howard the Duck was a superb ongoing satire on various comics genres, American culture, politics, and even the human condition. Confronted by nonsense all about him, Howard vented his feelings through his favorite expletive, a quacking sound transcribed as “Wauugh!” which could express exasperation, dismay, anger, fury, and even despair. That last emotion might be surprising in a “funny animal” comic, but Howard was a funny animal comic aimed at discerning adults, and through comedy it dealt with many if the same themes that Gerber explored in his genre melodramas like Man-Thing and Omega the Unknown.

One test of great satire is its longevity. Will a satire on topical events and issues still be relevant, meaningful and funny years later to a new generation of readers? I decided to see for myself. In Howard’s most celebrated storyline, he ran for president in 1976 against real life candidates, incumbent president Gerald Ford and the eventual winner, Jimmy Carter. Marvel’s Essential Howard the Duck Vol. 1 paperback enables new audiences to read Gerber’s entire original run on the series, including the presidential campaign. Will the storyline hold up, over thirty years later?

The election story arc begins in Howard the Duck #7, cover-dated December 1976, although the issue came out months before the November election). But Gerber had to spend the first part of the issue wrapping up the story he began in the previous issue. So let’s start with the beginning of that storyline in Howard the Duck #6 (November 1976, the first monthly issue), “The Secret House of Forbidden Cookies!”

Part of Gerber’s modus operandi on Howard was to parody other genres in comics and popular fiction: hence, Howard the Duck #1 burlesqued sword and sorcery. This time the target is the Gothic romance, and so, of course, it begins in a dark and stormy night. Following the Joseph Campbell monomyth pattern, the story starts out with our protagonist, Howard, and his companion Beverly at a low point. Having embarked on that particularly American form of quest, the road trip, Howard and Beverly have been reduced to hitchhiking in a torrential rainstorm. The lone passing motorist on the road at that time of night might have given Beverly a ride, but he panicked upon seeing her companion, reacting as if he’d seen a monster out of, yes, a Gothic horror novel: “It–it’s hideous–inhuman–not a man at all.” In other words, it’s a duck. The driver would have killed Howard and Beverly had they not leapt inside–into the mud. Beverly, usually the more optimistic of the two, postulates that the driver “lost control” of the car. Howard, more cynical about human attitudes towards him, is sure that the driver intended to kill them. And this is far from the last attempt on his life in the course of these four issues.

But then Beverly understandably turns distraught, and she and Howard reverse roles. Now he is the optimist, assuring her that “somebody is bound to come along.” But right now their situation resembles a wetter version of Waiting for Godot. Furious at Howard for getting them into their plight (and giving him a good kick), Beverly turns to hyperbole (“Nobody’ll ever use this road again!”) and evokes a fate worse than death. “We’ll have to eat each other to survive!” she asserts, not explaining just how they could manage to simultaneously devour one another. “That’d be understandable in the Andes,” Beverly says, grappling with the ironically humdrum nature of their predicament, “but not in the Poconos!”

Their plight is ridiculous, yet suddenly Gerber and Colan succeed in making it affectingly real. Fed up with the turmoil of her life since she met Howard, Beverly leaves him. Her parting words are “I can’t tolerate your stubbornness or petty fits of rage anymore!” That could be a line from an entirely serious story about lovers breaking up. Howard’s reaction is both credible and nuanced. At first, emotionally devastated, he seeks to placate her by hesitatingly agreeing with her decision (“if that’s what ya really want“) and admitting his faults (“I can’t deny I’m hell to live with”), perhaps in the hope that his concessions will change her mind. But Howard is too brokenhearted to adhere to his strategy, and suddenly calls out after her. She answers, but this time her anger triggers Howard’s temper, and he literally turns his back on her.

Frank Brunner drew Howard’s initial solo stories, but to my mind Gene Colan is Howard’s foremost artist. From the first time I saw his work, I’ve admired Gene Colan’s handsomely realistic style, which surely owes a debt to the great American illustrators. Yet he also draws Howard with the proper cartooniness. What amazes me about his work on Howard the Duck is that he somehow seamlessly blends the cartooniness of the duck and the naturalism of the people and backgrounds into a credible whole, so that you can believe that Howard and Beverly exist in the same world.

Beyond that, Gerber’s Howard the Duck provided opportunities for Colan to demonstrate his ability to make the characters he drew “act.” In the aforementioned breakup sequence, Colan captures the shifts in Howard’s emotions from sympathy over Beverly’s despair to irritation to being stunned when she says she’s leaving him to a look of vulnerability with a hint of desperation, to his final angry resignation, captured in both the look in his eyes and his body language.

Wandering through the rain, Beverly eventually reaches the archetypal Gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere, where she is mistaken for the new governess, a role played by Gothic heroines from Jane Eyre to Dark Shadows‘ Victoria Winters. Having, in effect, walked into a Gothic novel, the exhausted Beverly accepts the role that is assigned to her (“Oh, heck–why not? Anything that’ll get me in the door!”).

The next morning Howard awakens to the latest variation on Gerber’s “You’re a duck!” trope. This time he is found by Reverend Joon Moon Yuc and his young followers, the “Yucchies,” who regard Howard as a “devil-duck,” a creature of Satan, and a sign that “the last days” are upon them. Reverend Yuc and his followers are parodies of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who moved to the United States in 1971, and the members of his Unification Church, called the “Moonies.” Reverend Moon is no longer as prominent in the news as he was in the 1970s, but Reverend Yuc and the Yucchies still work as parodies of religious cultists and fanatics.

Professing to be “a servant of the Lord,” Reverend Yuc abandons his feigned humility a few panels later, asserting that he knows the will of God. “My word is as the Lord’s,” he declares, and he begins to lead his acolytes in praying to God “to strike this creature dead with a bolt from heaven!” Howard gulps nervously, doubtless fearing what will happen if lightning does not strike and the Reverend decides to take divine vengeance into his own hands.

Who would be the contemporary counterpart of Reverend Yuc? I am reminded of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s infamous agreement that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were God’s punishment on America for harboring feminists, gays, and pro-abortion activists.

In bringing Reverend Yuc onstage, Gerber has not diverged from this issue’s overall satiric theme. Reverend Yuc fills the role of the fanatical clergyman who leads the witch hunt (like the Reverend Trask in Dark Shadows), and the Yucchies are his congregation.

Luckily, the Yucchies are diverted from attempting to destroy Howard by the arrival of a bearded horseman in period dress, Heathcliff Rochester (whose names reference the brooding leading men of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre), who turns out to be a representative of the Seven Gables real estate company (in a shout out to Nathaniel Hawthorne). Having apparently been misinformed as to the name of his prospective client, Rochester addresses Howard as “Reverend Duck.” Like Beverly, Howard accepts the proffered role, which at least enables him to escape Reverend Yuc’s clutches.

