http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp02122008.shtml

http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp02132008.shtml


The fitting tribute is in the links above, but here’s some other thoughts of my own…

There are some writers who somehow just manage for a brief time to speak with the voice of the people, to capture an era and a feeling and somehow summarise a generation. Amongst comics writers I suspect Stan Lee managed it around 1964-8. Moore caught it with Watchmen. And for a little while there in the mid 70s, Steve Gerber was that writer.

It’s hard now to recall that time – I was 13 in 1976 when America celebrated its bicentennial. Looking back on Gerber’s work in Defenders and Man-Thing and Howard the Duck it seems fun but not that world shattering. But at the time Gerber had his finger on the things that every comics fan wanted to say, to know, to be. Comics and their readers came of age a little more with Gerber’s time at Marvel. If the material seems unremarkable now it’s because everything that came after was shaped by what he did then.

It all ended in tears, with creator rights lawsuits and recriminations and the world turned colder, but for a while there Gerber took us to a world we never made, filled with bozos and nihilists and elves with guns, gave us mainstream comics’ first character who made her living as a nude model, ran a duck for President, and brought the cultural social generational revolution that must have been going on in New York just then into the unprepared minds of teenage comics readers everywhere.

Waaaauuughh!