FOREWORD

by JOHN MORROW

I left the original lettering intact.

Although this is a “Graphite Edition,” I strongly felt it was important to show Steve Gerber’s typed synopsis for issue #1, so you can see exactly what Kirby had to pencil from, and how he interpreted it (and added in his own sensibilities). The series was a true collaboration, as you’ll discover here. Want other examples of Steve’s plots, synopses, scripts, and notes? I’ve compiled a free digital PDF download for readers of this book. Get it at: www.twomorrows.com/ media/Gerber.pdf, you lucky duck!

There are at least a couple of thencurrent events that you’ll need to be aware of to fully grasp Steve Gerber’s satire. Just after Destroyer Duck #1 debuted, artist John Byrne wrote an editorial for Comics Scene #2 (March 1982), proudly proclaiming himself a “company man”, saying “I’m a cog in the machine which is Marvel Comics”, and saying creators should be content

Stephen Ross Gerber [right] was born in St. Louis in 1947, grew up there, and fell in love with comic books there. In 1972, he began writing them for Marvel and moved to New York. I vaguely knew his name from the world of fanzines, but our paths did not coincide, and we did not meet until a few years later when he moved to Southern California and rented an apartment in Burbank, a few blocks from the NBC Studios. But I did read some of the comics he wrote and I found them generally clever and refreshing. He came up with new characters and with fresh takes on old characters. Some of the recently-hired writers at Marvel around that time seemed to have as their goal, making their comics as indistinguishable as possible from classic Lee-and-Kirby, Lee-and-Ditko or Lee-and-Anyone-Else. That Gerber guy wrote like that Gerber guy. There was always some clever twist, some human element that took his super-hero and monster stories to another level. At least, I thought so. I think it was in 1976 that I spent a week or so poaching alternately in the Marvel offices and the DC Comics offices in New York... just hanging around, meeting and talking to people. A few people at each office knew me, and the ones who didn’t just seemed to assume I was some new hire who belonged there. One person in the Production Department at Marvel kept giving me little tasks to do like pasting up a text page or proofreading a story. I did not say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t work here.” I went ahead and pasted up the text page or proofread the story.

There was a gent then working for Marvel in roughly the same capacity that I was assumed to be working in. There’s no point in giving his name. Few, if any of you would recognize it. But he didn’t like Steve Gerber, in part for the same reason I liked Gerber’s work: Because it didn’t read like sixties’ Lee-and-Somebody work. That, to me, was a plus. That, to this staffer, was blasphemy. (And the other reason why he didn’t like Gerber’s work was, I suspect, why a lot of people in comics don’t like what others in comics do: Because they covet the job. This guy resented that he was pasting-up text pages and proofreading while Steve was writing The Defenders and Man-Thing and other comics.)

From the moment I chanced to mention to him that I liked Gerber’s writing, he began telling me that Steve Gerber was crazy... and he didn’t mean “crazy” like in “Two wild and crazy guys.” He didn’t mean nice-crazy. He meant “crazy” the way someone is crazy if they get a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 semi-

by MARK EVANIER

automatic rifle, go up in a tower, and start picking off innocent strangers. That kind of crazy.

Having no evidence to the contrary, I guess I believed the guy. I had never met Steve Gerber and I considered myself lucky.

Flash forward a year or three. After every Comic-Con International (which had a different name back then) in San Diego, there’d be an after-party on Sunday evening at the home of MAD cartoonist Sergio Aragonés in Los Angeles. This was a different home than the one he now lives in and he’s now in a different city and he has a different wife. But those were great parties... so great that people who were there in San Diego and otherwise had no reason to go to Los Angeles would drive the many bumper-tobumper hours through Sunday evening traffic on the 5 just to be at Sergio’s for a few hours.

At one of those parties, I found myself happily sitting by the pool, eating Numero Uno pizza and talking with a very smart guy whose name I somehow didn’t catch. He knew who I was but if he’d introduced himself, I’d missed it... and this may have happened to you. You’re talking to someone for so long and having such a good time, you’d be embarrassed to say, “Excuse me, but who are you?”

Finally though, he mentioned something about writing “The Duck” and I knew he didn’t mean Donald or Daffy. He seemed to be talking about Howard the Duck, the suddenly-successful character Steve Gerber had created in one comic with artist Val Mayerik and continued in the Howard the Duck comic book with Frank Brunner and then other artists. At the time, that duck had only been written by Steve Gerber, so I thought, “This couldn’t be him, could it?” I soon realized it was... and he was not crazy. In fact, he turned out to be one of the sanest people I’ve met in 50+ years in the comic book industry. He died in 2008, but still holds that title with me.