Meanwhile, Beverly and her new pupil. Patsy, are having breakfast at opposite ends of the typical long table in the mansion’s typically immense dining room, forcing them to shout in order to hear each other. Patsy’s mad mother (another allusion to Jane Eyre, and other Gothic and romantic works) alerts her that the local villagers are charging up the hill to destroy her. (Rochester later explains that they regard Patsy as “some sort of witch.”) Beverly comments that it reminds her of Frankenstein “with a few contemporary touches”: the leader wears a hard hat, and they’ve brought a crane with a wrecking ball to demolish the mansion. To protect the house, Rochester unleashes the hounds, who proceed to trample Howard in pursuing the villagers.

Watching this, Beverly initially reacts with concern for Howard and rushes out to him, before remembering they had split up and striking an appropriately defiant pose. Mirroring her anger, Howard launches into an inner monologue in thought balloons: “Why should I care if I never see her again? What possible mutual attraction could rationally exist between a duck and–that? It defies every law of nature!” Howard continually faces bigotry from the humans he encounters; now he is giving in to anti-human prejudice against Beverly.

But then Beverly provides him with an opening (“I’m not inflexible. I might be persuaded. . .or charmed. . .”), and Howard immediately seizes it (“On the other hand, I’ve never felt constrained to follow convention”) and rushes into the equally overjoyed Beverly’s arms. Howard’s anger and even anti-human bigotry towards Beverly were merely defense mechanisms for coping with the pain of her rejection. As they hug, Howard thinks, “How could this be wrong–or insane–when it feels so good?” Absurd as the relationship between a woman and a talking duck may be on the surface, this scene is surprisingly moving. Through it Gerber has mounted a touching defense of any unconventional form of love. Readers may choose to interpret the bond between Howard and Beverly as a metaphor for whatever kind of relationship they like. As both Beverly and Howard weep with joy, he tells her, “I know how it goes. Love is strange, an’ all that!”

Howard and Beverly return to the mansion, where Reverend Yuc and his witch-hunting cultists soon arrive to “exorcise” the mansion. Patsy leads everyone to (where else?) the mansion’s tower room, which contains equipment out of a Frankenstein movie and an ominous, enormous figure concealed beneath a sheet. Patsy contends that she is “just baking cookies” and “this whole set-up is nothing more than a glorified Suzy Homemaker oven!” Gerber has hit upon a sharp satiric idea here, comparing the archetypal mad scientist creating his monster to a child baking cookies or playing with dolls. A little girl will pretend that her Barbie doll is real, and Dr. Frankenstein brings his own “plaything” to life. And so this issue concludes with Patsy, defying the “ignorant, unscientific rabble” in the best mad scientist tradition, pulling the archetypal lever, and bringing to life–her gigantic Gingerbread Man! (This, by the way, is eight years before the 1984 movie Ghostbusters and its colossal Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.)

Gerber quickly winds up this storyline within the first five pages of the following issue. Howard has a knack for pursuing different strategies than you might expect from the conventional genre hero. Faced with the enormous walking Gingerbread Man, Howard reasons that “It can’t eat us—if we eat it first!” and begins “ruthlessly chomping” through the creature’s leg. Soon thereafter the Gothic mansion, like Rebecca‘s Manderlay and Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, has gone up in smoke, and Howard and Beverly resume their road trip to the Big Apple.

They get a ride from country western singer Dreyfuss Gultch, a country singer who has been invited to sing the National Anthem at the convention for a third political party, called (get this) the All-Night Party. Gerber had obviously noticed how presidential campaigns enlist popular singers to perform at rallies and conventions, using country singers to appeal to the South.

Beverly asks Gultch if he can get them jobs at the convention, and he complies, although not from a sense of charity: Gerber and Colan visually make it plain that when he offers to do a favor for “such an exceptional pair as you,” he’s not thinking of Howard and Beverly, but of Beverly’s decolletage.

Beyond Gultch’s leering, Gerber continues to make a point of the sexism underlying the male-dominated world of politics. He gets Beverly a job as “Bev, your hospitality girl,” complete with miniskirted costume. “How’s that sound?” she asks Howard, “Like a come-on,” he replied, and indeed, by evening she’s been pinched so much she can’t sit down. Gultch gets Howard a job as a security guard, but when he reports for duty, his superior has a female employee on his lap.

So here are Howard and Beverly in newly assigned roles once again, and Howard’s might seem an unlikely fit. “You know I’m uncomfortable as an authority figure,” he tells Beverly, who knows better: “That’s what they all say–till they put on the uniform! You revel in that sense of power–and you know it.” Howard mulls this over, reflecting, “Sure, even on my world folks costumed themselves to achieve or reinforce a sought-after self-image. . . !” That’s interesting phrasing Gerber used, describing a guard’s uniform as if it were a superhero costume. But that’s something that is important to understand about costumes in the superhero genre: they are like uniforms that people wear in real life to convey an impression of authority. You could say that policemen put on costumes in order to fight crime. Moreover, in general people create a “self-image” through the clothes they choose to wear.

Dismissing the idea that clothes make the duck, Howard tells himself, “ya don’t immediately internalize–“ presumably meaning the image projected by a uniform. Waterfowl, know thyself! Garbed as an authority figure, Howard starts acting the part, imposing common sense solutions on the quarreling politicians he encounters. He has “internalized” his new role, after all.

First Howard wanders into a committee meeting, where a conservative is insisting that “This is the real world–where the Russkies will kill their own people in the name of national security! Our intelligence agencies must have the same freedom to operate. . . .” What, to kill our own people in the name of national security, that all-purpose rationale? A liberal rebuts him, declaring that “our men in mufti deserve our support” (as if anticipating the standard early 21st century rhetorical boilerplate about “supporting the troops”) but contending that “we cannot stoop to condone assassination. . . .” That’s a strong stand that the liberal immediately undercuts by adding, “except in self-defense!”, another all-purpose excuse. Gerber was writing this scene in 1976 about the Cold War, but with just a few alterations it could be a 2008 debate about terrorism between a hard-line right-winger favoring torture “in the name of national security” and a liberal who blusters about human rights but still lets the administration violate them at will.

