It got a B+.
Enjoy.
WHY A DUCK?
A Cultural Perspective
on the Adventures of Howard the Duck
on the Adventures of Howard the Duck
By Charles Meyerson
6 May 1977
THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Journalism 470, Professor Albert Kreiling
From the time of his hatching*, he was … different.
A potentially brilliant scholar who dreaded the structured environment of school, he educated himself in the streets, taking whatever work was available, formulating his philosophy of self from what he learned of the world about him. And then the Cosmic Axis shifted … and the world changed. Suddenly, he was stranded in a universe he could not fathom. Without warning, he became a strange fowl in an even stranger land.
—Steve Gerber; legend which begins each issue of Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck magazine
THE COMIC BOOK has an image problem. Its original purpose was, as the name suggests, to convey large quantities of the “funniest (or “comics”) dispensed with growing popularity in the newspapers of the 1930s. Despite the work which has come to dominate the field in the last three decades—serious adventure stories rather than humor—the name “comic book” has stuck, along with the low-quality pulp paper, the cheap printing process, the rotten color separation. (Some fans prefer the phrase “graphic story magazine” to “comic, * but this seems pompous.)
Despite their seedy past and less-than prestigious present, comics are apparently capable of telling stories as well as their nearest relative, the film. In France, for instance, comics like Pilote and Metal Hurlant (just released in the United States as Heavy Metal) are printed on high-quality paper with full-process color. Content of these French efforts is more sophisticated than that of their American counterparts, and readership there apparently reflects this content.
IN AMERICA, the Marvel Comics Group has been one of the prime proponents of the “comics can be intelligent” movement. Most critics of the medium agree that every once in a while, at least, the company backs up publisher Stan Lee’s boasts.
Enter: Howard the Duck, a superstar to take his place alongside such Marvel favorites as the neurotic Spider-Man, the anti-social Hulk and the Christ-like Silver Surfer. Howard is not to be confused with ducks Donald, Daffy, Huey, Louie and Dewey. Unlike those characters, Howard lives—against his will—in a world populated mostly by normal humans … and a few super-humans.
How did it happen? Marvel had assigned Steve Gerber—a young, communications master’s degree candidate from St. Louis University—to script a minor 1971 series featuring the Man-Thing, a mindless, run-of-the-mill swamp monster. Gerber turned the character into a mucky empath, wandering aimlessly across the country, feeding on the emotions of others for vicarious pleasure. In the course of the series, Gerber embroiled Man-Thing in a cosmic war between wizards. With magic spilling all over the place, the natural (albeit Marvel) order of things could not hold; it didn’t. At least a few innocent bystanders were randomly plucked from parallel universes, placed in others. One such being was Howard the Duck, snatched from a world where people just happen to look like ducks, trapped on Marvel-Earth, much like our own.
“I NEEDED A JOKE,” Gerber says. “I mean, how do you follow up a barbarian jumping out of a jar of peanut butter?” (That’s the event that preceded Howard’s debut.) The answer, he adds, came in a moment: A duck smoking a cigar.
It was just a one-shot appearance, according to Gerber; Howard went into comic-book limbo after a few pages of cynical comments on the inherent idiocy of “hairless apes.” Or so Gerber thought.**
Then the letters started coming in. Even after Man-Thing magazine died of poor circulation—the fate of many comics aimed at above-average intelligence— fans closed their letters to other Marvel comics, like Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, with questions like “When are you going to give the duck his own book?*
Marvel took the hint, giving Gerber free rein on the new series, within the restrictions of the industry’s self-imposed censorship board, the Comics Code Authority. Even those taboos fell, in some cases. One disputed scene, in Howard 2 (March 1975), showed an undressed Howard in the same bed with his human, very female companion, Beverly Switzler. It got a grudging OK from the Code.
FOR SOME REASON, this character—unusual even for Marvel—has become a star. Without doubt, Howard’s adventures are popular culture. The 25¢ first issue (January 1975) sold out so quickly that comics dealers can without shame ask $8 for a copy in good condition. After six issues, the book went from bimonthly to monthly publication; it remains one of Marvel’s best-selling titles. Howard-for-President campaign buttons, T-shirts and posters are among the first to sell out at the many comic-book fan conventions around the country. Last November, Howard was up with Mickey Mouse and Ronald Reagan in the write-in race for the presidency. And Marvel has just completed negotiations with the Register-Tribune syndicate for a Howard newspaper strip, to begin 6 June.
With apologies to the Marx Brothers, the question facing popular-culture scholars is “Why a duck?” Why has an irreverent duck captured the fancy of comics fans previously enamored with (super-)human tight-pantsed doers of right?
TO BE SURE, Howard is really just the latest in a series of duck-shaped darlings of comicdom. In the beginning, of course, there were Donald, Huey, Louie, Dewey, Daisy and their Uncle Scrooge McDuck—all Walt Disney characters, with a sizable fandom of their own. Artist Val Mayerik obviously drew heavily from the Disney mystique when he first drew Howard, from the blue sport coat to the gloved hands and the bright orange beak. Psychologically, however, Howard has more in common with Warner Brothers’ cynical Daffy Duck.
