Reviews: 'Essential Howard the Duck'
'Howard the Duck' was regarded
as something of a cult classic when it was published in 1972-78. Now that the
complete run has been made available in Marvel's 'Essentials' re-print line, we
can ask ourselves what was so special about it.
At first glance, the answer
would appear to be 'not very much'. Howard, a dead ringer for Donald, comes
from an alien dimension where everybody is a talking duck. Due to a plot device
in a previous comic, he is transported to our world, where, he, er, has
adventures. Writer Steve Gerber admits at one point that he makes the story up
as it goes along, so there is very little structure in these 28 issues.
Characters appear, get forgotten about, and re-appear a dozen issues later:
Howard wanders from Cleveland to New York and back, bumping into minor Marvel
characters and acquiring a non-descript supporting cast but never establishing
much sense of direction.
The comic is touted as being
deeply satirical, with Howard, the outsider providing a broad-brush stroke
critique of directly-post Watergate American society. If this is what Gerber
was setting out to do, then it doesn't work at all. The metaphor that Howard is
an outsider—'funny-animal-in-a-world-of-humans' doesn't really work in a Marvel
Comics setting, where practically everyone is a mutant, alien, or
tights-wearing super dude. Howard's personality is never properly developed.
Although he repeatedly compares the world of 'hairless apes' unfavourably with
his home, the occasional flashbacks suggest that 'duck world' was exactly like
our universe, only with ducks. In truth, we know nothing about what Howard was
doing before the cosmic axis shifted. He is simply a misanthropic Gulliver,
attacking the world of hairless apes and acting as a mouthpiece for Steve
Gerber.
For example, on the 70s fad for
Kung Fu movies:
'Chessh— like you hairless apes haven't screwed up your world
enough. You misrepresent an ancient philosophy, package it as violent entertainment
and sell it to your young to emulate '
And on the life story of a
sympathetic villain.
'I don't blame him for noddin' out. If I had to play by this
world's nutty rules where they penalize you for being clever and reward
mediocrity, and them glamorise the outlaw because he makes it on his own terms,
even if they are stupid and destructive.
These aren't jokes, merely
rants. At one point. due to a 'hilarious' misunderstanding, he becomes a
presidential candidate. Unlike the other candidates, he tells the truth because
he knows that he cannot expect to win. This 'truth' involves staggering
revelations like 'war is bad' 'advertising sometimes does not tell the truth'
and 'the consumer society is not always in our interests'.
'How do you feel, sir, about violence in movies…'
'I'm all for it…as long as it's never presented as cathartic—as
a release, a solution. A kid oughta know what he's gettin' himself into if he's
contemplatin' stabbin' or shootin' someone. It's messy…'
The situation of a candidate fighting
an election which he does not expect to win, and being manipulated by spin
doctors who think that he can, could have resulted in a great deal of situation
comedy. (When Dave Sim did a similar storyline, part of the joke was that
Cerebus was unsophisticated and naïve and could, at times, be manipulated by
Astoria and the rest. Howard, as the writers avatar, is pretty much
omni-competent, seeing through every advertising quack and crank in a couple of
panels.) Gerber seems to think that simply saying 'A duck stood for president' is
funny and satirical.
Howard encounters a steady
stream of absurdist versions of other Marvel characters. Not, at any level,
parodies or caricatures. There is little attempt to explore what was going on
in comics at the time. Gerber expects us to think that the mere existence of,
say, a Vampire Cow, a telepathic turnip or a version of The Punisher called,
get this, The Spanker, are inherently funny even though, once the character is
introduced, the rest of the issue follows the standard, non-humorous pattern of
a Marvel Comics fight scene. The best one can say is that Gerber feels that
orchestrating a Marvel super hero battle using all the usual tropes and conventions,
but having at the center a cartoon duck and, say, a giant beaver, will draw the
our attention to the fact that superheroes are a pretty silly genre to start
with. My guess is that the average reader in the 70s already knew this.
The oddness of the effect is
heightened by the fact that most or many of the issues are drawn by major
comics god Gene Colan, a classic horror comic artists with a broadly
naturalistic style, who doesn't seem to get the joke.
