![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Steve Gerber
Feb. 12th, 2008 08:35 pmI don't have anything to say about Steve Gerber that hasn't already been said, by people more qualified to say it than I am.
But I've been reading his comics for over thirty years, and I read one yesterday. I like some of them better than others, but still, thirty years of that twisted intelligence, that bizarre and funny creativity. He died yesterday, and I didn't even know he was ill, in hospital with wrecked lungs and working on the new Doctor Fate.
You think of Gerber, and inevitably you think of Howard the Duck, battling such foes as the Deadly Space Turnip, Doctor Bong and - most fearsome of all - the Deadline Doom. This last trapped Howard in an issue of illustrated text, famous for its obligatory comic book fight scene, "pitting an ostrich and a Las Vegas chorus girl against the MIND-NUMBING MENACE of a KILLER lampshade in a DUEL TO THE DEATH". The chorus girl, as you might anticipate, triumphs. Later, this double-page spread became the seed from which Nevada grew: and Nevada is one of the twenty graphic novels I would recommend to anyone who wanted to sample what the medium is capable of.
Steve Gerber's bizarre run on superhero non-team, The Defenders allied Doctor Strange with the Hulk, and the Valkyrie (incarnated in the body of a woman called Barbara Norris, whose husband tagged along with the team trying to find out what had become of his wife). They battled villains such as Nebulon the Celestial Man, who converts his victims to Bozos, attacking with a cry of "Four-Eyes stole Hulk's friend Bambi!" and failed to notice the random appearances of an elf with a gun.
Compared to this, Hard Time was almost realistic. Its hero, Ethan, is a high-school misfit who joins in what he expects to be a joke at the expense of his fellow-students, and then, when the joke turns into a massacre, finds himself carrying the blame and sentenced to fifty years in an adult prison. The prison itself is, I hope, a grotesquely heightened version of the real thing, and Ethan manifests powers which seem more mystical than superheroic, but the story is gripping and the characters are, in their own way, believable.
Such a variety of work, and yet such a distinctive voice; comics won't be as much fun without him.
But I've been reading his comics for over thirty years, and I read one yesterday. I like some of them better than others, but still, thirty years of that twisted intelligence, that bizarre and funny creativity. He died yesterday, and I didn't even know he was ill, in hospital with wrecked lungs and working on the new Doctor Fate.
You think of Gerber, and inevitably you think of Howard the Duck, battling such foes as the Deadly Space Turnip, Doctor Bong and - most fearsome of all - the Deadline Doom. This last trapped Howard in an issue of illustrated text, famous for its obligatory comic book fight scene, "pitting an ostrich and a Las Vegas chorus girl against the MIND-NUMBING MENACE of a KILLER lampshade in a DUEL TO THE DEATH". The chorus girl, as you might anticipate, triumphs. Later, this double-page spread became the seed from which Nevada grew: and Nevada is one of the twenty graphic novels I would recommend to anyone who wanted to sample what the medium is capable of.
Steve Gerber's bizarre run on superhero non-team, The Defenders allied Doctor Strange with the Hulk, and the Valkyrie (incarnated in the body of a woman called Barbara Norris, whose husband tagged along with the team trying to find out what had become of his wife). They battled villains such as Nebulon the Celestial Man, who converts his victims to Bozos, attacking with a cry of "Four-Eyes stole Hulk's friend Bambi!" and failed to notice the random appearances of an elf with a gun.
Compared to this, Hard Time was almost realistic. Its hero, Ethan, is a high-school misfit who joins in what he expects to be a joke at the expense of his fellow-students, and then, when the joke turns into a massacre, finds himself carrying the blame and sentenced to fifty years in an adult prison. The prison itself is, I hope, a grotesquely heightened version of the real thing, and Ethan manifests powers which seem more mystical than superheroic, but the story is gripping and the characters are, in their own way, believable.
Such a variety of work, and yet such a distinctive voice; comics won't be as much fun without him.
