The sad news came in today that comics revolutionary Steve Gerber has passed away. If you visit his blog, you can see that he was talking to his fans as recently as eight days ago, working on Doctor Fate despite his medical problems.
I think Howard the Duck would be the first time I came across Gerber. It was the 1970s and I was pretty young when I read it, but I could tell that there was something very different about it compared to the other Marvel stories I was reading, something very cool. Howard was a book which I appreciated more as I got older, and it’s one that’s aged very well indeed.
Reading some obituaries of him this morning, here and here, I see that Gerber was reaching out to fellow enthusiasts and fanzine producers like Roy Thomas back in the early 1960s I suppose it would be. I guess apart from that being where he got the underground vibe that served him so well in his career on titles like The Defenders, I’m always impressed by stuff like that, because we take it for granted the way we can easily connect with other fans, and indeed creators, because of the Internet.
These fanzines were the forerunners to our online communities and the efforts of these guys to get connected with each other, write about comics and produce their own stuff shows how much love they had for the medium and we all owe them a little debt for establishing those tentative links that have blossomed out into our online forums.
Fellow creators like Mark Evanier, Gail Simone and Mark Millar have been talking about Gerber today.
If you go to this link on Gerber’s blog, you can read comments from even more people, like Paul Levitz, Jim Salicrup, Steve Leialoha, Danny Fingeroth, Paul Kupperberg, all of whom remember him with fondness.
Condolences to his family and friends.
1 Comment
February 12, 2008 at 10:50 pm
RIP Steve Gerber. I have to agree, his stories were great. I have read a few stories from the 70s thanks to TPBs, and his stories certainly were different; they had a unique energy to them.