Finally, Gerber seems convinced,
like the ITV Digital monkey, that inserting the word 'Duck' into the title of any
Marvel comic is intrinsically amusing. Hence, we have 'master of quack-fu'
(whose name means 'the rising and advancing of a duck'); 'A duck no more'; 'This
Man, this Duck'; 'Kil-mallard, warrior of Mars'; 'A duck possessed' and so on.
So far, so unremarkable. But
somewhere along the line Gerber seems to realize what the problem is. Howard
the Duck is a comic about comics, and, more bizarrely, a comic
about the process of writing a comic about comics. And from this existential
feedback loop, something actually quite interesting comes inadvertently into
being.
One obvious result of the
comic's self-referentiality is that many of the supporting cast turn out to be
frustrated writers and artists. Several of the villains narrate, in good Marvel
Comics fashion, their life story. This always seems to involve unpopularity at
school, and a failure to achieve a creative occupation. Hence, Paul Same, who
subsequently becomes a continuing supporting character, was not appreciated as
an artistic prodigy as a child, and therefore works out his anger by turning
into a villain each night. A 'hilarious' parody of Doctor Doom called 'Doctor
Bong' was bullied at school, but realized that he could invent better insults
than his tormentors, was kicked out of journalism school, realized that 'the
syntax is mightier than the pen'…you get the idea.. I suppose this is partly a
parody of Stan Lee's 'sympathetic' villain shtick. But you get a much stronger
impression that all the villains are self-characterizations of the author.
The comic gradually cuts all
links with reality, even Marvel Comics reality, and lurches into a sort of
weird abstraction, a closed referential system with no exterior. Howard's
universe becomes such that superheroes are taken for granted and the whole feels
rather like a collection of emblematic sideshow floats. In one issue (#6 'Secret
House of the Forbidden Cookies') we have a Moonie-cult-leader ('Joon Moon Yuc')
trying to buy an old building from an estate agent. The estate agent dresses
like a highwayman, and is called 'Heathcliff Rochester'. The old building
(where Howard's girlfriend Bev has become governess) contains a mad-scientist
who is creating a monster in the basement. This monster looks like a giant
gingerbread man. It isn't remotely funny, but it's very strange.
Howard himself makes a conscious
effort to get away from the role of 'superhero', which fairly clearly
represents Gerber's boredom with the genre. In issue #9 Howard walks out of a
fight with a Canadian super villain in beaver shaped power armour. The
following issue shifts into a dream sequence, with Howard being chased by a
gigantic monkey armed with a rubber stamp marked 'cancellation'. The following
issue has him committed to a mental institution. At this point the comic itself
seems to go mad and we have several issues in which the 'joke' consists of a
voice in Howard's head saying 'piano'. For no reason whatsoever a group of 'demons'
emerge from the mind of a supposedly possessed girl (funny shtick: she talks with
a lithp), said demons looking like Kiss who I understand to have been a
pop group at the time.
These dream sequences and
interior monologues become very much a trademark of the comic, and are some of
the most interesting issues. Considering how surreal the comic has become,
setting the whole thing in a mad-ducks head is a relatively small jump. Defeating
a giant radioactive soap-sud by spraying vinegar on it ('real world') is not
notably less surreal than bumping into all your old enemies in a coffee shop ('dream
sequence'). Left to himself, one feels that Gerber would have filled the comic
with nothing but surreal interior riffs. Graphically speaking, we've gone from 'She
Loves You, Yeah, Yeah' to 'Strawberry Fields' in about ten issues.
The most extreme example of this
self-referential madness comes in issue #16, one of a few comics about which
you can honestly say that nothing like it has been done before or since. It was
relatively common in the 70s for writers or artists to miss deadlines, and for
the comic to be filled with an unscheduled re-print, sometimes dressed up as a
flashback. Gerber, faced (allegedly) with this deadline doom, chooses to fill Howard
#16 with an essay, illustrated by a series of double page spreads by various
(un-credited) artists. Thus, the key issue of this comic about comics turns out
to be the one that is not actually a comic at all!
