Review: Howard The Duck #1

There are going to be inherent levels of wrongness involved in any Howard the Duck comic, perhaps even more so than in most other characters with creator vs. company legal issues and hard feelings in their past, on account of those conflicts involving the character being fresher than those of, say, the first generation of Marvel characters.

The level of that wrongness a reader feels will likely depend on the reader, of course. If you were around and reading comics in the 1970s, then you'll be familiar with writer Steve Gerber and artist Val Mayerik's introduction of the character, the character's meteoric rise to fame (there's a reason the character was the first one to make the jump from Marvel comic book to silver screen by a a dozen years) and the ensuing clashes over creative control between the late Gerber and Marvel. In fact, you probably lived through parts of it, seeing the results or reading the coverage of it. For you, Marvel Howard The Duck comics likely seem wrongest.

If you've just heard about all of that well after the fact, then new Howard The Duck comics are still going to feel somewhat wrong, but likely less so.

And, of course, if you've never heard of Gerber, Marvel and The Duck's contentious history, and are only familiar with the character for his rather random, weird-ass appearances in oddball Marvel Comics (Marvel Zombies 5, Marvel Zombies Destroy, Fear Itself: Fearsome Four) and his brief after-the-credits cameo in Guardians of The Galaxy, then perfect! Has Marvel got a comic for you! In fact, you may be able to enjoy Howard The Duck #1 completely guilt-free, and without wondering if you should off-set your purchase with a donation to the Hero Initiative or a comics charity of some sort (Sure, go ahead and do so! Never hurts to donate $3.99 to the Hero Initiative).

So Howard the Duck #1 is really a bad news, good news sort of comic book. Yes, it will feel weird and slightly wrong for a lot of readers and potential readers that such a book even exists (Asking if the world needed more Howard The Duck comics, by the way, is a sucker's game; The Big Two are kinda sorta built on continuing to publish comics that the world doesn't really need, but portions of it want).

On the other hand, if a Howard The Duck comic must exist—and given Marvel's business model, it must exist eventually—then you couldn't really ask for a stronger creative team, nor a better comic. And it's nice to see a "created by" credit and that the creators aren't doing anything even approaching a Gerber pastiche. This is, instead, a misanthropic, down-on-his-luck talking duck in an pure comedic version of the Marvel Universe. Like, up to his shoulders in the Marvel Universe. In this issue, the first 20-pages of the series, there are substantial appearances by Spider-Man, Black Cat, Rocket Raccoon, She-Hulk and the supporting cast of her just-canceled series (Shulkie and Howard have offices in the same building).

The comic is the work of writer Chip Zdarsky, probably currently best known as the artist of Image Comics' irreverent Sex Criminals, and artist Joe Quinones, a major talent well-deserving of a high-profile, monthly showcase like this (If not higher-profile, but hey, this is good for now).

Quinones' style is pretty straight, meaning his Spider-Man and She-Hulk look like the ones that would appear in their own comics, his "sets" and "extras" are those of the "real" Marvel Universe, not some warped version of it. That is, Quinones isn't trying to draw "funny." (Did I use too many quote marks in that paragraph? I think I did. Imagine how annoying it would be to actually be talking to me right now, instead of reading this post; I'd be air-quoting, like, constantly.)

That sets up the important clash between appearance and content that powers the book's comedy. The delivery is deadpan, so no matter how over-the-top the gag might be—the training montage, for example, or Howard's "receptionist"—they never feel forced, but just scroll by.

And there are a lot of gags in this book, which is actually a rather dense read—always welcome these days, when Marvel charges $3.99 for 20-pages of ad-filled comics. Character humor, fishduck-out-of-water humor, minor visual gags, snappy dialogue, making fun of Spider-Man*...few panels go by without a joke of some kind, and those that do are usually preceded and followed by one with a joke.

As for the plot, it involves Howard having set up a new business venture. In the past, oh, decade or so he's been a lawyer, a member of the Fifty-State Initiative an an agent of ARMOR (the Alternate Reality Monitoring and Operational Response, created for the Marvel Zombies franchise). Now he's a private investigator, and not a terribly successful one (This issue opens and closes with him in jail cells). He meets a pretty nice human lady who owns a tattoo parlor he makes his unofficial partner, he takes a case retrieving a stolen piece of jewelry from The Black Cat** and he gets collected by an agent of The Collector.