Exasperated, Howard asks the committee members, “Any of you turkeys know anything about intelligence?” “Not firsthand,” one admits, as if he were in 2008 talking about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Later, Howard breaks up an actual physical fight between delegates for presidential candidate Wauldrap (with two “a’s”) and delegates for the rival candidate Wauldrop (with one “a” and an “o”) over who will vote for whom on the third ballot. Gerber was writing about when ballots taken at the Democratic and Republican conventions determined who their presidential candidate would be. After the 1970s one candidate from each of the two parties had accumulated enough delegates in the primaries that his nomination was a foregone conclusion going into the convention. But Gerber’s sequence turns out not to be dated. after all, inasmuch as political commentators have lately been predicting that neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton will have enough delegates before the convention to win on the first ballot. So the political horse-trading that Gerber mocks here will play a role in the 2008 Democratic convention. And, of course, there are few policy differences between Clinton and Obama: in that sense they are the Wauldrap and Wauldrop of the 21st century.

Despite his characteristic desire not to get involved, Howard heroically saves Wauldrop (the one with the “o”) from being killed by a bomb planted on the convention floor (“I can’t knowingly let even a politician die!”). Gerber was doubtlessly thinking of the political assassinations of the 1960s, but now this sequence will make readers think of the current threat of terrorist attacks. Wauldrop understandably resigns as the All-Night Party’s presidential candidate, and Gultch nominates their new hero Howard to take his place. And if some individuial singlehandedy thwarted a terrorist attack at a national poliical convention in real life, wouldn’t there be a move afoot to promote him for political office?

It’s interesting that, as much as Howard agonizes over making decisions, and as much as he wants to avoid getting involved in other people’s trouble, when someone presents him with a new role to fill in life, whether it’s a reverend or a guard or President of the United States–he passively, unenthusiastically goes along with it. It’s as if he’s drifting through life, taking whatever opportunities present themselves. “I guess I got nothin’ planned between now and November,” Howard says, “but–“ No buts. Howard didn’t say no, and he is nominated by acclamation. Thus a political legend is born.

Recall that in Gerber’s story about the life of Darrel Daniel in Man-Thing #5 and 6 (1974), Darrel reacted to the assassination of Robert Kennedy during the 1968 presidential campaign by deciding to become a clown, to try to make people laugh again. The assassinations of the 1960s must have haunted Gerber, as well, but in Howard the Duck #8 (January 1977) he blows the threat up to absurd propottions. Rival assassins kill one another for the chance to assassinate the duck, and a street in Greenwich Village turns into a sort of shooting gallery as Howard and Bev make their escape in Gultch’s bulletproof limousine.

Mind you, according to Howard’s campaign manager, G. Q. Studley (whose name denotes a preoccupation with fashionable images), the fact that “Howard’s assassination quotient” is higher than the Democratic and Republican candidates for president is a plus: “it means that people care!” There’s nothing dated about Gerber’s satire on professional political consultants like Studley, who insists that candidates recite “nice, safe, pre-tested bromidic bombasts,” which were “compiled by out expert equivocators.” Howard contemptuously bites Studley on the nose and walks out to conduct his campaign his own way.

Gerber and Colan segue to a newscast by a familiar-looking anchorman called “Walter Klondike,” who reports on the astonishing success of Howard’s presidential campaign. “According to Klondike, “his relentless candor set him apart at once. In the words of one astonished listener: “˜My God, he’s telling the truth! He’ll be dead in a week!’”

Howard has become a new incarnation of that archetypal American figure, the political outsider who hasn’t been corrupted by the system and who speaks the plain truth. This is a figure of such appeal to Americans that politicians from Eugene McCarthy to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to John McCain to Barack Obama have all presented themselves as this sort of candidate at some point during their careers. Howard is like a Frank Capra hero, only with feathers and without the naivete. And in bad times the American public fervently responds to a candidate who convincingly stands for change from a rotten status quo; Klondike reports that Howard has won “millions” of supporters.

Howard also proves to be a political performance artist who anticipates Michael Moore. (Gerber even has President Ford comment about Howard’s “theatrics.”) For example, to make his point against pollution, Howard “collected a steam-shovelful of non-returnable containers” and dumped them on their manufacturer’s property.

Klondike presents (fictional) comments on the HTD candidacy from the real life 1976 candidates: Jimmy Carter, depicted as a Democrat uncomfortably straddling both sides of the issue, and Gerard Ford, who seems a clueless Republican president. The names may have changed by 2008, but the character types that Gerber pinpoints here are still with us.

What makes Howard decidedly different from other candidates, apart from his species, is that he really isn’t motivated by the lust for power that drives other politicians. Again mixing his media, Gerber inserts a prose transcript of one of Howard’s press conferences, in which he explains that “I didn’t particularly wanna be president of this coast-to-coast funny farm you hairless apes have set up. When they asked me to run, I’d just been hit on the head an’ didn’t really understand what I was agreein’ to.” But as he tells a fat cat lobbyist, “Well, s’pose I toldja I don’t care if I’m elected? That I’d rather lose than sell out to you oily guys with steel brains and exhaust pipe mouths?” Free from personal ambition, Howard’s candidacy has a purity that other politicians don’t match.

In Howard’s press conference, Gerber continues to rework themes that we examined last week in his Man-Thing stories, but from a comedic perspective. Darrel the clown and Brian Lazarus both rejected the rat race of the business world and its goals of material success. Lazarus feared he had lost his capacity for emotion. Darrel found his true vocation in making people laugh in an unhappy world. Howard tells his audience, “you’ve fashioned an emotionally and intellectually sterile culture. . . .If an individual is unwilling to spend his life in the plodding pursuit of possessions, there’s nothing for “˜im to do! The United States is one big dateless Saturday night! If I’m elected, I’m gonna inject a little life back into you anesthetized Americans! For four years this country’s gonna get down an’ boogie, see?” Indeed, the campaign slogan on the real Howard the Duck campaign buttons that Gerber sold in 1976 was “Get down, America!” which also was a sly reference to the candidate’s downy feathers.

In the concluding pages of issue 8, Howard and Beverly run a “gauntlet” of assassination attempts by “special interest” groups. Whether Gerber thought that special interests would really resort to murdering a candidate they opposed, I do not know. I prefer to think of this sequence as employing hyperbole to satirize the lengths to which political “attack machines” will go to figuratively destroy a candidate.

What finally does in Howard’s candidacy is, beneath its comedic aspect, believable indeed, as politicians such as Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and now maybe John McCain could attest: a sex scandal. The media publishes a (faked) photograph of Howard and Beverly taking a bath together.

Exactly why this is so scandalous is left up to the readers. Is it because Howard and Bev aren’t married? Here Gerber is puncturing the hypocrisy of the political world, since he took pains to depict the convention as a hotbed of covert sex. Or is Gerber suggesting that the general public is less open-minded than Howard and Beverly about the unconventional relationship between a human and a waterfowl?

