R.I.P.

Damn! Not a musician, but (sometimes) as rock & roll as a non-musician could be.

[www.avclub.com]

[www.comicsreporter.com]

He created the Kidney Lady, one of the best villains of all time.

"Howard the Duck and Mr. Stress both stayed/trapped in a world that they never made/ but not me, baby, I had to fuck off" - Crissie Hynde



Post Edited (02-12-08 21:20)

I saw that yesterday too. I have very fond memories of reading Man-Thing, the Defenders and Howard the Duck in the 70s - mindblowers all with Mr. Gerber at the helm. I dug Void Indigo, too. It's a damn shame.

Did Void Indigo last more than two issues?

I think it was the graphic novel and 2 issues, none of which I have anymore.

One of the articles mentions that it was so shocking at the time some distributors refused to carry it. I don't remember it being that graphic - certainly not as graphic as some comics that came after (like Howard Chaykin's Black Kiss), or even contemporary ones like Coyote. Maybe time has blurred the naughtiest bits of my memory.

I had the Stewart the Rat graphic novel and an issue of Destroyer Duck back then as well.

I know I have the Void Indigo graphic novel around, and I probably have the two issues (there were exactly two) of the comic. I was giving it time because of the quality of the creators, but... it was pretty vile.

If you need 'em, I would be more than happy to part with them.

Different creator, but I'm still waiting for issue 3 of Big Numbers.

I just found out Marshall Rogers, another great comics talent that came to prominence in the same era as Gerber, died a year ago of a heart attack.

Jaysus, who's next - Jim Starlin? Steve Englehart?

If Starlin dies, he'll just pop up again 5-6 years later (bad geek Captain Mar-vell/Adam Warlock joke).

Shameless plug -- Buy Green Lantern Corps -- my friend's writing it, and it's really good.

You can get the entire HTD original run in a black and white collection from Marvel, but the giant space (anteater?) just won't look the same.

Yeah, I've seen those B&W collections. I suppose they're good for the price, but I'd much rather have them in color, the way they were intended to be seen. Maybe someday.

If Starlin dies, I'm sure he'll have killed himself in some sort of convoluted time-travel suicide, in order to prevent himself from becoming a mad god. (I see your comic geekiness and raise you a back issue.)

Pip the Troll sends regards.

Whatever happened to Pip, Gamora and the rest? I got out of comics after the late 80s, saw a little bit of the Warlock and the Infinity Watch thing, got back into 'em a few years ago but am mostly out again.

I would give my eye teeth for a comprehensive collection of the Starlin Warlock/Thanos comics.

Pip the Troll (and Howard the Duck, for that matter) recently appeared in SHE-HULK.

God (or Allen Moore) forgive me for knowing that.

Is She-Hulk still doing that satirical, fourth wall-breaking, metacomic thing? Pip and Howard are perfect for that.

You mean Alan Moore?

Yeah, that guy.

SHE-HULK was still fairly satirical (I haven't checked out a copy for months) but not fourth-wall breaking to the extent it was when John Byrne wrote it back in the 80s, which I always thought was more clumsy than clever. He was going for a MOONLIGHTING feel, but was too much of an old crank even back then to make it work.

They're going to talk about Steve Gerber on TALK OF THE NATION this hour on NPR. Neil Conan seems to drag comics on that show fairly often, but hell - he was a recurring character in the X-Men back in the 80s.

Good lord, please stop me before I become an even bigger geek than I already am.

The original Starlin Warlock run (Magus/Soul-Gem/Thanos) is collected in 6 full-color Warlock "Special Editions" from the 80's. You can usually find them as a group on Ebay for pretty cheap, but not right now, apparently (I looked). I gave away most of my comics in the late 80's, but not those (or the Micronauts reprints (uber-geek here)). They still work pretty well, even after Marvel brought every damned character back to life in the 90's. The new She-Hulk series is pretty good, though. Best is the issue where she's trying some super-criminal who time travels, so they have to bring in a jury that's from different times. One member is Hawkeye, who had just died, and the entire issue is She-Hulk having to keep from telling him what's going to happen to him down the road.

And keeping with Marvel tradition, Hawkeye's back, too.

Do we open a new "Ultra-Geek" thread after this?

