The Duck Who Scolded Me
Of all the Marvel characters Gerber wrote, it is Howard the Duck who is most often mentioned in connection with his name. This makes sense. Unlike Man-Thing or most of the Defenders, Howard was his co-creation (with artist Val Mayerik). Unlike Omega, he had the chance to be developed in ongoing storylines that were most resolved by Gerber’s departure. Unlike all of them, he was briefly a mass-culture phenomenon, thanks to the gimmick of having Howard run for president in 1976.
Most important: unlike Man-Thing and Omega, Howard the Duck was an inveterate talker. Gerber’s other comics were replete with clever chatterboxes (Richard Rory in Man-Thing; Nighthawk and Jack Norris in The Defenders; Amber and Dian in Omega; Vance Astro in Guardians of the Galaxy), but the Howard the Duck comic was the only one that put this sort of character front and center. It’s not that the attitude of Howard the Duck was absent from Gerber’s other work, but rather that it was either distributed and parceled out (on the team books), delivered by proxy (on Man-Thing), or floating somewhat freely from the enigmatic leads (Omega). A certain point of view was always central to most of Gerber’s Marvel comics; in Howard the Duck, that point of view, that voice, and that consciousness were all united in the figure of the protagonist. As such, Howard the Duck functioned as a testing ground for Gerberian subjectivity, with every obstacle serving as an assault on this authorial sensibility. Rick Hudson hit the nail on the head when he classified Howard the Duck as Menippean satire.
Howard’s sarcasm, anger, pessimism, and (literal) misanthropy do not sound like they would make a winning formula, yet the comic had a serious cult following. His grumpy alienation made him the heir of the moribund underground comics movement, whose antisocial protagonists rarely tried to win friends and influence people. Howard also had a bit in common with fellow Cleveland curmudgeon Harvey Pekar, whose American Splendor would finally gain broader attention years after Gerber’s comic folded. As for his heirs, the protagonists of the alternative comics of the 1990s, from Daniel Clowes' Enid in Ghost World and the eponymous star of David Boring, to the perpetually furious Buddy Bradley of Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff, all share Howard’s jaded hostility to varying degrees.
Where Howard differs (particularly from Buddy Bradley) is in the delicate combination of his acerbic wit and his inherent kindness. In the very last issue of his original run on Howard the Duck (27), Gerber has Howard declare, “I’m not negative—I’m angry!” But really, he is both. More to the point, Howard’s constant carping and sniping are connected to the characteristic that makes him the embodiment of the true satiric impulse: Howard is disappointed. He lives in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction with a world not just that he never made, but that continually fails to meet his basic standards of logic and decency.
Even his self-destructive impulses are thwarted by the world’s unwillingness to satisfy minimal expectations. Howard is unique among Marvel characters in starting the first page of his book’s very first issue in a self-destructive spiral:
“Behold: a depressed duck
Twice he had saved the city of Cleveland [..]
And what thanks does he get? Jail the first time, benign neglect, the second.
Now homeless, penniless, he stands on the bank fo the Cuyahoga River, contemplating—“
Howard: “—suicide? Yeah. Well. Maybe."
Vacillating between ending it all and simply taking “a little dip,” Howard finds little help from the Cuyahoga River (famous for having actually caught fire): the water is too disgusting for either. When he sees a tower made of credit cards, he decides to climb it in order to jump off, but this just leads to a series of adventures that include meeting his companion Beverly Switzler, and ultimately leaping from the tower in order to save someone else’s life rather than end his own (he survives, of course).
The next few issues have their share of action, but where Howard truly excels is critique; of the melodramatic literary aspirations of one of Beverly’s friends (issue 2), of the pretensions of the art world (issue 4), and, most strikingly, of a popular culture that turns violence into entertainment. Issue 3 (“Four Feathers of Death”) is a bare-bones Shang-Chi parody that takes on the conventions of the then-current martial arts fad, but also, by extension, the brutal logic of the superhero comics in which Howard finds himself. Kung Fu movies “misrepresent an ancient philosophy, package it as a violent entertainment—you sell it to your young to emulate!” When a melee breaks out in a diner after the movie, only he and Beverly have the sense to try to deescalate the conflict, and, failing that, save the teenage boy stabbed during the fighting. Later in the comic, Howard learns “Quack Fu,” but his real weapon is the one he will wield throughout the series: fearlessly haranguing people for their bad behavior. When the crowd around the dying boy won’t disperse to give him air, Howard shouts, “I’m only gonna say this once: Back off! You are all behaving abominably!…/C’mon—be good sheep. Ba-a-ack! Ba-a-a-ck!”
Howard is an unrelenting scold, but without being a humorless killjoy. It all works because of his wit, and because the Howard the Duck comics are populated with characters deserving of his scorn. Nor should we ignore the waterfowl in the room: it works because he is a duck. And not just a duck: a cartoony figure in a basically realistic world. The fact that the words issue from the beak of a “funny animal” softens the blow, and yet the visual contrast between Howard and the humans around him belies the comic’s moral hierarchy of ducks and humans. It is the people he encounters who are caricatures, and whose beliefs and actions invite ridicule, while Howard is more complex and more fully realized.