But these are all film characters who have made the transition to the comics. Howard is probably the first duck to make it on his own in a medium usually more hospitable to bird-men than to birds.
Howard’s appeal is more fundamental than his cinematic ancestry. Author Gerber and the artists with whom he’s collaborated have drawn on a number of American cultural myths in Howard’s adventures, making the duck a proponent of such traditional values as pastoralism and individualism.
HOWARD’S SPECIES HAS long been a symbol of pastoralism—dating back to Andersen’s Ugly Duckling. The first issue of Howard the Duck carries on the tradition. The story opens on the Cleveland banks of the Cuyahoga River; Cleveland is the setting for Howard’s early adventures. In the background of that opening scene, the moon shines down through smog-ridden sky onto a dilapidated shack—clearly a shorthand indictment of urban blight. In the foreground, Howard stands Hamlet-like—contemplating suicide. He repents for a moment:
“On the other hand, maybe something less drastic. A little dip to cheer me up, gimme a chance to think.” One webbed toe in the polluted river changes his mind again. YAAUUGH! That does it! I can’t stand it anymore! This whole world is fouled up!”
The ecological philosophy is compatible with the anti-materialistic attitude Gerber attributes to Howard.
In that first issue, Howard decides to commit suicide after all; so he plans a plunge from a riverside tower. The tower he picks, however, turns out to be made entirely of old plastic credit cards, Inside, he finds a lovely (human) female—Beverly Switzler—held captive by Pro-Rata, mad financial wizard and self-proclaimed “soon-to-be Chief Accountant of the Universe.” (The ensuing struggle puts the thought of suicide out of the duck’s mind.). If nothing else, Pro-Rata’s villainy is Gerber’s reaffirmation of the “money is the root of all evils” belief which has pervaded much of American society.
ABOVE ALL, THOUGH, Howard is a proponent of individualism. A minority of one, Howard’s frustration is symbolic of the individual’s search for recognition in a society actively practicing tyranny of the masses.
Howard fits neatly into the mythical American vision of the individualist. He is, as the opening legend notes, self-educated. As the series unfolds, it reveals Howard as a true Renaissance duck. Issue 3 (“Four Feathers of Death; or, Enter: The Duck”) finds Howard mastering in mere hours the art of Kung Fu from the mysterious Master C’hajj. Subsequent adventures feature Howard in the role of detective; in Howard 7, for instance, the duck deduces the existence and location of a bomb intended to kill the presidential nominee of the All-Night Party. (In so doing, Howard unintentionally wins the nomination for himself. This certainly calls to mind the rags-to-riches myth of the early 1900s.) Clearly, the duck is intelligent, talented and capable of learning quickly; traditional American virtues, all.
Even so multifaceted a being is not readily accepted by his fellow creatures. Few characters in the series even acknowledge Howard’s “difference.” Many assume he is a man in a duck suit, “just another loony,” rather than a natural-born duck. In this light, the series is the story of an individual’s search for recognition.
In Howard 2, the duck helps Beverly’s friend Arthur, a fiction writer, fight off mental possession by “the deadly Space Turnip.” In that struggle, Arthur verbalizes the individualistic philosophy underlying Howard’s adventures:
I am Arthur Winslow, author and collector of old movie stills. I, too, am alone. For all my life, I’ve been forced to endure a world in which no background music swells when boy meets girl, in which love has been dragged down from the spiritual heights to the crass domain of physical sensation.I stand apart, because I dare to believe in the power of what one man can do—the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet, James Bond—the heroes, the stuff of legends! I long to be that kind of man, but all I can offer the world are fictions that publishers refuse even to read, because heroes have gone out of fashion!
NOR DO DUCKS fare well in such a society. Issue 5 finds Howard outraged at the stereotypic treatment human society gives to ducks. Howard picks up a “Quacky Duck” comic book at a newsstand, throws it down in disgust:
This is an unfair representation of ducks. It makes us out as sadists—picking on the poor stupid bears. … It’s a whole pamphlet full o’ fowl aspersions! If there’s one good word about ducks in there, show me!
He calls up a radio talk-show to complain that comic books are
promulgating racist myths and perpetuating prejudice … . That’s right, buddy—ducks! And I know, ‘cause I am one! Whaddaya mean, “One what?” One talking duck, ya—[click]. I don’t think he believed me.
In an attempt to vindicate ducks, Howard takes his crusade to “a more visual medium, television. Unfortunately, the situation there is no better. Station officials refuse to acknowledge his duckness, mistaking him for a human in a duck suit and setting him up as a pie-target for a kiddie-show clown, Howard rebels against this mass-entertainment, beating the clown to a pulp—to the cheers of the kids in the audience: “Beat the living spit outta that mealy-mouthed clown!”
