Totally Offensive and Tasteless Analogies, Part Two

Howard for Prez

(Reference Here)

One of the most important factors in the unique - and to a large part singular - success of Howard the Duck was the book's dogged determination to break down every possible convention of mainstream adventure comics. Nowadays, genre conventions are flouted on a daily basis - in the wake of Watchmen, flouting genre conventions has become a kind of convention in and of itself. People have been bending and breaking the boundaries of superhero stories for so long that there really isn't a lot you can do to shock people anymore. I think, after Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol and Animal Man, and Marshal Law and Marvels, there is very little left to be done in the way of actual transgressive boundary-smashing. When the "shocking" homosexual love affair between a talking French monkey and a disembodied brain in a jar has filtered down to become accepted canon in mainstream superhero comics, and the black satire of Marshal Law (and Judge Dredd) has been eclipsed by the unintentional self-parody of Youngblood, that the superhero genre has become essentially invincible. The organism has evolved in such a way as to be capable of defending itself against any possible criticism, from without or within.

But it didn't used to be that way. Howard was distinctive because it didn't just satirize genre conventions: the self-aware superhero parody has been around almost as long as the superhero, himself, going back all the way to the original Sheldon Mayer Red Tornado and "Superduperman & Captain Marbles". Steve Gerber understood that critiquing superhero comics on their own terms was still essentially a capitulation to the genre's demands. The trick was to neither accept nor deny the premise, but to walk in a third direction altogether. Ergo, Howard didn't fight super-villains, he chose simply to walk away from unnecessary altercations. The most interesting concepts in Howard's run were never the villains - who remembers the Space Turnip? Even Doctor Bong was, let's be honest, one bad joke stretched a good ways farther than it should have been. (And, it must be noted, Howard's most effective foil was really just a delusional old lady in a fur coat.) But fiction needs conflict, so from where did Howard's conflicts arise? Often, the fact that he had no interest in doing what he was supposed to be doing. If given a choice between two equally absurd options, Howard always chose to opt-out of artificial dichotomies.

A long time ago I read and interview with Gerber where he admitted that one of the primary influences for Howard's adventures was the character of Mersault in Camus' L'Etranger. Initially - and for a long time afterward - I thought this was just so much pretentious twaddle. But after I had a few years to sit on the idea, and had gone back and re-read the original Howard run, it made some degree of sense. Mersault was a man adrift, unwilling or unable to understand the nature of social obligation, simply incapable of choosing between equally bad options when faced with inescapable absurdity. He couldn't even feel grief for his own dead mother, let alone for the man he killed on the Algerian beach. His lack of passion ultimately damned him.

Howard isn't dispassionate - if anything, he's too passionate, bound up by his frustrated self-destructive libido and strangled by his own perfectly conceived sense of futility. Howard is the prototypical paranoid, anxious Jew, a web-footed counterpart to Nathan Zuckerman and Woody Allen, filled with dynamic energy that can only be fully expressed in constant self-criticism. Howard can't simply lie down and die, like Mersault - he is constantly propelled forward by circumstances beyond his control, hurtling headfirst towards impending doom, perpetually helpless.

So what do you do with a character in a superhero comic book who isn't a superhero, has no interest in fighting super-villains, and wants nothing more than to be left alone while the rest of the world chokes on its own bile? Simple: let the duck run for President. There are few jobs more inherently futile than that of being a politician. It's telling that even when given the biggest microphone in the free world with which to speak, and given the opportunity to speak the proverbial "truth to power", no one really believes him.

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Extra Bonus: If you didn't know this was a tribute band and not the real thing, could you tell the difference?

Totally Offensive and Tasteless Analogies, Part One

We Now Return To Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

And we're back.

A lot of times when people die in the industry I don't feel the need to say anything about it, not out of any desire to be callous but more out of a wary respect - if I don't have anything particularly perceptive or personal to say, or so my thinking goes, best not to say something fatuous and risk seeming insincere or, worse, opportunistic. But I didn't feel the need to be so chary with Steve Gerber: not merely was he a significantly important presence in the comics industry, but he actually wrote a great many comics I personally loved. We had known his health was fragile for a long time, but I guess it was hard to believe that he was really in jeopardy. He was enjoying something of a second wind in his comics work, so why not in life as well? Charles Schulz didn't die until he was damn well good and ready.

But alas, the hints of future greatness will have to remain just that - hints. Although we haven't seen enough to really judge, the first few issues of his Dr. Fate revamp really seemed to have a lot of potential. It was very much a "Gerber" book, in that you couldn't imagine it having been written by anyone else: all the conflicts in the book were somehow symbolic of the protagonists own psychological struggles; said psychological elements of the book were foregrounded (the protagonist was even a psychiatrist); and you even got the feeling that this was, again, more than merely a paycheck but in fact a deeply personal project for Gerber. His Dr. Fate was emerging out of a morass of bad decisions and worse luck, trying to rejoin the human race while also, almost incidentally, dealing with the burdens of mysterious mystical powers which had dropped in his lap - kind of like a veteran comic book writer working his way back into a medium-profile mainstream assignment after many years of relative inaction.

The supernatural elements were really only a catalyst for something that was setting up to be much more interesting, providing the character hadn't been hijacked by DC's Never-Ending Crossover (I guess we'll never know how that would have turned out). In terms of tone it owed a lot to J.M. DeMatteis' previous run on Dr. Fate, an eclectic take on the character that sprouted up in the same fecund period as Neil Gaiman's Sandman but - for me at least - never seemed to fully cohere despite its good intentions. It was interesting to see Gerber working in the post-Vertigo character-driven mode popularized by Alan Moore in the 80s, especially considering that it was Gerber's own 1970s work on Howard the Duck and Man Thing that directly paved the way for Moore's genre-defining work on Swamp Thing. But even though it was aware of its past, Gerber's Dr. Fate was still very much its own book, heading in its own very peculiar direction. Based just on the first handful of issues I read, I would call it a moderate success. From what I saw Gerber was still working on the series when he passed, so any ending we get will probably be truncated in some manner.

I'll talk more about the specific excerpts from Howard the Duck I posted last week, and why I picked them, hopefully tomorrow.