Who's Who In The CBU Update 2008
Who are... Park and Barb?
Barbara Lien-Cooper writes the comic GUN STREET GIRL at Panel 2 Panel, was an original founder of Sequential Tart, is the managing editrix of the 2004 Eisner award-winning print magazine COMIC BOOK ARTIST, and was named by Mark Millar (The Authority, Ultimates, Wanted) as one of the three most promising new talents in the next wave of comics writing.
Park Cooper started writing about comics at the now-defunct DC FANZINE website.
The Grapes of Waaaugh
When I was a child, through sheer providence, I discovered a bunch of old Howard the Duck comics. I knew they were too mature for me, being a kid of eight or nine. But that was what made them so exciting. Here were these incredible comics that didn't seem to have had their origins in the Golden Age or the Silver Age, but leapt from the head of an actual author. Before Steve Gerber, I thought comics were like Topsy---they just "growed". Howard taught me that authors, talented ones with unique imaginations, were behind the curtain, so to speak.
I didn't understand about 2/3rds of the jokes in the work. For instance, the significance of a character named Dr. Bong totally flew over my head in terms of the drug reference. All I saw was that Marvel villains, which could be rather bizarre and silly in the 1970s, were being and could be spoofed. From Howard, I learned that comics could make surreal commentaries on real life (from paying the rent to Presidential Campaigns), that comics could be whip-smart, they could be for older readers, and that comics could be downright weird in the right hands.
Howard was Lewis Black in a duck suit, a duck-man that saw the world too clearly, which constantly (and quite amusingly for the readership) enraged him. As life goes on, I understand that rage…sometimes I often share it when it comes to the insanity and stupidity I see in the world. But at the time, I saw Howard as a sane person in an insane world…okay, a sane duck, but still. I liked him a lot.
Then, one issue, something changed. Howard wasn't funny any more. The comic wasn't electrifying or nutty or mature or any of the things I knew it could be. It took a few issues worth of reading before I got why. Steve Gerber was no longer writing it.
I couldn't understand why. It was his book. His name was in the credits. Howard didn't come from the Golden or Silver Age. He was Steve Gerber's! How could a person bring a comic character to life, then no longer be its author? It didn't make sense to me as a kid…and barely does as an adult.
Howard the Duck, which had taught a precocious little kid so many lessons about what I later recognized as surrealism and postmodernism (high modernism?), taught me a harsh real-life lesson--a lesson that as an adult and as a comics creator myself, I have never forgotten: If it's not creator-owned, it can be taken away from you. Now, I wasn't there. I was just a kid. Marvel might have had valid reasons for its decision to replace an author with another author. It's all in the past, right? An old, possible injustice that no one cares about, right?
Well, just like some comics fans still feel that pain in their heart about Gwen Stacy's death, the kid in me still feels frustration about what happened to Steve Gerber. And like a whiny kid, all I can say is, all these years later, "It wasn't fair!"
For some reason, thinking about what happened to Steve Gerber reminds me of a scene from the Grapes of Wrath where a banker forecloses on a farmer's land. The farmer says…
Muley Graves: "There ain't nobody gonna push me off my land! My grandpa took up this land 70 years ago, my pa was born here, we were all born on it. And some of of us was killed on it! ...and some of us died on it. That's what make it our'n, bein' born on it...and workin' on it...and and dying' on it! And not no piece of paper with the writin' on it!"
But that's not the way it is when comics aren't creator-owned. One's dedication to the land don't make it our'n. A piece of paper with the writin' on it does---called a work-for-hire contract.
It was a hell of a lesson for a child to learn, that something that mattered to an author and a readership could be taken away to become just another piece of intellectual property.
Perhaps Steve Gerber was the first modern martyr in the battle for fairness to authors, a cautionary tale as to why creator rights can be so important.
I wish I could say something profound about Steve Gerber's death beyond that I loved his work and I mourn his passing.
But all I can say is a word. Not even a word, but a sound, a series of letters that are nonsensical, but portray the outrage and frustration Howard himself often vented towards us "hairless apes".
All I can say is Waaaugh!
Steve Gerber, I hope, will rest in peace. I also hope that his creation will be allowed to rest in peace with him because no one, no matter how talented or how respectful of Howard or Steve, can write Howard like his creator did. But that probably won't happen. Howard is now permanently trapped in a world he never made: he's now part of the 5000 pieces of intellectual property that Marvel owns, which probably means no rest for the weary.
At least Mr. Gerber won't have to see what the results might be the way he had to in life.
Try to sleep well, Mr. Gerber.