But as to the pressing question regarding a new Howard The Duck series, the answer is, I'm sad to say, yes, yes he still wears pants. You may recall—if you're one of those readers for whom there's a level of wrongness about the book—that Howard originally looked like Donald Duck, only in 1950s businessman's attire instead of a sailor suit.

That was, in fact, the joke from which the character sprung. He was another kind of comic book character wandering into an entirely different kind of a comic, from classic funny animal comics to mainstream horror comics. He looked so much like a Disney duck, however, that his appearance lead to the other controversy involving the character, the end result of which Howard had to wear pants and have his head rearranged, pupil to bill, until he looked less like a cartoon duck and more like a real duck...or at least the movie version of himself.

Those of us who thought that a positive aspect of Disney buying Marvel might be that Howard The Duck could finally take off his pants and assume a form closer to his original, well, those hopes are now rather thoroughly dashed.

This Howard still looks somewhat wrong then—to me, at least—but then I suppose that too has a benefit, further distancing the title from the previous, original run, and thus any aura of pastiche.

Like every other aspect of the book, then, it's wrong done right.



*Spider-Man's a good example of the variety of humor in this comic. When we first meet him, he's playing with an old gadget of his, the one that shoots a sort of Spider-Man's Face-signal from his belt, and cracking jokes, as is a thing that Spider-Man often does. When we see him later, he's breaking down and sobbing about Uncle Ben, when he thinks his own selfishness might have resulted in Howard's death. So, you know, you get normal, funny Spidey and you get Zdarksy taking the piss out of the character, by making fun of his emotional trauma regarding his dead uncle.

**She's first misidentified as "The Cat-Woman" and, oddly enough, her own status quo seems to mirror the recent status quo shift that DC's Catwoman has undergone. While Catwoman set herself up as the boss of Gotham City's organized criminal element, Felicia Hardy is apparently trying to be more of a Kingpin of Crime sort, Spider-Man says, then The Black Cat who flirts with the city's premier superhero and, while technically a thief and villain, still has a heart of gold.

Far be it from me to question the cover copy of a 34-year-old Marvel comic, but I have a hard time believing anyone asked, let alone demanded that Man-Thing battle Spider-Man, Daredevil, The Thing and Shang-Chi simultaneously.

Ten things I really liked about Essential Man-Thing Vol. 1

1.) The way Man-Thing fights alligators. I flirted with doing a whole post about this subject, complete with a bunch of scans, but maybe I’ll just mention it here. There’s certainly something exciting about seeing a monster fight alligators, but the way Man-Thing fights them just fascinates me. Being a brainless, personality-less creature unable to speak or do much of anything beyond shamble around, empathize with the emotions of others, fight things and burn whatever he touches that knows fear, fighting alligators is a wholly meaningless activity to Man-Thing. He’s so blasé about it. He fights alligators the way I make my bed or wash dishes or brush my teeth: It’s just one routine part of his day.


2.) The copious amounts of well-drawn cheesecake. I know I make fun of DC and Marvel for their exploitative imagery of women fairly often, but that’s not because I think there’s anything wrong with drawings of sexy, scantily clad women, it’s because when DC and Marvel do it it’s a) often highly inappropriate (involving minors, sexual violence, brutality, or children’s characters), b) extremely poorly drawn , c) meaningless to the story and in some cases actively distracting from the story being told (see Benes’ JLoA run for a few hundred pretty good examples), d) really, really gross (sexualizing zombies and mortally wounded aliens, couching the scene in terrible violence, etc). or e) some combination of a-d. There’s plenty of cheesecake throughout this book, from Gray Morrow’s femme fatale Ellen’s flimsy negligee (which she wears in a shack…in a swamp) and the shredding her outfit goes through when she runs afoul of Swamp Thing, to the lurid covers of the issues of Monsters Unleashed included.

(I guess her top got caught on the steering wheel during the car accident...?)

