Interview by Michael Doran
Originally published at Comics Newsarama, July 20, 2001.
Well, Howard might not want you to ask, but that didn't stop us from asking Steve Gerber the obvious, what the hell's happened to Howard? But all in good time…
As previously announced, Gerber is making a return to the character he'll always be associated with later this year in a new six-issue mini-series from Marvel's Max line of mature readers titles, joined by interior artist Phil Winslade and cover artist Glen Fabry. Gerber recently sat down to give us some insight as why he decided to make a return to this familiar ground, if Howard have anything new to say in the 21st century, and why he's a mouse..?
Newsarama: Steve, it looks as if you're going to test the old proverb about going home again. Can you give readers a sense of why you regard this as a step forward, as opposed to back? Is it the 'mature readers' aspect that will give your return to Howard a new, fresh angle? Is it simply that you have a whole new culture to satire since Howard was in his heyday?
Steve Gerber: "First of all, I should probably explain that returning to Howard wasn't even my idea. It actually originated with Phil Winslade. Phil, with whom I'd done the Nevada series at Vertigo, was a longtime Howard fan, and it was he who broached the idea to Stuart Moore at Marvel Knights. When Stuart called to ask if I'd be interested in pursuing it, I resisted the notion, for a number of reasons: my long and unpleasant history with Marvel and serious concerns about creative freedom, just to name two.
"As it turned out, there was some hesitation on the other side, as well. Joe Quesada was concerned that the character wouldn't work for a contemporary audience, that Howard was too much a creature of the 1970s. Stuart asked if I'd be willing to write a brief story synopsis, something to indicate how I might handle the character today. I resisted doing that, at first. I was ambivalent at best, both about the idea of returning to the character and about working for Marvel again, and I think I resented, in a small way, the notion that I would have to 'audition' for this particular gig. Eventually, though, I decided this would be an opportunity to find out if Marvel would really allow me do the book the way I wanted to.
"So, I wrote up a few paragraphs on a story that had something to offend just about everybody - something so politically and commercially incorrect that I figured it would put an end to the whole discussion. Marvel would just choose not to do the book, or not to do it with me, and that would be that.
"To my surprise - that's putting it somewhat mildly - Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas loved the story. It was at that point that I caved to what was starting to seem inevitable. I really was going to do this character again.
"To be honest, it never even occurred to me that this could be a step backward. Howard is a character I created, and one I left behind involuntarily. I've always had the sense that there was 'unfinished business' between myself and the character. Beyond that, doing the book for a 'mature readers' line means I can write the book the way it always should have been written - and I don't mean just the freedom of language and to write unambiguously about sex. I mean that the stories can approach certain subject matter which would have been completely off-limits in a Code-approved book.
"As for there being a whole new culture to satirize - well, I think exactly the opposite may be true. The culture today bears an almost eerie resemblance to that of 1975. A dork in the White House. The U.S. split smack down the middle politically, and deeply polarized. Music, movies, almost all of popular culture at a creative nadir. It almost feels like I could pick up the story right where I left off."
NWRA: Speaking of which, when and what was your last Howard story, and have there been any aborted returns and start/stops since then? We heard of a proposal from a few years back… is this new series a revival of that?
SG: "The last Howard story I wrote was in Spider-Man Team-Up #5, the issue that covertly crossed over with the Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck book. The stories I consider the Howard 'canon' are the two short stories from Giant-Size Man-Thing, the first 27 issues of Howard's own book, the Howard the Duck Annual, and the Howard the Duck Marvel Treasury Edition. All the rest, including his appearances in She-Hulk, which I wrote myself, should be considered apocryphal. Marvel is planning to reprint that entire 'canon' by the way, in an Essentials edition, later this year.
"The story you mention is probably 'Howard the Duck's Secret Crisis.' It was written in 1985, I believe, and was intended to be the first issue of a new series. That fell through, because of what I considered unacceptable editorial interference. I pulled the script, and it was never published. (If anyone's interested in reading it, they can find it on my web site at http://www.stevegerber.com.
"People have asked, too, what this means about the existence of 'Leonard the Duck' in the Image Universe, since Leonard is purportedly the real Howard, kidnapped out of the Marvel Universe in the Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck one-shot. I suppose it means we have an inexplicable cosmic anomaly on our hands. Leonard does exist. He even made a cameo appearance in the Nevada story in Vertigo's Winter's Edge #2. Maybe he was the Howard of Marvel's 'Earth-2.' Maybe the new Howard series takes place on Marvel's 'Earth-MAX,' a hitherto undiscovered dimension of the Marvel Universe where people talk dirty and have genitals. Maybe Leonard came from the same place Krypto the Superdog recently returned from. I honestly don't know. Someday, John Byrne will do a miniseries and explain the whole thing."
