A piece of my childhood is gone

COMIC book writer Steve Gerber is dead at age 60. Fuck.

He wrote some of my favourite titles in the 1970s, particularly The Defenders, where he gave Doc Strange and company such oddballs to deal with as the Elf With A Gun (below).

His satiric, oddball run on titles like Man-Thing and his most famous creation, Howard The Duck, were also pretty cool. Howard was the first "adult" comic I read - I'll always fondly remember the cigar-smoking fowl's run for US President in 1976.

Apart from Howard, Gerver created and wrote a bunch of titles for various companies including Omega The Unknown, Destroyer Duck (drawn by Jack Kirby) and Void Indigo. They were hit and miss.

I communicated briefly once with Steve via e-mail in the late 90s. Having found his web site, I raved about how I loved his Marvel work and he quickly (and politely) responded about how I should check out his new series Nevada. I did and, sadly, I didn't like it - frankly, I always preferred Gerber's early Marvel work and thought a lot of his later stuff was out of step with the changing comics world.

I think he lost his way a bit in the late 70s when he sued Marvel over ownership of Howard The Duck, and he never fully recovered.

Go to his blog at http://www.stevegerber.com/sgblog/ and be kinda weirded out. Steve wrote his last post on February 4: "Nothing new to report medically. I’m up in the middle of the night, working on Doctor Fate. Will let all of you know what’s going on with that in a day or so."

The next entry is on February 11 and says, "I am not Steve Gerber. I’m a friend of his named Mark Evanier. Steve died yesterday at that hospital in Las Vegas. It was not a surprise but it was a shock…to all of us who knew him."

Mark has his own obituary for Gerber at http://newsfromme.com/, which is worth a read.

As for me, I feel another shadow creeping across my grave. I'm getting older, friends.