But Morrow and the other artists can draw realistic looking women quite well, it’s not like Man-Thing was being published alongside Marvel’s Swamp Monster Babies at the time, and the stories are almost all melodramatic soap opera horror stories about a tragic swamp monster set in a Florida swamp—scantily clad women don’t seem all that out of place, or threaten the integrity of the stories, as the whole endeavor is already intended to be lurid and exploitative.


3) The protagonists for a large chunk of these stories are essentially Satanists. For about a dozen comics in this collection, from Fear #11 through Man-Thing #2 or so, the sympathetic humans consist of teenager Jennifer Kale, her little brother Andy, and her grandfather, who looks a little like Stan Lee and runs a cult. The young Kales steal his magic book and summon a demon, setting off a chain of events that endangers all reality, and yet they’re all pretty sympathetic; Steve Gerber never really writes any “Stay in school and say your prayers, kids!” moral. It’s just the story of some kids who visit head shops and draw pentagrams to summon demons in the swamp for fun, and the cloak-wearing adults who practice forbidden magic on the weekends. I bet parents in the '70s loved it when the kids brought copies of Man-Thing comics into the house.


4.) Ka-Zar shows up for some reason. Man, talk about whiplash. This volume goes from the first Man-Thing story, by Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas and Gray Morrow, to a two-parter from Astonishing Tales written by Thomas and Len Wein and drawn by John Buscema featuring Manny and Ka-Zar vs. AIM, and then snaps back to a Conway story illustrated by Morrow and Howard Chaykin. I haven’t read many old Ka-Zar stories, but here he’s written rather Namor-like, only he’s from a jungle instead of from underwater, and he rolls around with his “brother,” a saber-toothed tiger named Zabu.


5.) Steve Gerber will write whatever the hell Steve Gerber wants to write. For the most part, the narrative of this volume is essentially on on-going, episodic swamp opera, with Man-Thing coming to the aid of various counterculture types (hippies, devil-worshipers, bikers, Native Americans, environmentalists) from mad scientists, industrialists, worse devil-worshipers and bikers, and the ever-present threat of alligator consumption. But there’s no genre he won’t tackle, and make work in the context of the book. Man-Thing repeatedly finds himself transported to sword and sorcery worlds, is later cast into a weird psychodrama involving the ghost of a circus clown and otherworldly judges who decide what form of eternity human souls must spend, he fights a traditional superhero and a traditional supervillain in different stories, and, toward the end of the book, he’s shanghaied by ghost pirates.


6.) Rory Regan. I love that guy. For some reason (Gerber?), I keep finding him in all of my favorite Essential books.


7.) My favorite sentence of dialogue ever. There’s this one scene where a recurring wizard character from the sword and sorcery fantasy land shows up, and lays his hand on the stunned Jennifer Kale’s shoulder. She spins around and says, “Who--? YOU?!” and he responds, “Aye--I!” I love that line.

The wizard also refers to Man-Thing as "The Man-Object" all the time.


8.) Mike Ploog. Artist Mike Ploog provides the bulk of the art in this volume, followed closely by Val Mayerik. Both are great—in fact, I don’t think there’s any bum art in the whole thing, thanks to Buscema, Morrow, Rich Buckler, Pat Broderick and Alerdo Alcala—but Ploog’s exaggerated, slightly cartoon-y art is tops. And, as I’m sure has been repeatedly pointed out, his name is just so perfect for stories involving swamp monsters.


9.) Daredevil and Black Widow’s guest-appearance. The back of the book boasts, “Guest-starring the Fantastic Four! Ka-Zar! Daredevil!” While technically true, DD and Black Widow appear for exactly two panels, literally just swinging through—in one dimensional portal and out another.


10). The complete randomness of the themes and subject matter. It’s not just that Gerber would find a way to put Man-Thing in different genre settings if it struck his fancy (or if some Marvel editor was like, “Ghost pirates are big this summer! Do a ghost pirate story!”, I guess), but the individual stories would be about almost anything. One issue it’s the environment, then it’s mental illness, then it’s a Superman parody, then it’s an elderly couple’s marital problems, then it’s a critique of religious zealotry, then it’s back to the environment, and hey, how about a moral passion play centered on bus crash in the swamp? There’s a real sense of an issue-of-the-week nature that creeps into these stories, at least between the longer story arcs involving the Nexus of Reality, similar to the vibe I get from those old Denny O’Neil Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics. Of course, I love those. Judged by today’s standards, I suppose a lot of these stories might not hold up on their own—they certainly seem pathetically juvenile when compared to what Alan Moore would do with DC’s muck-murker within a decade—but I find these stories utterly charming and, like a lot of Gerber’s work for Marvel during the period, a bit ahead of their time in terms of aspiration, if not always execution.

misc.