"Anyway, no, the new series will begin at a new point in time with a completely new storyline."
NWRA: Over the years numerous creators have said they're of the mind no other writer should handle Howard but you…Not to get into the freelancer, work-for-hire issues, but just creatively speaking, do you have a sense of ownership over the character?
SG: "It would be pointless to deny it. Yes, I do."
NWRA: How have you regarded the attempts by other writers to handle him over the years? Any highlights..? Lowlights..?
SG: "Apart from the couple of stories done by other writers while I was still editing the book, I regard all but one attempt as failures. The exception was a Christmas story written by Steven Grant for Bizarre Adventures some years back, a very nasty parody of 'It's a Wonderful Life.'
"There are some characters who can be interpreted successfully by any number of writers, some that don't even require interpretation because they're really just a collection of super-powers and catch phrases, and a handful who are so intimately tied to a creator's own personality and worldview that they can't be handled by other writers successfully at all. Howard falls into that latter category. The only way another writer might have succeeded with Howard was by investing and infusing as much of himself into it as I did, in effect reinventing the character from the inside out. There are very few writers in comics who are willing to risk that much exposure of self, or invest that kind of effort in a company-owned character. In some ways, I don't even blame them. But they should have been able to figure that out and just stayed away from the character in the first place.
NWRA: Okay, for the whole generation of readers who may only know him from GenX and whatnot, and references they hear about his 70's heyday, can you us a brief introduction…explain who and what Howard the Duck was back then and why it worked when and how it did?
SG: "That's not easy to do briefly, but I'll try….
"First of all, Howard isn't a 'toon.' He's a creature of flesh and blood who comes from a parallel universe where everybody looks like what we refer to as 'funny animals.' He was trapped in our world when something called the Cosmic Axis shifted, and beings from assorted realities began to spill over into neighboring planes of existence. So far, no one's been able to send him home, not even Doctor Strange.
"Howard The Duck was never a 'humor' comic in any traditional sense. Howard isn't even a comedic character. He doesn't tell jokes, doesn't do one-liners. He's usually depressed, frequently rude, and has a bad tendency to waddle all over other people's feelings. Most of the humor in the series derives from the absurdity of his situation - a sentient duck, trapped in a world of talking hairless apes - from the interplay among the various characters, from the often-bizarre villains, and from Howard's trenchant observations on the world around him. In contemporary terms, he has much more in common with, say, Spider Jerusalem than with Donald Duck.
"The original series was notable for - here we go again - a number of reasons. First, it was set very firmly in the Marvel Universe, but it looked at that universe from a perspective that was slightly askew, that openly acknowledged some of the basic absurdities of comic books, but never ridiculed them. Other Marvel characters appeared as guest stars in Howard The Duck - Spider-Man, Son of Satan, The Defenders, even some villains like the Ringmaster - but they were never 'gagged up,' never played for laughs, just because they were in a book whose lead character happened to be a talking duck.
"Second, the book dealt with the kind of subject matter, even back then, even under the strictures of the Code, that other comics rarely addressed. Howard and Beverly Switzler, his human companion, were constantly between jobs, forever struggling just to make the rent from month to month. Over the course of the series, Howard careened from one humiliating job to another. Beverly posed, presumably nude, as a model for life drawing classes. The other characters in the book - Paul Same, the artist; Winda Wester, the sweet young thing with a speech impediment that made her sound like Tweety Pie - all faced similar struggles. They were a very unglamorous bunch. Along the way, Howard got peripherally involved with a religious cult, had a nervous breakdown, ran for president, gained an arch-enemy who was an embittered former rock journalist, and so on.
"And then there were the villains and recurring characters - Pro-Rata, Chief Accountant of the Universe; the Kidney Lady; Dr. Angst; the Space Turnip; Le Beaver, the only known Canadian superpatriot; Dr. Bong; and, of course, Adolf Hitler and Nurse Barbara - all of whom, despite the silly names, were anchored more in the real world and its real absurdities than in any comic book universe.
"Not exactly your typical comic book fare, then or now."
"I should also mention, in more than just passing, that the art, in particular Gene Colan's work, with Steve Leialoha and Klaus Jansen inking, was outstanding. It was a very good-looking book, even despite the crappy printing of the time."
NWRA: Okay, let's segue into how it will work today? Stuart Moore said it won't be a nostalgia trip, but it'll just do what it did then. Can you explain what this means..?
SG: "If we were intending the book as an exercise in nostalgia, all we'd have to do is trot out all the old characters, have them say and do all the expected things, turn Howard into a duck version of this or that superhero, and cakewalk off the stage after six issues.
"In a word…feh.
