Planet of the Hairless Apes
In the early Howard the Duck comics, Beverly is not just Howard's companion and sounding board. By serving as his most important human relationship, she makes it possible for him to keep his distance from (other) humans, while occasionally drawing him in when it is important to her.. Howard deals with Arthur Winslow (the Space Turnip) in the second issue because of Arthur's connection to Beverly, and it is Bev who spurs him into action to help Paul Same just two issues later. Bev even mediates between Howard and his nemesis, the Kidney Lady, on a city bus just before Howard's wrestling match in Issue 5.
Issues 19 and 24 (the last two "meandering" HTD stories) are both post-Beverly, and Howard's brief, frustrating entanglements with a parade of new "hairless apes" are facilitated by his solitude (and even loneliness). They cover similar ground, so we will only be looking at the first of the two. When Beverly interferes with Dr. Bong's attempt to turn Howard into one of his bizarre creatures, the result is more horrifying: Howard becomes a human. With only an imaginary, spectral version of his duck self to keep him country, he spends Issue 19 wandering New York, penniless and aimless. First he falls in with a smelly, belching homeless man called Mad Dog who claims to be a starving artist ("I am creating a masterpiece of degeneracy >phuugh> which I have titled--/ "Body of Mad Dog") When Man Dog predictably goes wild at a diner that refuses him service, the newly human Howard is about to try to stop him, until his duck companion reminds him, "What do you care? He's a flake an' the food in this dump ain't worth defendin." " Howard agrees: "Say no more, chum. I dunno what possessed me!"
What possessed him may have been the beginning of a newfound identification with his fellow hairless apes, or merely an extension of the occasional altruistic impulse that got him into trouble when he as still a duck. But it turns out that, even though he is no longer such an obvious odd duck, he still stands out like sore thumb. Among the diners are Amy and Elton, a couple whose relationship is on the rocks.[1] Elton is an earnest, sensitive New Age man who worships Amy so intensely that he is completely oblivious to her as a real person. Howard's decision to leave the diner mid-melée gets Amy's attention: "Please--you're everything Elton's not--totally misanthropic!"
As it happens, that's the only accurate conclusion Amy ever draws about Howard. Though painfully aware of the narcissistic Elton's failure to see her for who she really is, she falls into her own version of the same pattern with the man whose complete disinterest in her fires her imagination. She literally tackles Howard in one of those classic Marvel panels where the sheer volume of verbiage can't possibly match the momentary action it describes (two long, periodic sentences about how desperate she is when stuck with a man who expects her to do all the reasoning for him).
But what does she ask of him? "Say happy things--strong things--positive things--! /Or you'll bite the curb again, so help me!" Happy? Positive? She clearly has no idea who she is dealing with. With Amy literally twisting his arm behind his back, Howard brings up the weather, the Mets, the stock market, and Star Wars. Amy is elated: "It's the most banal babble I've heard in weeks! Don't stop! / You can't imagine how I've yearned to talk to a man who--/ --who can walk away from me!" Everything about this statement is wrong, from the fact that Howard literally can't walk away from her (she "refuses to yield a single pound-per square inch" of pressure on Howard's arm) to praising one of Gerber's most cleverly loquacious characters for his "banal babble."
But her pressure on Howard is as emotional as it is physical. Right before she approaches him, he marvels at the "casual effrontry with which these --we?--hairless apes invade each other's" space. Yet after just a few minutes of listening to Amy talk about her relationship with Elton, he starts to volunteer "Maybe I should talk to him, or--" before his imaginary duck self objects: "Butt out, buffoon! My gawd, yer goin native!" Imaginary Howard is absolutely right. Howard the human is pondering humanity in a way he never had before, and learning a lesson:
Howard: "I was wonderin'--are all hairl- uh, human relationships this--convoluted?"
Amy: "You mean as mine and Elton's? Are you serious?
By some criteria, ours would be considered straightforward!"
A discreet scene change and the passage of time suggest that Amy's relationship with Howard also becomes straightforward. When he wakes up the next morning, Howard is a duck again, and the narrator surmises in the next issue that the "ministrations of TLC activated his adrenal glands, among others.../and triggered a biochemical reversal of" Bong's experiment.” An old homophobic fantasy has it that a gay man or lesbian can be "turned" by a fulfilling sexual encounter with someone of the opposite sex; in Howard's case, sex with a woman while in human form is enough to turn him back into a duck. His brief experience of humanity ends in the total affirmation of the one thing Amy accurately saw in him: his misanthropy.
At the same time, misanthropy alone does not define Howard the Duck. Were that his only salient personality trait, he would not keep finding himself in these situations. In Gerber's last Guardians of the Galaxy stories, Vance Astro tells his teammate Starhawk, "I never dreamed that beneath your pompous exterior lurked a fellow fallen idealist!" (Marvel Presents 9). The angry, sharp-tongued Astro is applying this term to himself as much as to Starhawk, and it would be equally applicable to many of Gerber's viewpoint characters--particularly Howard the Duck. Howard's real problem is that, despite the senselessness of the world in which he finds himself, he cares too much. Nearly all the plots of Howard's comic are an excuse for exploring the conflict that really motivates his stories: his clear-headed intellectual rejection of the demands placed on him versus his emotional and ethical drive to get involved. Howard's problem is also Steve Gerber's: Gerber worked in a cruel industry, a medium he loved, and a genre that would attract and frustrate him at the same time. Though he could not change the rules of Marvel Comics, he could at least give a consistent and reliable voice to a fallen idealist's love/hate relationship with this tantalizing four-color world.
Notes
[1] Amy and Elton are based on a couple in "The Play It Again Sam Casablanca Blues," one of the short stories that make up Don McGregor's prose collection, Dragonflame and Other Bedtime Nightmares (1978). This is the second time Gerber has parodied McGregor (after his "Space Turnip" parody of Killraven in Howard the Duck 2).