Beneath the bathtub photo, Gerber ran a caption promoting the title of the next issue’s story: “The Bite of the Beaver! (Chomp!)” I confess that in 1976 this reference to vagina dentata went right over my head–and obviously, over the heads of Marvel editorial and the Comics Code as well!

In the next issue, Howard the Duck #9 (Feb. 1977), it turns out that the photo was faked by a hotel bellboy, a fanatical youth who is in the employ of Pierre Dentifris, an even more fanatical foreign mastermind from, of all places, Canada. So Howard and Beverly head up north, where they meet a square-jawed Mountie named Sergeant Preston Dudley, whose name alludes both to Jay Ward’s Dudley Do-Right and to the now nearly forgotten radio and television series, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon (which was–what a small world!–originally produced by George W. Trendle, who also presided over the creation of The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet).

When Howard and company finally encounter Pierre Dentifris, “Canada’s only super-patriot,” he turns out to be a bearded recluse who rants against America and the “way you barbarians invaded and polluted us with your industry, your so-called culture–!” Surely Gerber was satirizing rabidly anti-American foreign critics. But in 2008, I think that Dentifris has a new relevance that Gerber could not have anticipated. Now to me Dentifris looks like a satiric foreshadowing of Osama bin Laden, raving from his isolated hideaway against American culture and employing fanatical youths to carry out his plots against the United States. Dentifris is conducting his own sort of secular jihad against America. Coincidentally, he even takes control of an airplane as part of his scheme; Sgt. Dudley comments that this is “his modus operandi. . .Pierre always uses bellboys and robot planes.”

Ultimately Dentifris, costumed as “Le Beaver,” has a showdown with Howard on a rope suspended over Niagara Falls. And yes, Gerber even makes an allusion (“Slowly he turns. . . .”) to the classic vaudeville routine about Niagara Falls, probably best known to Baby Boomers from the 1944 Three Stooges short Gents without Cents. Once again choosing a rational but unexpected alternative to standard heroic behavior, Howard decides that the fight is stupid and waddles off the rope back to safety, while Le Beaver falls to his apparent demise. (But considering that the Canadian dollar is now worth more than the American one, I’d say that Le Beaver has finally gotten his revenge.)

Howard’s harrowing experiences leave him on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and Howard the Duck #10 (March 1976) consists of an issue-long surrealistic dream sequence which Gerber titled “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Duck,” kidding his own Man-Thing classic. I could easily keep on going analyzing this brilliant series, but this week’s column is long enough, and this is a good place to stop.

So, yes, Gerber’s Howard the Duck not only stands the test of time, but its satire even proves unexpectedly relevant to current events.

In the 1950s and 1960s Walt Kelly’s Pogo ran for President every four years, and over the decades I hoped that Howard would likewise run–or waddle– again for the Presidency, but he never did, Mind you, this would only have worked if Steve Gerber had written the stories. Others have tried, but Howard is so personal a creation that no one but Gerber ever truly captured the character or the feel of his series. Some years back, Gerber wrote a new Howard the Duck miniseries for Marvel’s MAX line, and I worried that, after so many years, he would be unable to recapture the magic of the original. But he did, and the MAX series matched the standards Gerber set in his 1970s Howard stories. One of my only regrets was that Gene Colan didn’t draw the mini-series.

My other regret was that Gerber never did a follow-up Howard series, for reasons I do not know. And now it’s too late.

Its like the new Batman mini-series that Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers were working on when Rogers passed away, and that now will never come to be. It’s disconcerting to think of the stories that could have been done by comics creators who died too early, if only they had been asked when they were still here.

Imagine if Steve Gerber had written about a new Howard presidential run during the Reagan years, or the Clinton administration, or during the regime of George W. Bush? But the point is that we can’t. No one else as yet has fully recreated Gerber’s unique satiric vision.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

Long, long ago, I attempted to persuade my high school English teacher that comics could be a means of serious artistic expression, just like prose fiction or film. She looked at me with disbelief, for this was the 1970s, and in those pre-Internet days, I knew no one who thought that comics could be serious literature. But I was certain that they could, and I brought evidence to my high school teacher to prove my case. Exhibit One was a Man-Thing story written by Steve Gerber, who passed away last week after a lengthy illness.

According to one school of thought, the 1970s was a dreadful decade for Marvel. It is true that in the 1970s most of Marvel’s top tier titles, such as Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man, ran well-intentioned but second or third-rate imitations of Stan Lee’s superhero sagas of the 1960s. But if you knew where to look, the 1970s was an extraordinary innovative period in Marvel history. Away from the flagship titles, a new wave of young writers, their imaginations fired by the great comics of the Silver Age, were taking Marvel and the comic book medium in new directions, putting the stamp of their own creative personalities on genres from superheroes to sword and sorcery to horror and more. There were Roy Thomas’s Conan the Barbarian, Steve Englehart’s Avengers, Captain America and Doctor Strange, Doug Moench’s Master Of Kung Fu, Jim Starlin’s Captain Marvel and Warlock, Don McGregor’s Black Panther and Killraven, Marv Wolfman’s Tomb of Dracula, and the resurrected series that would transform the industry: Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s “new” X-Men.

Of all of the 1970s new wave writers, perhaps Steve Gerber had the most distinctly individual voice. Gerber continued working in comics on and off over the decades, and was writing a new series about DC’s Doctor Fate at the time of his death. But his groundbreaking, most influential work was in the 1970s, when he wrote an eclectic assortment of series for Marvel, including Defenders, Guardians of the Galaxy, Tales of the Zombie, and his co-creation, Omega the Unknown.

Gerber did not create Marvel’s swamp monster, the Man-Thing, but it was he who made the series memorable. Anyone who has subsequently worked on the character has labored in Gerber’s shadow. It was a horror series, but the nature of its title character, a creature lacking human intelligence, gave Gerber the opportunity to shift its focus to the human characters who wandered into the Man-Thing. More than any other mainstream comics series of its day, Gerber’s Man-Thing focused on psychological drama, and not just on individual character studies but on portraits of American society in the 1970s. Other Marvel “new wave” writers gave personal touches and viewpoints to genre stories, but Gerber’s best work of the period was so personal as to verge on the autobiographical, however fictionalized.

Marvel has collected Gerber’s early Man-Thing work in Essential Man-Thing Vol. 1. Looking through this thick paperback, you will see Gerber’s rapid development as a comics writer. By the time the Man-Thing series spun out of Adventure into Fear into a comic book of its own, Gerber had become a master of comics storytelling. This week I am examining two of these tales, which I believe to be enduring classics.

