Ecce homo, baby.
If, like me, you’d been reading Steve Gerber’s weblog, you’d have known that his health was suffering of late. Pulmonary fibrosis isn’t something that magically goes away, short of a double lung transplant. That’s not exactly a walk in the park, but I’ve seen folks walk away from a transplant better than they started out, so, like a fool, I’d held out hope that Mr. Gerber would turn it around. He’d had some close calls before, and there didn’t seem to be much reason to think this one was different, given the casual voice he’d used in his weblogging.
And reading it, you wanted to believe that he was going to knock this thing out. I wanted to believe it, anyways. If for no other selfish reason than he’d be well enough to write again, and assumedly be deriving whatever pleasure he could from the act. When his health allowed, he seemed to have found a good working relationship over at DC, who even allowed for a second season of HARD TIME in the face of uninspiring sales (it was the only survivor of the Focus line of DC sci-fi/superhero books) and gave the series an opportunity to wrap up with as much grace as could be mustered. A well-deserved tip of the hat to Paul Levitz there, who I’m convinced lobbied hard on the book’s behalf.
HARD TIME was one of the few times I had the pleasure of following Mr. Gerber’s work in a month-to-month basis. When I’d discovered his work by way of HOWARD THE DUCK, it was long past its original run relegated to warehouse clearances and back-issue bins. I didn’t even know he’d written any DEFENDERS books until after I’d gotten a hold of his HOWARD run in Essentials form. And here I just blogged something about those a couple weeks back.
Having read those, alongside MAN-THING, I’m convinced that without Steve Gerber’s work, authors like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison would have had a much, much harder time of getting their skewed stories into the US comic market. And without Mr. Gerber’s rabble-rousing and stink-raising regarding creator’s rights, we’d be years behind on these issues. I’ll even go so far as to suggest that the Image revolution wouldn’t have happened without the platform that Mr. Gerber built up. HOWARD THE DUCK had become a cautionary tale for a generation of creators. If Marvel could bald-facedly strip Steve Gerber of the rights to Howard, then maybe everyone had better watch what they do for the Company. That lesson was not lost on creators, and the backlash, to a large degree, still cripples the output of the Big Two (well, that and a steadfast desire to polish the franchises rather than expand them). But still, Mr. Gerber fought battles so that others could recognize that there was a battle to even fight.
But back to his storytelling for a moment. What really made his work stand out from his contemporaries was Mr. Gerber’s interest in the heart that beat beneath the invulnerable shell of the super-hero. He was interested in the human part of the super-human equation, even to the point where the “super” part was pushed aside. I can’t imagine reading, say, WATCHMEN, with its focus on secondary, human characters, without Steve Gerber having made his career on doing the same thing. MAN-THING was never really about Ted Sallis; it was about the constellation of characters that surrounded the muck beast in the Florida swamp. THE DEFENDERS was more about the humans under the masks than it was epic cosmic adventure (though he didn’t skip on the latter). HOWARD THE DUCK was far more a book about humans (even ones covered in feathers) than just freaky adventures. In that, HOWARD read as much like an homage to FURRY FREAK BROTHERS or WONDER WART-HOG as it did a mainstream Marvel book.
And Mr. Gerber’s overlooked grim take on THE FOOLKILLER (a character he himself invented) is about nothing more than choosing life in the face of an overwhelming and all-encompassing sense of nihilism. Written in the early part of the 90s, during the swelling wave of “gritty realism” that was washing over mainstream comics, FOOLKILLER did the “common man’s revenge” story, but refused to do it straight. Instead of embracing self-destruction, as we’re led to believe is all but inevitable for the Foolkiller, he’s brought to embrace life and change, and yes even pain. Instead of being allowed to remain an unfeeling killing machine, the Foolkiller is made to grow up; a lesson that could stand a little more learning.
I look at this and find my own words inadequate in describing my feelings towards the man and his work. He fought the same battles that we’re still fighting today, in terms of comics readership and public perception. Read the interview with him that’s reprinted in THE COMICS JOURNAL LIBRARY: THE WRITERS and it all sounds eerily the same. Which is sad, when you think about it, since that interview was probably some twenty-five years ago. We’re still the same humans muddling through the same sets of problems and challenges. Which is why Steve Gerber’s work still resonates today, even past the topical references (satire has a somewhat problematic shelf-life) and the prose-heavy style of the day. Look past that, though, and Mr. Gerber still delivers a sense of wonder and power in his stories about all the superpeople who are still struggling with their state of ecce homo, dig?
And I can’t help but think that life is still unfair, in that I can eat my dinner and bathe my kids and write this out on my computer, but Steve Gerber can’t. My hope is that he’s plugged into something bigger than himself now, bigger than himself but not so big he can’t remember what he came from.
Yeah, still unfair. But that’s the hand we get dealt.