A Spammer posted a harmless-looking message as a comment to the previous message.  It contained a link (irrelevant to Gerber) that took you to a harmless-looking website.  But that website was full of nasty stuff to infect your computer and steal your identity and make your toenails fall out.

I have deleted the message…but if you clicked on the link in it, do a virus scan, a.s.a.p.

Thanks to Stefan “Starocotes” Immel, who alerted me to the presence of an asshole in our midst.

The mysterious person who’s posting a biography of Steve at this link has just added another chapter.  This one covers the years after Steve was ousted from his Duck…working for me at Hanna-Barbera, working in animation and suing Marvel.  As I kinda expected, the author got a lot of things wrong.

I’m pretty sure I know who it is.  What I don’t know is why this person is doing this anonymously or if they intend to do anything with this work apart from stick it on a website that few will see.

The latest posting also includes a scan of a comic story Steve wrote and published in his first fanzine in 1962 at the age of 14.  Not bad.  I’ve seen worse from adults working for DC or Marvel.

If Steve were here, I’m pretty sure he’d post this link.  It’s your chance to watch the movie, Howard the Duck, for free in a little window on your computer.  Or at least, you can watch enough of it to see Steve’s credit.  We can all find things to criticize in the film but my comment was “Not enough Gerber.”

An anonymous person has begun posting a biography of S. Gerber over at this link.  Someone on Heidi MacDonald’s message board guessed I was the author but I assure you, I’m not.  For one thing, there are a couple of mistakes in the narrative that I would not have made.

You’ll probably want to check it out, though I’m reserving judgment until I read more of it. The whole matter of Steve’s legal problems with Marvel, which the biographer will begin addressing in the next chapter, is a very complicated situation which has never been accurately described in any past reporting. I’ll be interested to see if the anonymous author gets it right. If he/she does, then I think I know who’s behind this biography…

I’m closing down the comment thread on all messages except this one.

Hello.  Yeah, it’s Evanier.  I thought it was time to close all the old threads and open up a new one to talk about Steve.  A big Howard the Duck collection is out now.  Apart from the fact that we all wish Steve had lived to see it and receive reprint fees, does anyone have anything to say about it?  Or anything else Gerber-related?  Post it as a comment to this message.

Evanier again.  This board was down for a day or so because Steve’s account with the hosting company expired and we had to transfer control of www.stevegerber.com to me.  I’m going to keep things up and running indefinitely unless the Gerber family decides it wants something else for this site.

There will always be a couple of open discussion topics here.  They may not be the top ones but if you scroll down, you’ll find them.  I think Steve would be very happy to know that his friends were continuing to use his site for discussions…and not necessarily just about him.  So enjoy.

Is there a Steve Gerber fan out there who’s highly familiar with WordPress? That’s the software that runs this weblog and it’s not one I know particularly well. I run Movable Type over on my blog. I need to do some maintenance here to keep the ol’ Gerblog up and operational and I could use some aid. If you are that person, drop me a note. Thanks.

A public panel/memorial for Stephen R. Gerber will be held at the New York Comic-Con.

The convention itself is April 18-20 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. Details on the con can be found on this page.

The Gerber panel will be Saturday morning, April 19, from 11:00 AM until Noon in room 1E16. I’m moderating and so far, we expect to have Mary Skrenes, Len Wein, Buzz Dixon, Gail Simone and Frank Brunner participating. Others will be added, and we’ll also invite folks in the audience to toss in their Gerber remembrances, time permitting.

I’m doing routine maintenance here and I’ve closed the previous general thread about Steve and opened this new one. If you have things to say about Steve’s work on Doctor Fate for DC’s Countdown to Mystery comic, post them as comments to the previous message here, the one below this one.

If you have general remarks about Steve — his life, his other work, his glasses, his table manners, whatever — post them as comments to this message.

Also, I wanted to announce that there will be a public, “everyone’s invited” memorial for Steve at the New York Comic-Con, which is at the Jacob Javits Center in that city from April 18-20. I will be the moderator and we’ll have a dais of folks who knew and worked with the guy, plus we’ll let anyone in the audience who has something to add add it.

The exact time has not been determined yet but it’ll probably be either Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon, more likely the former. I will post that info here as soon as it’s firm.

Justin Newberry sent me the following e-mail…

I know it’s been a week since it came out, so you may have already been inundated with emails about this, but do you think you could add a post on Steve’s site for people to comment on the latest issue of Countdown to Mystery? I think a number of his fans would appreciate it, myself included. Also, does anyone know if Steve managed to finish the remaining two issues of the book?

Steve wrote six of what were always planned as eight Doctor Fate stories. He plotted the seventh from a hospital bed and it was scripted (and scripted well) by Adam Beechen.

For the eighth and final issue, the sixteen pages have been divided up and four different writers have written short (four page) endings to the tale. They are Adam Beechen, Gail Simone, Mark Waid and myself. I haven’t read what the others wrote but I’m told they’re all interesting and different approaches.

Most of the sources that have already reported this have said we were writing how we think Steve would have ended the series. I didn’t think that and I doubt my colleagues did, either. Steve had a unique way of thinking and could well have been planning an utterly unexpected, outta left field finale…so I wouldn’t presume that I could predict what was on that wonderful mind of his. I just wrote an ending that seemed to flow logically from what had gone before. I think, if you read over a lot of Steve’s past work, you can see that on his own work, he often did not write an ending that flowed logically from what had gone before.

If he’d lived to write it, he might have done something quite unexpected. He also wouldn’t have had to cram it into four pages…which was not easy.

As requested, we’ll designate comments to this message as being about Steve’s work on Doctor Fate for DC.