I write a lot of obits on this site. Some are about people I didn't know very well. Ten years ago today, I had to write one about someone I knew well and liked a lot. I still miss Steve Gerber and so does the comic book industry even if some who work in the field don't know it…or him.
I don't think I ever told you how I met Steve. I knew him first through his published stories which I thought were some of the best coming out of Marvel at the time. From a writer's standpoint, there are two kinds of comics you find yourself writing for a company like DC or Marvel. One is the kind where you're handling characters created by others, working in a mythology established by others. Some writers do some wonderful work in this arena but when I think about my favorite comic book writers, I'm more impressed with their work in the other kind of comic book.
That would be the kind that you either create the comic or co-create the comic…or you take over a book about which very little has been established. Generally speaking, you have to be the only person writing those characters at the time. That gives you more freedom to shape the environment of that book and to add new characters or reshape existing ones such that you can tell the kinds of stories you have to tell. You make it your own, at least for the time you do that book, which generally has to be a long period. It never happens when you're doing an issue or three. You have to stay on a book for a while before you can form-fit it to your strengths.
Steve did that when he took over a comic called Man-Thing, making it distinctly his own for a while. He did it of course with Howard the Duck and a few other comics he launched. He wrote some good stories for ongoing comics handled by many like The Defenders and Sub-Mariner but he found his voice in the more personal books. In them, he wrote more about human beings even if those human beings were monsters or ducks.
Anyway, I liked his writing but before I met him, when I mentioned his name to anyone at Marvel, I was told he was crazy…and I don't mean brilliantly, eccentrically crazy. I mean "crazy" the way Charles Manson was crazy. Several people, including a writer or two who I guess thought of him as competition, told me that any day, Steve Gerber would be hauled off to the looney bin.
I didn't necessarily believe them. I've had too many people in my life turn out to be exact opposite of the way they were described. But I also didn't not believe what I was being told about this Steve Gerber person.
Now then: For several years in a row, my partner Sergio Aragonés would host an annual post-con party right after what we then called the San Diego Comic-Con and now call Comic-Con International. The con ended on Sunday afternoon and a lot of us would caravan (or drive home) to Los Angeles and by 8 PM, there'd be a big crowd at Sergio's old home in the Hollywood Hills, sitting around the pool and eating pizza. Just talking and unwinding.
At one of these parties, I found myself talking to a guy with glasses. We were discussing comics, the world, life, movies, the pizza we were consuming, everything…and the guy was bright, funny, perceptive and I had no idea who the hell he was. He somehow knew who I was but if I'd been introduced to him, I hadn't caught the name. And after 40 minutes or so of great, enjoyable conversation, I didn't feel like I could say, "By the way, who are you?" I was trying to figure it out without doing that.
I forget which comics he mentioned he'd worked on but let's say one of them was Daredevil. He'd say, "You know, when I was writing Daredevil…" and I'd start thinking, "Okay, who wrote Daredevil besides all the people I know who wrote Daredevil?" And then I'd think, "Well, I believe Steve Gerber wrote a few issues but this person is way too sane to be Steve Gerber." He'd mention some other comic that several people had written and I'd think, "Gee, the only person I can think of who wrote that comic and who I don't know is Steve Gerber. Could this possibly be Steve Gerber? Naw…"
Finally, he mentioned writing Howard the Duck and I thought, "This is Steve Gerber!" And I instantly realized that not only was he not demented or insane but he was saner and smarter than any of the people who'd told me Steve Gerber was out of his mind. He was also a better writer than any of them.
We spent a lot of time together. When I was running the Hanna-Barbera comic division, I brought Steve in as my assistant and he also wrote a lot of the comics, most of which were published overseas. Later, I recommended him for animation writing for the Ruby-Spears studio and he quickly became one of their most valuable writers and story editors. He wrote for many of their shows and developed Thundarr the Barbarian.
Often, you bond with people by charging into battle alongside them. Steve had his infamous legal battle against Marvel over Howard the Duck and a lot of folks (not just me) joined that battle in whatever way we could. But Steve also fought a lot of fights to better working conditions and compensation for all writers, not just himself. If and when an accurate history is ever written of how life in comics got better for creative people in the eighties, Steve's name will be mentioned a lot. That's what I meant about how the industry misses him.
I do, too. He was a clever, creative guy and we all out missed out on the wonderful things he might have written if he'd been around the last ten years. A great, great loss.
When Steve died, I seized control of his blog and it's still up and running at www.stevegerber.com. Not a lot has been posted since and as I write this, the most recent post and comments are from October of '16. But every message Steve posted is still there, followed by many posted since we lost him. You might want to drop by and read and maybe even write something.