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.

There have been many fine remembrances of Steve on the web but the one by Eric Mink in the St. Louis-Post Dispatch is especially worth reading.  Click here to do so.

Yes, it’s Wednesday afternoon but I want to talk about last Tuesday evening.  That’s when a group of F.O.O.G. (Friend of Ol’ Gerber) gathered together at a Burbank restaurant to toast their departed pal and swap stories about him.  Here’s a list of who all was there and I think it’s complete but I’ve been wrong before: Buzz and Soon-Ok Dixon, Gordon and Donna Kent, Alan Brennert, Marv Wolfman, Frank Miller, Flint Dille, Nat Gertler, Kayte Kuch, Tim Eldred, Sheryl Scarborough, Taylor Grant, Stacy Belanger, Rick Merwin, Harris Miller, Len Wein, Paul Dini, Jack Enyart, Floyd Norman, Roger Slifer, Meg McLaughlin, Jerry Eisenberg and Yours Truly.  Many others sent regrets.

Not much I can say about it other than a great time was had in spite of the reason for the gathering, and I think it brought a little sense of closure to some of us.  One hopes some of the anecdotes that were told will find their way to the Comments sections of this blog, hint hint.

Opening a new thread for your thoughts about Steve.

Leave them as comments to this message.  After a while, I will close this one and open another.

To read everything people have posted here about Gerber, click here.  This will show you a list of the messages that have comments sections devoted to Steve.  Then read the comments section of each.  Some of the messages are quite touching and even surprising…in a good way.

Still Evanier. And still pleased by how much attention is being given to the loss of our friend. After you make your way through all the lovely messages posted on this site, if you haven’t had enough, just go a’Googling and you’ll be stunned by how many are out there…even in languages Steve neither wrote nor read.

I’m going to keep this site up and running until such time as Steve’s family and close friends make some sort of decision about it. For now, there will always be a forum open for people to post whatever they feel they want to say. I’m just stopping in from time to time to read what’s here, delete the Cialis ads that make it past Gerber’s Spam filter, and close down a comments section that’s gotten too long, whereupon I start another. I also deleted one posting from someone who wrote something they shouldn’t have written, realized that too late, then wrote me in a panic to get it removed. If you read that post, pretend you didn’t.

Lastly: If you were a friend of Steve’s and you’re in the Los Angeles area and interested in attending an informal dinner where other friends just sit around and swap Gerber stories, drop me an e-mail. And do it quickly because the gathering is Tuesday evening.