Hopefully, new reprints will contain blank pages between the end of the run and the beginning of the new run. Y'know, like those Ryko Costello CD's.

Well, hell, if you want to get geeky let's get geeky. The Micronauts was written by Bill Mantlo at roughly the same time he was taking over Howard the Duck from Gerber, who'd burned out big time by then. Mantlo's Micronauts was terrific stuff, his version of Howard not so much. Although in the black & white magazine incarnation, he kept finding reasons for Beverly Switzler to be naked, which was a development I was much in favor of in high school. Plus, he also namedropped Devo and the Talking Heads a few times, which was pretty cool to see in a comic back then. But overall, his version of Howard was pretty weak.

Poor Mantlo - I think he's in a persistent vegetative state after a car accident many years ago.



Post Edited (02-14-08 19:26)

Now that you mention it, the first time I was really aware of Elvis Costello was when Peter Parker declared that Oliver's Army was his favorite song in some issue or another of one of the many Spidey titles.

I loved Mantlo's Micronauts as well. Not to mention his Rom: Spaceknight (which most people won't admit publicly), and his run on The Incredible Hulk is still my favorite. It's a shame about his accident.

His Howard was...OK, but it didn't have the spark of genius of Gerber's. I imagine he was assigned the title and did the best he could.

I remember a Spider-Man from back in the 70s where Peter declared that Aretha Franklin was his favorite singer. I seem to recall Mary Jane making fun of him for that.

Since we are outing ourselves as geeks, I used to own (and may still--though I don't know where it would be) a page of original art from Rom: Spaceknight. It was not an outstanding page. I just thought it would be cool to own a page of original art. I believe Pat Broderick was penciller. I'm not sure who the inker was.

The Micronauts comics were often very good.

Pat was the man for a while -- drawing Micronauts, Green Lantern, and Captain Marvel at the same time. ROM was a great comic, too. Bill Mantlo is indeed in a vegetative state, and needs donations to help out. There's a chairty comic collection you can buy to do so.
[www.sleepinggiantcreations.com]
Marvel was horrid to work for and did not help out its artists after they left the fold. Before his death, Dave Cockrum, the creator of Nightcrawler and orig. New X-Men artist, had to continually ask for money to help with his diabetes.

Mantlo and Herb Trimpe were the guys Marvel threw all their movie/toy adaptations to, and they usually did great stuff.

To try and inject some music into this - Hypnolovewheel has a song on "Space Mountain" called Cosmic Cube. When I saw that, I thought it can't be about the AIM superweapon but sure enough it was. The song namechecks Thor and Antman as well!

On Pop Will Eat Itself's Can U Dig It?, for a long time I was puzzled about the chorus: "V for Vendetta/Alan Moore knows the score". I didn't know who the hell Alan Moore was and figured it must be some English thing. Years later, I think Moore can do no wrong - so I guess he really does know the score.

and to bring it back around to TP, Steven Grant - longtime TP writer back in the day - wrote Howard for a while after Gerber stopped the first time.

I think Grant wrote one of the best post-Gerber Howard stories - a parody of It's a Wonderful Life where a suicidal Howard is shown that everyone he knows would actually be much better off if he'd never lived, but then he feels so sorry for his pathetic guardian angel that he decides not to kill himself after all. It was one of the few non-Gerber Howard the Duck stories that managed to really catch the same spirit as Gerber's stories.

Otherwise, I seem to recall that Marvel kind of screwed Grant over when he wrote Howard, as they held his stuff in inventory for years, then by the time they finally published it, all the topical humor he'd written into the stories was irrelevant.

Grant used to have (and maybe still does have) a great column on one of the comics websites. I used to read it regularly more for his political commentary than his comics opinions. With his spirit and intelligence, I can see how he'd've been a great music critic.

grant, in his day, has been an astute music and film critic.

This from a real outsiders point of view, me and mines included think with, regards to readin' Mr. Grant's interview w/ Mr. Robbins as the most informative narrative format question and answer available on record.

Ask for it through your local DSL subscriber today.

Just remember that the more you feel you know, the less people feel inclined to listen.

And another dead cartoonist is taken far too seroiusly.



Post Edited (02-17-08 02:43)

Here you go...

[cgi.ebay.com]

Enjoy.