Friends and fans of Steve Gerber around the internet are posting their thoughts and memories about the man that brought us Howard the Duck, Omega the Unknown and Thundarr the Barbarian:

“Within a year’s time I was a serious fan girl, with long boxes and a subscription to THE BUYER’S GUIDE, as it was then known. I knew which issue The Vulture had debuted in and who inked Thor #232. While I filled my mind with all that useless information there was one other thing that I knew for sure: any comics that had ‘Written by Steve Gerber’ in the credits was going to be good. It was going to be more than good. It was going to be a story that was funny, dark, exciting and filled with a knowledge of the mysteries of the human heart that no other writer of the time could match.”

Heidi McDonald

“Steve Gerber was a giant. Is a giant.”

–Warren Ellis

“In the seventies, when New York comic professionals were banding together to find ways to elevate the stature of the field and the living standards of its practitioners, Steve was at the nexus of so many of those efforts. When Steve was involved in his lawsuit with Marvel, many fellow professionals rallied around him with loans and gifts of cash and some of us put together a benefit comic book, Destroyer Duck, to raise money. People did that because they knew, first of all, that Steve was fighting not just for his own financial reasons but for matters of principle relating to how the comic book industry treated its creators. That some of the more pernicious business practices soon went away had a lot to do with Steve taking the stand he did. Also, those who knew Steve knew that when you were in need, he would do anything to help. He was, in every sense of the word, a friend.”

–Mark Evanier

“Steve Gerber’s role as one of the best and emblematic writers of his generation can’t be understated. He was a crucial figure in comics history. Like some of the all-time great cartoonists of years past, Gerber carved a place for self-expression and meaning out of a type of comic that had no right to hold within itself so many things and moments that were that quirky and offbeat and delicately realized — except that Gerber made it so.”

–Tom Spurgeon

“… Steve Gerber and Archie Goodwin and Len Wein were the three people who made me want to write comics. And of the three of them, Steve’s comics were the quirkiest, the most personal, the coolest. When I grow up, I thought, if I’m lucky, I’ll write comics like that.”

–Neil Gaiman

“One of my all-time favorite comic book writers died this week. Steve Gerber, who for years stood head and shoulders above most everyone else working in mainstream comics, and whose audacious imagination and gift for scathing satire remain unrivaled even today.”

–Jason Aaron

“I was spoiled; my first real exposure to Gerber’s work (little did I know that as a child I had been subverted by his writing on G.I. Joe and The Transformers) was Marvel’s Essential Howard the Duck in early 2002, collecting nearly Gerber’s entire run, from Howard’s first appearance in Adventure Into Fear #19 to Howard the Duck #27. I absorbed it gluttonously. As satire, it’s not terribly deep, but it’s astute. Like the rest of Gerber’s work that I’ve read, as well as his interviews and blog, it cut through the bullshit.”

–Brendan Wright

“As a kid, I was aware that Gerber’s work was different from anyone else’s at Marvel, I guess everyone had to be aware of that, as he satirized superheroes, religion, rock music, cults, game shows, space opera, comics, etc, while writing about such things as Kyle Richmond carrying his brain around in a bedpan, a scientist with an ape’s body, the Soofi soap cult, the Badoon aliens and their game shows, The kidney-obsessed Kidney Lady, The Celestial Man who was actually a Cthulhian nightmare, the Elf that murdered folks and never actually encountered the Defenders, giant attacking salt shakers, Space Turnips, a duck running for President, etc. You never knew what the hell was coming up next in those titles, and I was crazy about those books.”

–Evan Dorkin

“And this is all the impetus I need to step away from the computer, open up the longbox next to me and reread one of my favorite single issues of any comic ever created, Steve Gerber’s Man-Thing #5, ‘Night of the Laughing Dead’.

“I love the writing in this story so much that I own six copies of it. In fact, I can’t help buying another copy whenever I run across it at conventions. It felt like a literary masterpiece when I first read it decades ago, and continues to feel that way to this day.”

–Rick Marshall

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Creators, Quote Unquote. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.