—I’ve gone back and forth a few times this week over whether or not I should post something acknowledging the passing of Steve Gerber.

I didn’t feel the need to post about it to inform anyone, as I assume just about everyone who stops by here had already heard about it and read many of the tributes, remembrances, off-the-cuff eulogies and official obituaries that have poured out of the professional and fan communities throughout the week, in what amounts to something of an electronic wake.

And then there was the fact that I knew more about Gerber’s work than I actually knew his work; my personal experience with his writing is quite limited.

See, I’m 30 years old, and I didn’t start reading comics until around 1990 or so. Like a lot of readers, I started reading in both directions, scooping up new books as they came out, but also hitting libraries and back issue bins and reading backwards through the medium simultaneously (at a rate that’s increased exponentially in the last few years, given the incredible amount of work available in trades now).

So, obviously, I missed the work Gerber was best known for; I wasn’t even talking yet when he had left Marvel for the first time. The very first Gerber-written comics I’d read were Nevada and Hard Time, his last Howard the Duck series for the Marvel’s Max imprint was my first non-terrible movie experience with the character, and it wasn’t until about a year or so ago that I read his Defenders and Omega the Unknown, the latter of which was so far ahead of its time that it was weird reading it in the 21st century and wrapping my head around the fact that it was actually from the seventies.

Oddly, while I had always thought of Gerber as That Guy Who Used To Write Howard The Duck, I didn’t realize that he also wrote for television animation until I started reading about his career in posts like this, and that I had grown up experiencing his writing after all.

In addition to working on Young Caleb favorite series Thundarr The Barbarian, Gerber also wrote for G. I. Joe, a cartoon series that is near the top of my Greatest Things I’ve Ever Experienced list. I see that Gerber wrote two of the series’ very best storylines, the one where Destro and Lady Jaye discover they’re related, and there’s that crazy Lovecraft monster in the well at the bottom of their ancestral castle, and then that trippy two-parter where Shipwreck thinks he’s losing his mind).

This might sound silly, but in a way I feel kind of lucky to have not read so much of Gerber’s greatest work yet. The tragedy of a writer, artist or creative person you’ve never even met dying is, after all, in large part the realization that you won’t be getting to enjoy any new work from that person again. I know that there are still a lot of Gerber-written comics I haven’t read yet, and I look forward to doing so.

Tom Spurgeon has been compiling a master list of remembrances of and tributes to Gerber here.



—In announcing DC Universe #0, Dan DiDio says they changed the name from Countdown to Final Crisis #0 when they realized they didn’t want to end a Countdown to Final Crisis trade with a cliffhanger. I wonder if it didn’t have more to do with the fact that they were afraid to brand the book with the word Countdown, an association which has had little benefit for many of the several dozen other books to be branded as part of the Countdown mega story?



—I was relieved to read the rumored Busiek/Bagley Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman series being officially announced this week, mostly because it seems like such a good idea, and I was worried that the rumors rumor monger Rich Johnston was, um, mongering were too good to be true.

Interesting that DC’s had two weekly series now, one of which was successful in terms of sales, fan response and critical responses, and another that was fairly successful in terms of sales, widely reviled by fans and universally despised by all critics. Each was produced was a different approach. So I assumed that a third series would be done using the approach of the first, but it seems that DC’s going with a third approach, having one creative team handle the bulk of each issue.

It’s a great creative team, so I think the series has a lot of potential. It’s also a lot of work for so few creators though, and I think this series therefore has an even greater chance of hitting a publishing delay than the first two.

Like 52 and Countdown, this will be a fun series to watch and I hope that, like 52 at least, it will be a fun one to read.


