WHAT’S SO ESSENTIAL ABOUT… ESSENTIAL HOWARD THE DUCK?
WHAT’S SO ESSENTIAL ABOUT… ESSENTIAL HOWARD THE DUCK?
Halfway through the book, when he misses an issue and submits a long freeform essay in its place, Gerber freely admits that the next-issue box is as great a mystery for him as it is for the rest of humanity. So far, so every other comic – but there’s something in ESSENTIAL HOWARD that screams it from day one, as the Duck bounces like a pinball from one ‘wacky’ foe to the next, all with something to half-say about the state of the Earth and American Society circa 19seventywhenever. Starting off as just another half-humourous oddity in Man-Thing, a comic crawling with them, something about the personality of the protagonist – i.e, the first recorded Marvel Hero to actually think and talk like a normal human being, if not act like one – obviously captured ‘the fans’ enough to give him a series, and then to prolong it.
Indeed, the best bits of this odd number are the bits where Howard doesn’t have to jump about fighting the villain-of-the-month or guest-starring with the hero-of-the-moment, but is free to wander around being himself. He gets about a page and a half per issue for this and spends it displaying an intelligence that is sorely missing in every other character in the book – and, I suspect, in the entirity of late-70′s comics up to Daredevil or so. He hogs personality like bad webcomic characters hog blankets – his Dr Who-like companions are left with little to go on save an ‘artistic’ temperament, an unfunny speech defect or, in long-running foil Bev’s case, a vaguely confused 1970′s attitude to what makes a ‘healthy’ sexuality. Essentially, her thing is she’s fucking a waterfowl – for the rest, you might as well flip to any page in a Luke Reinhart novel. (On a side note, surely the most overrated and egomaniacal author ever to walk the planet.)
At this time, though, this would have been completely revolutionary – an attempt to bring the vaguely anarchic spirit of the undergrounds, packaged and Marvelised and then made as unsafe again as possible by the buzzing, questing Gerber, to be brought to newsstands frequented by college students struggling to justify their taste for the illiterate. Despite the somewhat dated elements, it’s schizophrenic, electrifying stuff which makes a lot of today’s comics look sick.
Best scene would be when, in the course of some adventure or other, Howard becomes a human being, and, for a blessed half-issue or so, we get a glimpse of something truly magnificent – the saga of a badly-dressed man who looks a lot like Chico Marx slouching about misanthropically, having adventures no more ‘super’ or less interesting than a real city could provide.
Too good to last, by the end of the issue he’s randomly become a duck again… and somehow, after that, the pages turn a little faster. The peak has been reached. So much for the seventies.
Vic Fluro in The Brown Wedge • 323 views