In this essay, it is made quite
clear that Howard is the sane side of Gerber's mind, nagging him and
encouraging him. Gerber talks about being a writer, and has doubts about
whether his work is worthwhile:
'Plants are like people. Writers are like plants. Therefore, and
this may come as a surprise, writers are like people. Given them light, water,
nourishment, a comfortable pot and an encouraging world and they'll grow….'
Howard cuts through this:
'You've learned how ta manipulate words an' pictures ta give a
semblance of profundity, but it's all superficial'
and gives writers-school advice
'Save theorizn' for the speech communication majors o' the
world….The way ta communicate is just…do it. Free associate. See what ya come
up with. Tell the folks at home a story.'
Significantly, Gerber seems to
recognize the banality of Howard's 'insights. '
Be myself you mean. That's terrific advice Howard. Wowee. Why
didn't I think of that.'
Once the comic has deconstructed
itself to this extent, there is not very much left to do, and we feel a sense
of desperation creeping in. After hearing Gerber tell us that he is in a rut,
isn't sure that what he is doing is profound, and that he makes it all up as he
goes along, it is quite hard to go back to caring about whether Bev is forced
to marry Doctor Bong.
A couple off issues later,
Howard gets temporarily turned into a human, and we have human-Howard walking
around New York being depressed, with duck-Howard in his mind telling him to
snap out of it; pretty much the Gerber / Howard split of the all-text issue.
The final issue in the
compilation has Howard deciding that 'he isn't negative, he's angry,' and that
instead of railing against the world of hairless apes, he is going to do
something about it. This seems to be setting things up to allow Howard to turn
back into a 'conventional' superhero who fights villains rather than tries to
avoid them. (Much the same thing happened in the final issue of Stan Lee's
original Silver Surfer, with the formerly pacifist character
declaring war on the whole human race.)
While I can still read one of
the reprint volumes of Thor or Spiderman in the spirit in which
they were intended, Howard the Duck rather stands as a period piece, a
monolithic slab to where comic books were in the 70s. It is far more rooted in
the 70s than Spiderman is in the 60s: Watergate, Kiss, Star Wars,
Kung Fu, Moonies, colour TVs as a luxury item… It would be interesting to know
what Gerber could have produced without the Roy Thomas - Jim Shooter shackles
of the 'Marvel Universe' to contend with. It's possible that he might have
produced something more like a 'graphic novel'; it's equally possible that he
couldn't have written anything at all without the silliness of editorially
imposed rules to kick against. But the comic is definitely worth reading as a
rambling, up-itself and occasionally funny experimental treatise: there really
isn't anything else like it. It's also nice to be reminded of a time when this
level experimentation was permissible in funny books. If nothing else, it is a
slap in the face for everyone who thinks that comics before the advent of the
Holy Moore consisted of nothing but 'splat' and 'kapow'.
The influence of Howard the
Duck on Cerebus the Aardvark is quite staggering.
I knew, of course, that the
title of Cerebus was partly a joke at the expense of 'silly animal'
comics, and that 'Cerebus the Aardvark' as a title was
almost an attempt to trump Howard the Duck and Gerber's
subsequent Stewart the Rat. (Trumped a few years later
with a Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, or course.) I believe that when
Gerber lost control of Howard,
Dave Sim was considered as a possible replacement on the book.
But almost everything about Cerebus
seems to have its origin in Howard the Duck: the cynical, world-weary
persona, of course, and the central gag about funny animals in a world of
humans. Howard runs for president; Cerebus spends 25 issues
running for prime minister. The Howard-goes-mad issues and the dream sequences
become the 'mind games' motif which gradually became the dominant trope in Cerebus.
(Right down to the disembodied speech bubbles.) Gerber uses blocks of 'screenplay'
to reproduce Howard's election press conferences, just as Sim does for Cerebus.
Howard and Cerebus both end up in dialogues with their creators. Both do the
unthinkable and have issues which consist of nothing but blocks of text. And
Howard is always respectful and tolerant towards his female supporting cast.
Well, okay, the exception proves the rule.