That evening at Casa Aragonés, Steve had recently moved to Southern California. He was just settling down in his newly-rented apartment and he mentioned something about needing to go find sheets and bedding for a queen-sized bed. As it happened, I had just upgraded my queen-sized bed to what they call a California King and I had a pile of linens and blankets for which I now had no use. When the party was winding down, Steve followed my car to where I was living and I gave him what I had. We wound up sitting in my living room, talking until 4:00 AM and becoming the best of buddies.

Moral of the story so far: Don’t believe everything that somebody tells you about somebody else. Especially if it’s derogatory. There will be other morals before we get to the end of this, but I’ll let you figure them out.

Not long after that, Steve got into some immense deadline hassles with Marvel over books on which he was writer-editor. All his titles were running late -- some almost fatally so -- and not all of that was his fault. But some of it was. At the same time, he was bickering with Marvel over Howard. Steve had the temerity to suggest that he should own, if not the character itself, then perhaps some percentage of the revenue it was already generating, with more to come. Just a few years later, that would not be an outrageous position for a creator or co-creator to take but at the time, it was like young Oliver Twist asking the proprietors of the orphanage, “Please, sir... may I have some more?” In the book of the same name, Oliver was struck for asking that, thrown in solitary confinement, and there was talk of hanging him.

It wasn’t quite that bad for Steve.

Soon, he was dismissed for lateness... but he was convinced that would not have happened had he not raised the ownership question. And he was also convinced he needed to sue over custody of that duck.

I introduced him to my attorney, Henry W. Holmes... famed in song and story. I’d been introduced to Henry by the noted author, Mr. Harlan Ellison. Harlan was (of course) a fine writer and often a litigious one, and when Harlan prevailed in one of his legal skirmishes, he did not keep the outcome confidential. He wrote eloquently and triumphantly about it... which means he wrote about Henry. I found H.W.H. to be not only a great lawyer, but a great friend... with a genuine love of creative people and a defender of their rights. His client list included many famous names, almost all of whom paid him way more money than Steve ever did... or for that matter, I ever did. That didn’t matter with Henry; not if he liked you, not if he felt you’d been cheated or wronged and he could put things right.

Henry studied Steve’s situation and decided that there was an injustice there and a solid, winnable case that might right that wrong. But he did caution Steve that taking on Marvel Comics would not be cheap... and I suspect even Henry, wise as he was, may have underestimated how “not cheap” it would be.

And as the case proceeded, there came a day when Steve’s legal bills were reaching unexpected heights. He began talking about a growing need to abandon the fight... and not because he feared he would lose. That, he knew from Day One, was always possible. He began considering abandoning the cause because he could not afford to stay in the fight long enough to win. In the American legal system, it is not an uncommon situation when someone with shallow pockets goes mano-a-mano with someone who has deep ones. Even one particular court decision in Gerber’s favor -- the judge sanctioning Marvel for stalling tactics and ordering them to pay Steve some money -- did not whittle down his bill enough.

He was making good money with his writing at the time. I was then running the comic book division for Hanna-Barbera Studios, preparing material that Marvel was publishing in a series of comics featuring H-B characters... and on a grander scale, preparing material for overseas publication only. Steve came in as my assistant and I gave him numerous writing assignments on the foreign books and one on the H-B books published by Marvel. It was credited to “Reg Everbest,” which was Steve’s name, neatly-anagrammed. We did that because a Marvel staffer, who I guess considered it treason to sue the company that paid him, was reportedly going around, announcing to everyone that Steve Gerber’s work would never ever again appear in any Marvel publication. Well, it did that month. (And his writing appeared in other Marvel books years later with the letters of his name in the proper sequence. That was after the suit was -- SPOILER ALERT! -- settled.)

I also introduced Steve to Joe Ruby, co-founder with Ken Spears of the Ruby-Spears Animation firm, and Steve began writing for them. He started with a script for the Plastic Man cartoon series on ABC’s Saturday morning schedule. Joe liked it and Steve soon went on staff there and was an enormous asset, especially by launching a series called Thundarr the Barbarian. Most of the design work on that show was done by a man named Jack Kirby [left, in 1980]

But even with that work and income, Steve was not earning enough money. His case may not have been a losing battle, but making payments on the bill was, and he was seriously into debt to