The Uses of Disenchantment

Out of all the writers discussed in this book, Steve Gerber is the one who seems the least temperamentally suited to be writing comics in a mainstream superhero universe.  Not because he didn’t like superhero comics; quite to the contrary, the path that brought him to work for Marvel could not have been more fanboyish if it had been flanked by cosplayers in full Spider-Man drag.  Gerber had a fanzine while in high school in St. Louis, struck up a friendship with fellow fan and future Marvel editor Roy Thomas by mail, and, when his copywriting job on Madison Avenue proved detrimental to his mental health, he used his ties to Thomas to get hired at Marvel.  In the infamous all-text, stream-of-consciousness issue of Howard the Duck (issue 16, produced as a last minute deadline replacement while the writer moved West), Gerber imagines being grilled by Howard about all the useless trivia he carries in his head:

“By the way, when did the Human Torch first appear in a solo adventure in the Marvel Age of Comics?”

“Huh? STRANGE TALES 101. Why?”

“And who were the villains in the first fifty issues of FANTASTIC FOUR—in order?”

“Oh…Mole Man, the Skrulls, the Miracle Man, Sub-Mariner, Dr, Doom, Subby and Doom together, Kurrgo, Puppet Master, Sub-Mariner again, Dr. Doom, Impossible Man, Hulk, Red Ghost, Subby again, The Mad Thinker, Dr. Doom, Dr. Doom…”

Like most of the creators of his generation, Gerber was not just a consumer of Marvel Comics; he was a product of them.  He was also not the only one to do his best work at a distance from the line’s core titles; as we’ve seen, I’ve already made similar claims about Doug Moench and Marv Wolfman.[1]. For Gerber, the Marvel Universe was a highly attractive and productive set of secondary worlds in which he was more than happy to play, but over time he showed less and less interest in the games for which these worlds were originally built.  He did not so much reject the superhero or fantasy adventure as emphasize different types of pleasure and rewards that these narratives could yield.  

By now it is old hat to recognize that there is something absurd about grown men with bizarre aliases donning skin-tight costumes in order to fight other grown men clad in form-fitting onesies.  Much of the “deconstructive” approach to the superhero starting in the 1980s used this perspective as a point of departure (with Moore’s and Gibbon’s Watchmen as the most famous example). But deconstruction tended to fight against the genre’s absurdity, often with an almost pathological naturalism that is caricatured as “grim and gritty” (Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns):  bloody, grotesque violence and frank sexuality are the antidote to superhero silliness. 

This is not what Gerber did, although Gerber’s influence on the superhero renaissance of the 1980s is, while rarely emphasized, rather obvious once you look for it.   Gerber did not run from absurdity: absurdity was the point.  Gerber was the French Existentialist of the Marvel set, Albert Camus with a heavy dose of Eugene Ionesco. [2] Absurdity is the default position of Gerber’s world, sometimes almost joyous (as in the end of his “Bozo” storyline in The Defenders), sometimes suicidal (as on the first page of Howard the Duck 1). His characters oscillate between embracing the absurdity of their various plights and withdrawing or dissociating  (Howard’s nervous breakdown; Man-Thing’s emotional overload).  Gerber’s approach to the daft premises of the Marvel Universe is far more accepting and catholic than that of many serious comics writers to follow him, because absurdity is neither a negative in and of itself, nor an antipode to the “real world.“  Our world, like Marvel, is absurd by definition.  We just dress better.

Notes

[1] It was probably true of McGregor as well, but, since editorial never let him near the Avengers, Fantastic Four, or Spider-Man, we will never know. 

[2] Gerber is not alone, Rorschach from Watchmen is the clearest proponent of a French Existentialist worldview in modern comics, but within the framework of a grim sociopathy that went beyond even Gerber’s various iterations of his Foolkiller character.