Steve Gerber

 Oh man, I really don't want to do this. I mean I really don't. I've been curled up on the couch, shivering and hacking and dreading the point when I was well enough to write this.

Because it's the worst combination: I'd been out of touch with him for over twenty years, and him no farther away than www.stevegerber.com. Decades of his life and work were foreign to me. 

And yet he was my friend when his friendship was important. And while calling him a mentor or an inspiration would have seemed laughably wrong then, and still seems off the mark, knowing Steve made me more courageous as a writer, and watching (so to speak) him work made doing comics that much more worthy of being done.

Let me explain. In the years before I broke in to the business, I had become a serious letterhack. My brother Rob was quicker off the starting gate than I was (as The Gringo Kid), but I was soon at it both carburetor wide open and taching into the red. I pretty much wrote a letter on every comic I picked up, and many of them multi-page essays. I was completely and totally sincere in trying to write intelligently and seriously about the comics I read, and was turning all my University of Chicago-honed skills to the task.

And the longest of those multi-page essays went to the writers who most moved me. I practically melted down my huge Olympia electric for Don McGregor, Doug Moench, and Steve Gerber. And by sheer force of enthusiasm, they began to write me back, every so often. And I began to know them as people.

This wasn't all that amazing, because they all wore their hearts on their sleeves. It was one of the remarkable things about the comics industry at that period that writers could be that personal, that individual, that ambitious, within the strange framework of super-hero comics. While I had always fantasized about writing/drawing for Marvel, It was this strong personal work that kept me as a twentysomething of colossal intellectual pretensions from throwing that dream out with the firemen and astronauts. This was worth doing.

(They weren't the only ones, of course. Chris Claremont, Steve Englehart, Roger Stern, Jim Starlin--it was a big wave, and they all participated in it. I let them know then, as I let you know now.)

Don McGregor was by far and away the most demonstrative, and the one I got to know first and had the most adventures with, and Doug, as it turned out, shared most of my intellectual weirdnesses--from Philip José Farmer to Robert Anton Wilson to the Church of the SubGenius--but Steve became the best of friends because I don't think he knew how to do anything else, and I became one of his because he made anything else similarly impossible.

This was the thing about Steve: that his passion and compassion and sense of the absurd were all of a piece. The absurdity of human interaction never got in the way of interacting anyway for Steve--and it made things funnier. Life was a dark, weird, unfair, incomprehensible process: that was plain if you spent as much as an afternoon with him. However, laughter and compassion where no more absurd than anything else.

To the outside world, Steve's legacy is just as weirdly appropriate: being responsible for Howard the Duck, which is a succès de scandale of comic-book movies--so bad it 's kind of the Springtime For Hitler of the genre. It's a legacy a writer as fine as he doesn't deserve--but which he received in the days after the eucatastrophe as a deep confirmation that there is no dog.

But it gives me a chance to make a fannish letterhackish point that fits into what I knew about Steve as a person. Howard the Duck was not satire, and it's thinking that it was that made Bialystock and Lucas make such a bad movie. Steve was not a satirist, but something much better. Putting a funny animal into a world of humans could very well be, in many creators' hands, a supremely ironic gesture, but Steve was doing the opposite. It offered a chance to become more emotionally involved, not less. Howard was a bad-tempered, irritable, pessimistic outcast--but the distance and the pessimism hurts. Howard's relations with the humans around him  are not detached and sardonic because he's Drawn That Way: Howard's duckitude is the embodiment of how hard it is for everybody to get along in a world they never made. THe real result of Howard's duckosity is that it dumps him into ludicrous situations with the Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime or Doctor Bong--situations whose main purpose seems to be to remove all dignity or sense from the situation. Sound familiar? That's Steve's half-sad Muttley-like laugh from the beginning to the end of the strip.

Steve went off to work in animation (Thundarr the Barbarian!) and came back with reports of a strange and absurd world that yet seemed oddly familiar. But removal from that artist's colony had its price, and I paid it. And it's more my story in general that I fell away from my friends from that big period of my life. The result is that I've got too many compartmentalized anecdotes from the Age of Miracles. And when someone who at onetime was as important and as dear to me as it was possible to be now dies, it has the terrible banal feel of knocking and old vase off a shelf and watching it shatter.

Steve was a friend of mine, but others knew him better. I'm not qualified to sum up his life, or even make a stab at the essence of his work. I was gone too long. In the end, what I can say is that I liked him, drew strength and artistic courage from him, and that it feels just awful that I will never see him again.