Among them was Howard the Duck. I wrote my eulogy over on the MySpace blog but I’ll reprint it here for folks who don’t wish to soil their hard-drives with MySpacey stuff:
I find myself in one of those illogical funks where I feel more upset than my mind tells me I ought to be.
Steve Gerber was the creator of Howard the Duck and was probably my first exposure to truly subversive material in pop culture. He wrote these wonderful, whacked-out super-hero stories that seemed to always take place on the fringes of the nice, comics code approved neighborhoods of the seventies Marvel Universe.
He was also, from everything I’ve read about him, one hell of a good guy.
I never knew him except through his writing but he enriched me with it.
Now he’s gone at age 60 and people like Cheney, Limbaugh, and Ollie North are still using up good air.
And, yeah, I know the movie sucked but he had almost nothing to do with it other than to cash a check so paltry that he still had to write comics up through the last week of his life.
We all die and that’s fine. I just wish we all got what we deserved, especially Steve Gerber.
