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Some of you know that my favorite comics are early to mid-70s Marvel. I picked up a couple of cool collections within the last month, but time has been in short supply, so I’ve just been picking at them. With Thanksgiving out of the way, I plan to dig deeply into both.

The Man-Thing book is the first volume of a series collecting Steve Gerber’s work on the swamp monster. Gerber was wildly original, and even early in the book you can watch him crank up the crazy. During this period, Marvel published out a lot of books with the only the lightest editorial interference, leading to an anything-can-happen vibe. This is most apparent in Gerber’s work.

The other book is the massive Werewolf by Night Omnibus, an oversized thick tome (over 1100 pages) collecting the horror/superhero series. A variety of writers worked on this, Doug Moench being one of the best and the one who stuck around the longest. The early issues have terrific Mike Ploog art (he’s also in the Man-Thing collection, and worked on early Ghost Rider and The Monster of Frankenstein for Marvel). I also have a real fondness for the art of Don Perlin. He stuck around Marvel for a long time and did solid work on Ghost Rider.

So excuse me while I plug in the lava lamp and travel back to the early 70s, when gas was cheap and so were the comics.

Goodbye, Steve Gerber

This is a lousy day.

I had to drive in to work in the middle of the night through several inches of snow and ice, only to find the heat in the office was out. Again. Further work problems ensued, then I had to go to a funeral.

But that’s not what made today such a chunk of suck.

When I got up this morning, I found out via The Comics Reporter that Steve Gerber was dead.

His pal Mark Evanier memorializes Gerber here.

I didn’t know Gerber. I’d never met him or corresponded with him. I was just a fan.

He was the best writer at my favorite comics company during my favorite era in comics.

I was a Marvel boy, and the 70s were a good time to be a Marvel fan. Distribution limits had been lifted, and Marvel was expanding their line faster than George W. Bush can violate the constitution. As a result, there were too many books for The House of Idea’s small staff to oversee. By default, Marvel did something which would be unheard of in today’s comics world: they found writers they trusted, then turned the writers loose.

Nearly total freedom resulted in some of the most creative work in the history of the medium, stuff like Don MacGregor’s Black Panther and War of the Worlds, Doug Moench’s Master of Kung Fu, Moon Knight and Planet of the Apes, Marv Wolfman’s Dracula stuff (and, yes, even as a dumb kid I thought it was cool that Dracula was being written by a Wolfman) and Jim Starlin’s cosmic Warlord and Captain Marvel.

But nothing compared to the writing Gerber was doing. He didn’t create Daredevil, Sub-Mariner, Man-Thing or The Defenders, but he made them his own, especially the last two. Gerber imbued them with absurdist hijinks and a rare-for-the-times sense of political relevance.

He did create Howard the Duck. The anthropomorphic fowl remains Gerber’s best known creation. He also brought forth the tragically brief Void Indigo, a series that was decades ahead of its time. Too bad Vertigo didn’t exist in the 1970s.

Gerber eventually left Marvel on unfriendly terms, moving to other companies and animation.

Though many of his colleagues are MIA (Moench, Engelhart), Gerber continued to turn out mainstream comics work. He was writing a Dr. Fate script for DC in the hospital in the days before his passing. He remained creatively and hilariously subversive right up to the end.

Kudos to Marvel for getting a lot of Gerber’s 70s stuff back in print. Tonight I’ll sit down with volumes of Essential Defenders and Essential Howard the Duck, and I’ll remember one of the best.