Let’s begin with the two-parter, “Night of the Laughing Dead” and “And When I Died!” from Man-Thing Vol. 1 #5 (May 1974) and 6 (June 1974), drawn by the foremost Man-Thing artist, Mike Ploog, and inked by Frank Chiaramonte.

In the opening pages Man-Thing rises from the waters of the swamp, as if from the subconscious mind, and trudges forward. Gerber’s narration recounts that this monster was once a human scientist, Ted Sallis, whose one little experiment went awry.”

Like Bruce Banner, Sallis was working on a military project, heedless of its potentially destructive consequences: in Sallis’s case, he was working on: recreating the “super-soldier” formula, to create a race of superhuman soldiers for the government. (I wonder what Gerber thought of Marvel’s Civil War, which led to the U. S. government coercing superheroes into its service.) Just as Banner’s gamma bomb turned him into the Hulk, a monstrous embodiment of destructive power, Sallis’s experimental formula transformed him into a nearly mindless swamp creature, a distorted caricature of a superhuman.

Through his Faustian bargain, Sallis forfeited his prized intellect. The Man-Thing is a being of physical power but only primitive consciousness. Gerber was particularly interested in this theme of the disconnect between the mind and the body in contemporary humankind.

Further, as Gerber’s narration informs us, “as if to compensate for all it stole from you, the swamp gave you back an ability mankind lost in its infancy. . .that of psychic empathy.” The Man-Thing is a creature governed by emotions: he senses and even shares the feelings of others and responds to them. Reduced to a minimal level of intellect, the Man-Thing ironically has greater comprehension of the emotions of others than normal human beings do, a kind of empathy that the human Ted Sallis sorely lacked. Gerber’s narrator tells the Man-Thing, “You can feel what others feel. . .You can understand those feelings. . .And the mote of humanness left within you can act on that understanding.”

As the narration tells us this, we see instead another figure trudging forward: a circus clown, who looks utterly miserable. Gerber seems to be suggesting that the Man-Thing will be capable of understanding this clown. Moreover, perhaps Gerber meant for us to identify the Man-Thing with the clown, both pitiable figures walking through the swamp, and both, as we shall see, brought to the bottommost point of human existence. This swamp, “the festering marshland,” as Gerber puts it, is a visual metaphor for a world of despair.

Of course, the image of the weeping clown is a familiar archetype from I Pagliacci and so many other works. But Gerber, as we shall seem went beyond cliché in his handling of the archetype. For one thing, he surprises the reader by having the clown, merely a page after his entrance, commit suicide.

His counterpart in misery, the Man-Thing, is the only creature who hears and responds to the gunshot. As the creature stares at the corpse, Gerber’s narration concisely and affectingly contemplates how much killing there is in the world, for a variety of reasons, “even, incredibly, for. . . pleasure.” The Man-Thing becomes the clown’s sole mourner. Dimly recalling the ritual of funeral, the creature lifts up the clown’s corpse, in Ploog’s macabre variation on the Pieta, and seeks a place to bury him.

No longer capable of reading, the Man-Thing is mystified by the clown’s suicide note: “Laughter is dead, futility!” This may seem at first a cliche. But, again, Gerber moves beyond the obvious. Another of his themes is whether art–not just comedy–offers a means of transcending the sorrows of existence.

The scene shifts to Richard Rory, Gerber’s semi-autobiographical character, and his friend Ruth Hart, who are being hassled by a motel clerk. Reading this scene now is a reminder that society did not always accept the idea of unmarried couples rooming together. There’s another reason that the clerk objects to Rory, whom he sneeringly calls “Joe College.” Rory complains, “I hate people who make “˜education’ sound like a dirty word.” Gerber’s comics did not indulge in the anti-intellectualism of American pop culture.

Soon Rory encounters a circus owner named Garvey, who brutally strikes down a high wire performer named Ayla Prentiss when she insists they go looking for their missing clown. Rory goes to her defense, but this is not a superhero story, and his heroic moment is short-lived: another circus performer, a strongman named Tragg, overpowers him. Ayla accompanies Rory and Hart and tries to persuade them to help her find “my clown,” whose name is Darrel Daniel. “I loved Darrel. . but I betrayed him,” she confesses, and as a result “He stopped laughing. . .stopped living. . .just wanted to die. . . .”

Then Darrel’s spirit, still in clown costume and make-up, appears, first to Ayla, Rory and Hart, and then to Garvey and Tragg, causing the latter two to crash their truck as the spectral clown watches “gleefully.” So here are more familiar archetypes: the vengeful ghost and the scary clown, most famously embodied in comics by the Joker, merged into a single figure.

But Gerber develops the figure of Darrel yet further. As part one of this story ends, the clown’s spirit appears before the cast of characters–Rory, Prentiss, Hart, Tragg, the Man-Thing, too, and Garvey, who joins them in the following issue–and proclaims, as if he is now the circus’s ringmaster, that “we’re going to have a little show, my friends! And you–all of you–are going to be the actors! We’re going to play out the story of my life–and death–with the swamp as our stage–and my soul at the mercy of the critics!”

There are so many tales of ghosts who remain on Earth because of traumatic events in their mortal lives, which they reenact over and over as spirits. Here Gerber combined this idea with the Shakespearean concept of the world as a stage and ourselves as players upon it.

But Gerber goes still further, for at this point his story takes on a metafictional dimension. As a clown, Darrel is a kind of artist, and here he becomes a playwright and director as well, staging the story of his life. It is implied that every man is the author of his life, that each of our lives are works in progress, completed with our deaths, when our lives are judged by any higher powers that may exist. Thus through Darrel’s “play,” Gerber presented a variation on the idea of judgment after death.

When a person dies, his or her fellow human beings look back upon the life of the deceased and judge its value; indeed, this is what we are doing right now in reading and contributing to appreciations of Steve Gerber upon his passing. But even during our lives, we are continually being judged by the people around us. What sort of public impression do we make? How truthfully does it reflect our inner selves?

Furthermore, Darrel the clown is like the author of any work of art that contains personal, even autobiographical themes, and thus, certainly like Steve Gerber himself. The artist creates his work of art out of his ideas, emotions, and elements of his or her own life, and then presents them to the public, to the world at large, his audience and the critics.

It’s interesting that Gerber, then a full time comics writer, should put such emphasis in critics in this story, since back in the 1970s mainstream critics did not write reviews of comics; the only comics “critics” were writing for comic book letter columns (like myself) and early fanzines. But of course, in a sense, everyone in the audience is a critic, who decides whether what he or she sees is good or bad. When the artist creates a work with such personal meaning to him and presents it to the audience, he or she is not only offering the work up for judgment, but himself or herself as well.