—I’ll give Reign in Hell a chance, because I liked the idea of the DC devils fighting over hell in all the other comic books I’ve read it happen in over the last 15 years or so and I generally like Keith Giffen’s writing when he’s on, but I’m pretty leery of Dan DiDio’s contention that it will establish a new set of “rules” for magic in the DC Universe:

In the past at DC, we’ve always played the balance as being between order and chaos. Then, starting with Day of Vengeance, we’ve shown that magic has been in disarray since the death of Shazam and the other events that occurred in that miniseries. What you’re going to find now, is that magic has realigned itself with a whole new set of rules, and those rules are being crafted by those individuals who control Hell. So naturally, there’s a direct effect between what’s going on in Hell and the magic being used in the DC Universe.

Considering the last time that those rules were originally laid out in a series written by Neil freaking Gaiman and illustrated by John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess and Paul Johnson in the days before the Vertigo imprint was created and some of the DCU’s most interesting supernatural characters were separated from the fictional universe that birthed them, did the rules of magic really need rewritten? Because if Giffen and company’s series doesn’t best Gaiman and company’s, than I don’t see how it can be seen to have been worthwhile.


—Is Grant Morrison the DC Universe’s savior? No matter how bad it seems to get fucked up, he’s right there waiting to re-awesomeify it. At least, that’s what I gathered from hearing him talk to Zack Smith about Final Crisis. It sounds great: A one-off Justice League villain from the ‘70s, a one-off Martian Manhunter villain, Streaky the Super-cat in #2, Kamandi, Anthro, Frankenstein, “a big definitive battle between Supergirl and Mary Marvel. Some seriously badass super-animals…”

What I found particularly interesting was this bit from Morrison: “It’s the apocalypse. (laughs) Basically, this is it. This is doomsday for the DC Universe… This is about the DC Universe under the greatest threat that it’s ever faced. It’s the ultimate annihilation of everything they hold dear."

See, what I loved about Morrison’s JLA run was that it started with the White Martians taking over the world and about to execute the League, and, with each successive arc, the end of the world threatened them again. Morrison’s League was a council of heroes, united by the fact that they were each the best of the best, constantly staving off the apocalypse (not a bad theme for a millennial book like the one he was writing), and each time they beat it back, it simply returned in greater force until “World War III.”

By that point, the apocalypse was such a huge threat it took the intervention of the armies of heaven and every single man, woman and child on Earth getting superpowers and uniting to defeat it.

And now Morrison’s saying he’s come up with a greater threat than Mageddon? Now that’s a comic book I want to read.


—Man, Mark Millar sure makes it hard to like him. Speaking to The List about Civil War, he says: ‘”It was actually the most difficult assignment I’ve ever had. It’s the bestselling comic of the last 15 years, yet when I see it sitting on my shelf I actually feel a bit sick. I just think of how much time it took up and how much re-writing I had to do just to co-ordinate everything with the other writers.”

If you follow the link, you’ll see folks fact-checking Millar, and an update regarding Millar’s response to said fact-checking.

The “bestselling comic of the last 15 years” bit sounded suspect to me, at least without a bunch of caveats regarding format and market and so forth (all of the sort there’s no reason The List would bother to include anyway), but what struck me was this thought: What kind of jerk pays attention to that stuff, anyway? Does Millar have a big chart in his office with bar graphs of comics sales to see if he’s the best-selling or the fifth best-selling comics writer or what?

It’s an especially amusing remark right before lamenting how much time it took him to produce the series. (And imagine how much more time it might have taken if it was any good!). Perhaps he’d have more time for comics writing if he wasn’t collating sales data for comics from the last fifteen years…


—Speaking of Millar, I’m waiting for the trade on his Fantastic Four, like I wish I would have done for his last two collaborations with Hitch. It was not easy not buying this week’s issue though, once I got a look at the Thing in his 19th century gear.


—Easy joke at the expense of someone toward whom I bear no ill will: Valerie D’Orazio thinks all black superheroes look alike.

You know, one of the great advantages of blogging vs. writing for traditional print media is that in the case of the former, when you make a mistake, you can go back and correct it immediately, whereas with the latter, once the mistake is in print, all you can do is apologize for it later in print.

