You wouldn't know it now, but there was a time when comic books were all about wild creativity. They were big and bold and colorful, simple enough to appeal to kids and yet bursting with inventiveness, the better to hold the attention of those who were still most comfortable in the boundary-free realms of the imagination. There's a reason they were dominated by heroic feats that defied the laws of physics and supernatural horrors that bent the borders of reality into terrible pretzels. It was one of the only forms of media where staying grounded inherently hampered the effectiveness of the storytelling. It was a place to fly.

Steve Gerber wrote comic books for Marvel Comics during the 1970s, a time when the company was thoroughly overtaking their distinguished competition. Marvel had become a force in the previous decade by integrating more complicated psychological underpinnings to the tales of costumed characters. It was still pretty basic stuff, but absolutely revolutionary for these folded and stapled four color publications. Gerber was part of the second wave of writers that expanded on this foundation, satisfied that the archetypal stories had been sufficiently told and it was time to start letting a little warp settle in. Gerber was more willing that most to let that warp really show. The Defenders brought unapologetic weirdness to a superhero team book, and Man-Thing took the familiar, perhaps even cliched swamp monster character (only in the comics) as conduit to tell stories of almost existential pathos. I have very fond memories of a Marvel Two-in-One issue that Gerber wrote centered around a homeless drunk who wreaks havoc with a mystical harmonica. Anything could serve as the ingredient for a epic story with Gerber. Even a duck.

It is Howard the Duck that stands as Gerber's most notable creation. A throwaway character who looked a like a brasher version of Donald Duck (looked enough like him, in fact, that the Disney folks were none too pleased), Howard grew into a completely unique phenomena, in no small part because Howard's title was where Gerber's writing was at its most uninhibited. It's as if having a anthropomorphic duck as the lead effectively shattered what few rules were left. The series was an ongoing satire of comics, politics, and the whole of popular culture, expertly mixing lowbrow humor with sophisticated commentary. It's a giddy, cynical dissection of American life in the middle of the me decade for anyone prepared to see that sometimes the medium isn't the message, the message is the message.

Like his famed waterfowl, Gerber was trapped in a world he never made. He was writer with too much self-respect to view his creations as cogs in a corporate machine. When he defended his integrity, he was discarded and had to fight for his rights. He kept writing, creating series in recent years that the companies couldn't solve and struggled to sell. In many ways he was as much of an outsider as the indelible characters he created. Hopefully he took solace in retreating to the worlds he himself made. They were better anyway.