"What Howard The Duck represented 25 years ago was an effort at constant invention. Virtually every character in the book - except for KISS, the Marvel guest stars, and Hitler - had never appeared anywhere else before. We're not going to jettison the original characters, certainly, but we're not going to be content with just recycling them, either. There'll be new villains, new supporting cast members, new situations and locations. The book and the characters will continue to grow, just as they did originally.
"Probably, Stuart also meant that the basic premise of the book - that the world is a very weird, very absurd place - doesn't require updating at all. In some ways, it's also a much less forgiving, more brutal, and generally uglier place (except for the clothes) than it used to be. As the living embodiment of all that is querulous, opinionated, and uncool, Howard will fit in just as badly today as he did in 1975."
NWRA: Can you just give us a sense what this particular six-issue story is about? We've talked about it in a general sense, what story have you concocted to play it all out?
SG: "Without giving too much away, the structure of the series will be episodic. Each issue or two will comprise a self-contained story, but those stories will be building toward something larger. Essentially, what I plan to do is dismantle the entire edifice of popular culture, lay the machinery of it completely bare, and then, while it's naked and vulnerable, toss a hand grenade at it.
NWRA: Okay, let's get to the "change" now…Can you tell us how and why this change came about, from a creative and legal standpoint..? How it will play out during the series, and do you have any fear its impact on reader recognition? Or is a duck just a duck..?
SG: "Back in 1979 or so - I don't have the exact date handy - the Walt Disney Company threatened to sue Marvel Comics, claiming that Howard the Duck infringed on their Donald Duck trademark. To avoid a legal battle, Marvel's old management signed an unbelievably stupid agreement with Disney regarding the design of Howard the Duck. Under the terms of that agreement, Howard must conform to a set of designs that Disney provided for the character. It's the version with the beady eyes, the hideous swollen beak, and the baggy trousers, the one that appeared in the black-and-white Howard magazine and in the movie. The way the agreement is worded, Marvel isn't even allowed to come up with an entirely different design, even if that design bore no resemblance to Donald.
"Over the past couple of decades, I've done a lot of complaining about the idiocy of Marvel's old management, and if ever there was proof of my argument, this is it. They literally let another company redesign their own character for them. As best I can tell, Marvel never even attempted to negotiate the matter, never even submitted any alternate designs for Disney's consideration. I can just picture the Disney artists, hunched over their drawing boards, cackling like hyenas, as they designed the ugliest duck they could possibly imagine. Disney's lawyers and management must have had a real belly laugh, too, when Marvel accepted their design without balking.
"Now, I wasn't even aware that such an agreement existed on paper. I thought Marvel had simply agreed on a 'handshake' basis with Disney that Howard wouldn't look like Donald. We were in the process of redesigning Howard - Glenn Fabry had done some terrific sketches - when Stuart Moore checked with Marvel's legal department and turned up the written agreement. Needless to say, everyone concerned was horrified. None of us, least of all myself, wanted to do a character that had to look like that appalling Disney design.
"You asked, 'Is a duck just a duck,' and the answer to that is 'no.' A Marvel duck redesigned by Disney under the terms of that odious agreement is a really unattractive, unappealing, and probably unsalable duck. It's a duck I didn't want to write and a duck that Marvel didn't want to publish. For that reason, we were on the verge of junking the project altogether, when I asked a question that's sort of a corollary to yours: 'Would Howard in the guise of any other species still be Howard?' In other words, was the character's personality ultimately more important than its feathers and beak? Could we turn Howard into, say, a mouse, and still preserve everything about him that made him Howard?
"I proposed the idea to Stuart, and he found it intriguing, but wasn't sure Bill and Joe would go along with such a radical idea. To help make the case, I asked Glenn Fabry, as a favor, to try transplanting Howard's personality into a mouse - there was a small element of revenge involved there - just to see if it was possible. Glenn graciously agreed to participate in the experiment, and, a day or two later, came up with a mouse that was, unmistakably, Howard. (In case you're wondering, Phil Winslade, who'll be drawing the book, wasn't able to work on these designs, because he was totally immersed in a Daredevil project for Marvel Knights.)
"Stuart showed the sketches to Bill and Joe, and not only did they like the idea, Bill actually upped the ante a couple of notches by suggesting that we try Howard as several different animals over the course of the six-issue series. Which is exactly what we're going to do. And yes, there will be an explanation for these changes as part of the storyline. I can't reveal the nature of that explanation without spoiling the first issue, but it will be at least as logical as, say, the Hulk's propensity to change skin colors or any of the various transformations Ben Grimm or Hank Pym have undergone over the years.
"I'm hoping we can set up some kind of Internet poll toward the end of the series, to let readers choose what kind of animal Howard should remain on a permanent basis. If they want him to stay a duck, and a duck without the pants and swollen beak, well... I can only think of one way that might be possible, and it's a bit too early to discuss that yet."
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