So it was weird to see D’Orazio refer to Jefferson “Black Lightning” Pierce as “John Irons,” apparently an abbreviated version of John Henry Irons, the secret identity of Steel, in her recent review of the last JSoA issue. And then, when a commenter pointed out her mistake, rather than issuing the typical “Oops, my bad,” she went to bizarre lengths to note that her misreading pointed to a key weakness in the book, and how her misread version would have made more sense, and that the commenter was pulling “a dick move” for pointing out her mistake and reaction to being told she made a mistake.

Now, neither Steel nor Black Lightning are regulars in the book, and yeah, they’re both black dudes with bald heads, the former often in the company of a teenager with long braids, as the latter was in this issue.

But then, Irons has glasses. And usually a goatee. And, depending on who’s drawing him, an earring or two. And he’s not married. And he doesn’t have any daughters, let alone two of them, one of whom is on The Outsiders (He does have a niece named Nat, who does, admittedly, look like the girl in this scene named Jennifer). Oh, and he’s not a teacher. An he doesn’t live in Chicago. And, obviously, his names not Jeff, and the dialogue in the scene refers to the character in question as “Jeff.” Three times.

To be fair to D’Orazio—fairer than her churlish response to her own readers warrants, actually—her confusion perhaps underscores the weakness in making Black Lightning bald, so that he more closely resembles Steel, Mister Miracle II, Jakeem Thunder and the animated version of John Stewart (Why can’t DC let it’s black superheroes have hair? I feel like Mr. Terrific needs to grow a big blowout just to compensate for everyone else’s head-shavings). And, of course, how weird it was that Geoff Johns just sort of retroactively invented a wife and second daughter for a character who was single and childless (up until Judd Winick and/or Johns assigned him his first daughter, anyway).

Perhaps D’Orazio’s confusion between Black Lighting and Steel speaks to how complicated and new reader repellent the modern DCU is though. I mean, note that she’s a former DC editor and she can’t tell who’s who in one of the company’s best-written and best-drawn series; what hope do new readers have of making sense of The Legion of Super-Heroes, Countdown to Infinite Crisis or Salvation Run?


—I haven’t been reading Salvation Run, in part because of its association with Countdown and in part because it seems supremely illogical even for a series involving not one but two talking super-gorillas (If their captors want to give the villains an extra-judicial punishment, why bother putting them on another planet? Why not just put a bullet in each one’s brain? And why on Earth give them their weapons and their favorite clothes before sending them there?).

I did flip through it this week, however, on account of the cover, which featured the aforementioned two talking super-gorillas coming to blows. The first really stupid thing I saw was on page one, wherein Martian Manhunter, presumably there incognito, resumes his hero form to covertly call home on the down low. What, his radio doesn’t work while he’s in disguise or invisible?

Please note: The above scene is extremely stupid.

And then there was the gorilla-on-gorilla Grodd vs. Monsieur Mallah battle, which seemed to come to a rather permanent conclusion. The solicitation for this particular issue promises that “villains will die” and Hannibal Tabu’s Comicbookresources.com review also indicates that it was a battle to the death. Mallah and The Brain weren’t caught in an explosion or thrown into the ocean or some sort of easy-to-come-back-from death, either, but they were beaten to death.

Man, who wants to live in a fictional universe that doesn’t have room for a talking gorilla with a French title, a beret, and a bandolier and his boss/best friend (and possibly more), who is a talking disembodied brain that lives in a skull-shaped robot canister?


—Damn, that Jog character sure can review of a comic book. In his review of the first issue of Image’s Next Issue Project, I noted several occasions where he said the exact same thing I thought about the book, although he said it much more concisely and elegantly than I did, either in my hastily assembled Wednesday night review, or the slightly more polished version you can see on Newsarama on Monday.

He seems to have found the anything-goes approach a virtue, while I thought it was a drawback. Likewise, my favorite story was the one he liked the least (Allred and company’s Stardust one), and the ones I liked the least were among his favorite (the contributions from Ashley Wood and Joe Casey and Bill Sienkiewicz).

We both seem to have enjoyed Rugg and Maruca’s Captain Kidd story though.