So the play of Darrel the clown is a powerful dramatic metaphor, indeed. It begins in the following issue, in which Darrel announces that his “set” will be the circus. Life as a mad circus is another familiar trope, and Gerber would use it again in his final storyline for the original run of Howard the Duck, casting Howard as a clown who fights back against his oppressors.

Darrel explicitly casts the Man-Thing as a visual metaphor: “You, Man-Thing, shall portray my inner demon–the force within me that laced my laughter with bitter tears–and drove me to self-destruction.” The narrator observes that though the Man-Thing cannot comprehend language, “the swamp beast seems to nod.” The Man-Thing comprehends emotions, you see, and feels repelled by evil. Therefore, it is significant that he sides with Darrel, signaling that the clown is not the villain he might seem to readers at this point.

Darrel then transforms his other “actors” into figures from his childhood. Ruth explains that they’re not just playing these characters: “we’re actually going to be these people from Darrel’s past!” As I observed earlier, in ghost stories the specters are often obsessed with repeating events from their past. I am reminded of how in Dark Shadows ghosts sought to mesmerize mortals into thinking themselves to be people from the ghosts’ own mortal lives. Gerber just makes the role-playing metaphor explicit.

Darrel casts Rory in the role of the clown’s boyhood self. Since Rory is considered Gerber’s stand-in, this may suggest that Darrel, too, is to some degree an autobiographical figure, emotionally and psychologically.

Through the clown’s casting of other roles, Gerber makes an acute psychological observation: relationships that one has an adult can mirror those he or she had as a child. Hence Darrel casts the brutal Tragg as “the bully who was my bane in youth,” and Garvey, his cruel boss at the circus, as his insensitive father. Perhaps the real point is that Darrel, consciously or not, perceives Garvey, whom he blames for his suicide, as another father figure who failed him.

In “Act I” of the clown’s play, Darrel the child hints that he wants to go to the circus. His father Milo forbids it and insists on forcing Darrel into a way of life that the boy finds anathema: constantly working to become rich. Milo condemns the circus as “dirty,” “foolishness,” and “fit for animals only.” Since we know that Darrel grew up to be a circus performer, Milo is condemning his son’s creative ambitions. Milo is bent in forcing Darrel into an identity, a role in life, that is not true to the boy’s nature. If the father succeeded in imposing his will on Darrel, he would stifle the boy’s spirit. “I’m not allowed to have fun,” Darrel the boy tells his father. Later, afflicted with self-doubt, the boy wonders, “Nobody else is laughin’–why should I be able to?”

One of Gerber’s recurring themes is his rebellion against society’s attempts to compel everyone into a sterile, soul-destroying conformity. Like many who grew up in the 1960s, Gerber opposed the American mindset that prized monetary success as a measure of personal worth. The boy Darrell bitterly tells his father, “All you know how to do is count your money!”

Darrel becomes so estranged from his father that, as a teenager, he laughs at Milo’s funeral. A psychiatrist diagnoses Darrel as “a tortured soul. obviously in turmoil over a multiplicity of moral and emotional crises.” But, the shrink adds, “this is America–1951! That makes you normal!” Darrel’s sense of alienation thus becomes a malaise afflicting postwar conformist American society.

Darrel reached a turning point in his life on “the day after Robert Kennedy was shot–the day I went looking for a circus.” In 1974 Gerber did not have to explain to his readers that this was the third of the political assassinations of the 1960s–the murders of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King–that shocked and disillusioned Americans. At this low point Darrel embraced his vocation: “I had at last decided what I wanted what I thought the world needed most”–to make people laugh again.

In real life, after working unhappily in advertising, Gerber figuratively joined the circus by moving to New York and becoming a comic book writer, back in the days when mainstream American culture accorded no respect to the comic book medium.

Darrel succeeded for a time in his chosen artform. He won an appreciative audience, perhaps symbolized by the love of his fellow performer Ayla. “It made me feel good about myself for the first time,” the clown declares.

But then Darrel learned that his supposed benefactor, Garvey was coldly exploiting him (You can’t buy laughter,” asserts the clown), and worse, came to believe that Ayla merely pretended to love him on Garvey’s orders. You would expect that this would drive Darrel to despair. But look at the specific form that despair takes: it affects his vision of the world, and therefore his art. “I changed my act–made it evil!” recalls Darrel, to such a degree that Ayla says that it was “frightening the customers.”

In the end, Darrel says, “The act was scaring me, too–showing me a part of myself I hated.” Art had been his salvation; now it was destroying him. “The laughter in me was dead,” which is what his father had wanted. Unable to accept life without laughter or love, the clown killed himself.

Darrel’s ghost had already characterized this play of his life as a “tragedy.” But the three mysterious, hooded critics do not agree. They now cast off their robes and stand revealed as representatives of heaven, hell, “and the realm between.” Speaking as if they were drama (or comics?) critics, they “judge your [Darrel’s] drama –your life–a moral and artistic failure,” accusing him of not showing “sufficient motivation” for his suicide. Claiming he is “neither a good man nor bad” they sentence him to “oblivion.” By coincidence or not, this is reminiscent of the Button-Molder’s scene in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt. Since Peer, too, is adjudged to be worthy neither of heaven nor hell, the unearthly Button Molder decrees that his soul will be melted down like other flawed goods. Although Ibsen leaves Peer’s ultimate fate uncertain, what may save him is the redemptive love of a woman named Solveig.

How does one truly judge the success of a dramatic work of art? Though Brecht might disagree, isn’t one measure the degree to which the audience members identify with the lead character and see themselves reflected in his or her personality? And doesn’t an actor attempt to comprehend the psyche of the character he or she plays? Gerber’s surrogate, Richard Rory, not only portrayed Darrel in his play but “became” Darrel. Moreover, Rory was in a sense an audience member as well, watching the play take place around him. Now he protests the “critics’” decision: “I lived his life! I can vouch for him! His soul doesn’t deserve to perish!”

Moreover, Darrel’s play is still going on: the Man-Thing, still playing his part, “still acting as Darrel’s inner demon,” battles the three “critics.” The Man-Thing has an advantage to playing a part: the narrator informs us that his “empathic nature enabled him, for a time, to become [Darrel’s] soul.” Moreover, the Man-Thing has specifically become Darrel’s “inner demon,” his spirit of rebellion against repression, fighting back against this unjust judgment. The Man-Thing is also an audience member for Darrel’s play; the narrator says that Darrel’s soul “touched” the Man-Thing, as if it were a touching performance.

Characteristically, Gerber, in his narration, dismisses the three unearthly “critics” as “bureaucrats,” as if even the management of the hereafter has become yet another system unresponsive to individuals’ needs.