“Aw, kids,” the show’s director pleads, “y-you don’t mean that—?”
“If this’s the standard intellectual caliber of the entertainment you feed ’em, Fuzzy, I bet they do,” Howard replies, walking away from the mayhem.
HOWEVER SUCCESSFUL the duck is in attacking the de personalized media of his adopted society, he still fails to establish his worth as an individual. In an attempt to fill his penniless pockets, Howard tries to win $10,000 by going three rounds with wrestling champion Emile Klout. Masked by a bandana, the duck enters the ring; Howard wins without much effort. (He does, after all, know Quack Fu.) Doffing his mask, he asks for “the moolah, pal. Fork it over!”
*Y-you’re a duck!” the ring manager replies. “Waitaminit—our ad said $10,000 to any man who could stay in the ring! We don’t owe you nuthin’!”
The theme becomes clear; it occurs again and again throughout the series: Howard may look like a duck, but he’s really—in every way that counts (sexual niceties aside)—a man, looking for a place in a mass society the cover logo refers to as “a world he never made,” but would like to make over.
ALTHOUGH THE COMICS Code, with its concern for the sensitivities of young readers, prevents Gerber from exploring the topic in depth, he does hint at the problems presented by Beverly’s relationship with Howard, striking a blow for (racial? specific?) equality at the same time. In issue 6, Howard muses:
I mean, I realize “sanity” is defined relativistically— but take my relationship with Beverly as a prime example. Talk about evidence of mental imbalance! Why should I care if I never see her again? What possible mutual attraction could rationally exist between a duck and—that? It defies every law of nature. On the other hand, I’ve never felt constrained to follow convention! [Hugging Beverly:] How could this be wrong—or insane—when it feels so good?
Here again, then, is evidence of Howard’s individualism, Even in matters of love, Howard refuses to be “constrained to follow convention.” (For the record, the nature of the relationship between the two has yet to be clarified. In issue 14, Howard—suffering from nervous breakdown and demonic possession—confronts Beverly:
Answer! How do you conceive our relationship? What do I mean to you? Do you like me—or cherish me—or perhaps I merely amuse you? Am I your object of ridicule, sweet? AM I??
Howard’s tirade is interrupted before the frightened Beverly can answer coherently.)
A NUMBER OF AMERICAN myths surface in what so far has been the crux of the series, Howard’s presidential campaign. He rises from obscure freak to presidential candidate virtually overnight, in the best tradition of the Horatio Alger heroes. Once he gains that platform from which to speak—in a text-page presentation of the campaign’s last press conference—he verbalizes many of the traditional fears, values and concerns of ordinary humans.
You meatbrains willingly subject yourselves to more abuse, physical and psychological, than any nation in history. You allow your eyes and lungs to be be eaten away by pollution. … Your ears are barraged by the sounds of jackhammer progress. All this while politicians and Madison Avenue bang away at your minds, You … open yourselves to … a society that … refuses to let you make a move without first filing forms in triplicate. You wonder why … your young are either dissident, empty-headed, or drugged into a stupor? It’s because you’ve fashioned an emotionally and intellectually sterile culture, that’s why! If an individual is unwilling to spend his life in the plodding pursuit of possessions, there’s nothing for ’im to do!
Here, in one scene, Howard (or Gerber) voices the anti-technological, anti-urban, anti-big-government, anti-materialistic philosophy traceable back at least to Thomas Jefferson; fundamental beliefs present in varying strength throughout American history.
DURING THE EARLY years of the comic book, the medium catered primarily to the children and the undereducated. As the medium matured, so did its audience: The 1960s brought both a counter-culture, “underground,” connotation and an increase in the number of college-educated readers.
Although this change was most visible in the underground comics of the last decade, the spirit of revolution has clearly influenced the “above-ground” comics of the 1970s. (For instance, Frank Brunner, illustrator of Howard’s first four solo adventures, came to Marvel after a stint with the undergrounders.)
Throughout its existence, however, the comic book has been identified in one way or another with things outside the mainstream of American life. Howard the Duck may be the closest approximation comics have made of middle-class fears, beliefs and values. The magazine is not the best-selling comic book on the stands today, but it is one of the best-selling new titles at Marvel, the biggest comics publisher in America. Certainly one factor in its success must be the traditional values championed by Steve Gerber and his cigar-smoking duck.
SO THE ANSWER to the question “Why a duck?” is in this case simply “Why not a duck?” The species is not the issue; had society granted film and comic prominence to some other species of cartoon characters from Disney or Warner, Howard might just as well be a cow, or a frog—so long as his appearance serves to accent his individuality. Howard the Duck is a success because it presents traditional American beliefs in an intelligent, if untraditional, fashion.
_____
* Some editions use the phrase “From the time he was laid …”
** Gerber made these remarks in an October 1976 interview with the author.
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