It it would be a shallow superhero comics cliche if it were the Man-Thing’s sheer brute force that saved Darrel. Instead, as in Peer Gynt, possible redemption comes through a woman’s love for the protagonist. But Gerber’s Ayla is not a moral paragon like Ibsen’s Solveig. Ayla confesses not only her love for Darrel but also her guilt for lacking “the courage to defy Garvey” and to admit her love to Darrel. Remember, she remained silent when Garvey claimed she only pretended to love Darrel, not realizing the clown was eavesdropping; had she told Garvey then and there that she did love Darrel, he would not have fallen into his downward spiral. Now Ayla offers to sacrifice her own soul to the “critics” in exchange for Darrel’s. This is enough to placate the critics, and the judge from heaven signals that Darrel has been redeemed. The clown’s autobiographical drama succeeded by touching the heart of the key member of its audience, Ayla. (And this ending, in which a woman’s sacrifice, motivated by love, saves the seemingly damned hero, reminds me of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman.)

Gerber’s narration leaves the other witnesses to Darrel’s play–and the readers–with a chilling warning: “to wonder what sort of drama they will be able to stage when each meets his own circle of critics.” Each of us is the playwright/director of his or her own life.

As Ploog shows the Man-Thing submerging back into the waters of the swamp, Ayla delivers the story’s final lines, memorializing Darrel by asserting “That a man who can inspire laughter. . .and joy. . .is the holiest man of all.” That’s rather over the top, but Gerber’s belief in the importance of laughter and joy is surely the motivating force behind his most celebrated comics series, a comedy about a talking waterfowl.

Gerber reworked and reexamined themes from the clown storyline in a later story with a memorable title: “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Man,” with art by John Buscema and Klaus Janson, from Man-Thing Vol. 1#12 (December 1974).

Sensing “the dull, muted agony of a mind in torment,” the Man-Thing is drawn to an abandoned insane asylum, where he sees “a lone man, pale and wan,” unshaven, writing by candlelight, “living on beans and canned meat. . .rarely sleeping, rarely leaving this one tiny room.” It is an archetypal image of the lonely life of the writer, although this one is particularly, self-destructively driven by his inner demons.

This man is named Brian Lazarus, whose Biblical last name suggests that this will be a story of spiritual death and resurrection. But at this point in the story, there is no glimmer of hope.

Darrel the clown’s art turned so “evil” that it frightened even himself. Lazarus is struggling to express himself through his writing, but he is unable to achieve control over his art; “It’s no good–its not right,” he soliloquizes. “No matter how I try, the words just won’t say what I want them to. Or maybe they do–and I just can’t tell anymore!” But Lazarus feels he must continue to try, because writing is his means of defense against a growing pain. “The hurt is afraid of truth,” he declares.

There enters a well-dressed man, who might be a servant, since he has come to escort Lazarus to “them,” yet he calls Lazarus “Brian” and exudes a sinister authority. Lazarus resigns himself to meeting with “them,” and his guide significantly says, “you know you can’t escape them. You don’t even want to, deep down–or you’d never have brought them with you.”

Then the Man-Thing sees Lazarus beset by a horde of figures–all everyday people, but with wild expressions on their faces, tearing at Brian’s clothes, as his head tilts back, eyes bulging in terror, mouth agape in a silent scream. Brian’s agony is no longer “dull” or “muted.” And what do these human vultures want? They demand that Lazarus pay his bills, pay the rent, or pay a parking ticket. This is the constant barrage of the everyday demands of living in contemporary American capitalist society, the necessity to earn and pay out money for the necessities of life, and they are driving Brian Lazarus insane, “each demanding a bit of soul or flesh.”

Watching, dimly recalling his former human existence, the empathic Man-Thing recognizes that “he has had the same experience, felt the same way Brian Lazarus feels now.” Seeking to aid Lazarus, the Man-Thing seizes one of Brian’s assailants, only to see the figure literally fade into nothingness.

Brian Lazarus is a creative artist who not only suffers from emotional and psychological turmoil but who has lost control of his art. So his creative imagination instead produces these apparitions that embody the demands of society and torment him. Even his well-dressed guide was a figment of his imagination, which has turned against Brian, the creator himself.

As an empath, the Man-Thing is capable of perceiving Brian’s hallucinations. Indeed, since the Man-Thing recalls somehow once having the same experience and emotions, Gerber is establishing Lazarus as a kind of double or counterpart to the Man-Thing. Perhaps, by extension, Gerber is suggesting that everyone feels some of Lazarus’s anguish and fear of the the burdens of everyday existence in modern times. But most of us don’t react in the extreme way that Brian Lazarus does. We must probe more deeply for the source of his madness, as the story proceeds to do.

The hallucinatory assailants vanish, and, after his initial fright, Lazarus strangely accepts the silent Man-Thing as his confidant (but inasmuch as they are counterparts of one another, this seems right). Lazarus speaks of the work he is writing, his “Song-Cry,” and, again significantly, acknowledges his responsibility for the torments he is suffering. “I had to explain how iI let the hurt get me,” Brian tells the Man-Thing. As an artist, and like Darrel, Lazarus seeks an audience for his art–even if it’s only one person–who will understand what he wants to express: “somebody who’d listen without asking for something. . . if I just got the words down. . . they’d find their way to someone. . . .” (Why, it’s rather like those of us who write blogs and columns on the Internet, hoping that our ideal readers will find them.)

Gerber then segues to the familiar figure of Richard Rory, with his new friend Sybil Mills. This sequence reminds the reader that Rory too is connected with the arts: he is a disc jockey, selecting rock music to play for his own audience of listeners, and he promises to dedicate a song to Sybil. But though he kissed Sybil goodbye, she has no intention of pursuing a relationship with Rory: “I make it a practice not to involve myself too deeply with anyone–ever.” Sybil distances herself from her own emotions.

Thus, when she sees Lazarus staggering along the street in the driving rain, Sybil’s initial reaction is to keep her distance. But when Sybil realizes “he is on the verge of collapse,” her better nature prevails, and she “rushes to his side” and “guides him to her quarters.” So now Brian has a new guide who is neither imaginary nor sinister.

Lazarus the writer has led such an isolated life that all he initially says he wants from Sybil is to hear somebody’s voice.” But it soon becomes clear he needs to talk, and to talk to someone who (unlike Man-Thing) can talk with him.

What Brian begins talking about is his love of art, in this case. music. (Notice that Brian calls the text he us writing his “song-cry.” Remember, too, that Gerber earlier reminded his readers about Rory’s connection with music.) “I used to love music–more than anything else,” Brian tells Sybil. “I used to say that anybody that didn’t like music was dead.”

Although Sybil earlier was unresponsive to Rory’s offer of a song, this time a shared love of music forges a closer connection between Sybil and Brian. “I like music, too. Very much,” Sybil tells Lazarus, adding, “I’m a dancer.” Indeed, she spends the whole story wearing her dancer’s leotard. Dance and music are important parts of Sybil’s identity. Like Brian. she too is a creative artist.

It seems that the first symptom of Brian’s growing psychological anguish was losing his ability to appreciate art. He tells Sybil that one day, significantly, upon coming home from his job, he started playing the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, “and it just sounded like noise to me. Ugly, ugly, ugly noise. That’s when I knew. . .I was dying.” Art–his ability to appreciate it and his ability to create it–is at of the core of Brian’s identity, too. But he is losing his capacity to perceive the beauty, the order, and the literal and figurative harmony in art.

The problem was that his alienation from the rest of life has hampered his artistic capabilities. “My whole life. . .became one gigantic, impenetrable wall of noise.” It’s not just the demands that his boss and others out on him. Lazarus tells Sybil that “the lies were the worst. . .by far.” Before he worked for Marvel. Steve Gerber was an advertising copywriter, and so is Brian Lazarus. Brian took the road that Darrel forsook: the path to riches in the business world. But for Brian that meant lying about the destructive product he was paid to sell, even though an artist’s duty is to tell the truth. “I was on my way to being a very rich liar,” Lazarus confesses, before he “ran out screaming.”

Then comes Brian Lazarus’s manifesto, the “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Man” itself, which Gerber presents as a text piece, accompanied by Buscema and Janson’s somewhat surreal illustrations (including one of Brian with an arrow through his skull, crying out in agony, like the later Steve Martin gag, but played for horror). This was not the only time that Gerber experimented with the comic book format like this, introducing text passages in the midst of a sequential art narrative, mixing his media.

The point of the “Song-Cry’ is that the pursuit of money in the rat race in the business world destroys the author’s identity as an artist, turning him into “a living dead man,” a corporate zombie. “Sleep, synapses. The world has no use for you today. Or ever,” Lazarus writes, as if his career of telling “lies” for profit has rendered him as mindless as the Man-Thing. “Kill your mind!” Lazarus exclaims in his “Song-Cry.” He writes that he has become “a crumb in the loaf of industry, makin’ life without identity, on the river island of eternity,” suggesting the insignificance of such a life when weighed on a cosmic scale.

Brian’s “Song-Cry” is like Darrel’s play: a deeply personal work of art through which its creator reaches out, seeking understanding from his audience. “There was no one to tell, no one who wanted to listen. No one who could really understand,” laments Lazarus. He asks Sybil (though he is also looking out towards us, the readers), “What about you? Do you understand?” Sybil admits that she doesn’t, “but that doesn’t mean I won’t try. . .or listen,” as she takes Brian’s hand. His “Song-Cry” has succeeded in moving Sybil, his audience of one: “You touched something in me. . .that I wasn’t even sure was there. I think. . . care about you.” Brian’s “Song-Cry” has awakened emotions in Sybil that she formerly tried to suppress.

The late Ingmar Bergman made a film, Hour of the Wolf (1968), about an artist who was going mad and who hallucinated seeing various tormentors. By the film’s end, the artist’s wife, because she cares for him so deeply, has begun to see his hallucinations as well. The same thing happens here. On the brink of overcoming his insanity, Lazarus suffers an abrupt relapse, and this time Sybil sees the phantasms as well, and the demonic apparitions attack them both.

Again suffering psychic pain through his empathic power, the Man-Thing returns to combat the apparitions, only to recognize that “the phantasms are not the enemy. His assailant is Brian!” This reminds me of Number Six’s discovery in the surreal last episode of The Prisoner, in which he finally confronts his mysterious nemesis Number One. Of course the apparitions embodying Brian’s fears spring from his own psyche. The fact that he is a writer with a creative imagination presumably enables them to take such vivid form.

But these phantasms and the terrors they represent are not beyond Lazarus’s control: the well-dressed man said that Brian did not want to escape them.

As the Man-Thing battled the phantasms, “thought-bursts” erupted in Lazarus’s mind. One was “To survive among them. . .you must become them. . . .To survive, you must die.” Lazarus considers himself the “living dead man”: he has figuratively “died.” It was really his true identity as artist, as individual, as a person with a capacity for love, who “died.” Another of the “˜thought-bursts” makes another allusion to the Beatles: “You can’t be the Walrus if they want you to be the system. They are I!!” That is the point at which the Man-Thing turned to attack Brian. Lazarus had persuaded himself that he had to become part of the “system” to survive in life, rather than remain true to himself. The phantasms are really Brian punishing himself for his decision.

Brian needs a psychic shock to break free of his inner demons. and he receives it when Sybil risks her life to shield him from the Man-Thing’s wrath. Suddenly Brian is concerned for someone other than himself. Earlier Lazarus wrote that he thought he had become “like a burned-out machine. . .a dead computer.” Thus Gerber returned to his theme of the mind disconnected from emotion. Lazarus certainly feels terror and despair, but not empathy (the Man-Thing’s specialty) or love for others, until Sybil is nearly killed before his eyes.

Lazarus tells Sybil, “You should’ve let him hit me. I’m already dead.” But Sybil tells him he’s wrong: “You feel–you care. Dead men can’t do that!” Sybil is Lazarus’s counterpart: she would not allow herself to empathize or love, either. “I wasn’t sure I could care that much. . .even about you,” she tells Brian, but by risking her life for him, “now I know I can.”

It is the recognition that someone cares deeply about him, and, surely, Brian’s own response towards her, that resurrects Gerber’s Lazarus from his “living dead” state. The narration tells us that “Brian’s attackers vanish, along with the madness that gave them life.” People don’t overcome insanity so quickly in real life, of course, but in the context of this tale, this exorcism of Brian’s inner demons seems right.

It is appropriate that Steve Gerber did comics for DC’s Vertigo line later in his career, because the best Marvel horror series of the 1970s, and Gerber’s Man-Thing most of all, foreshadowed the sophisticated, character-driven approach that Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and other Vertigo series would take to supernatural fantasy in the 1980s and 1990s. (You can see Neil credit Steve’s work as an inspiration here) Even so, there was nothing else in the 1970s like Steve Gerber’s psychologically acute, intimately personal, powerfully emotional work in comics, and there is nothing else quite like it today.

But that’s not what Steve Gerber will be best remembered for. Steve Gerber was also unequaled in modern American mainstream comic books as a master satirist, as we shall see next week when we will turn to his most iconic creation, Howard the Duck.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson