Steve Gerber (center) is responsible for off-beat 1970s stories and character, such as Howard the Duck, the Defenders and Man-Thing.
When and What He Did at Timely/Atlas/Marvel: Writer throughout the 1970s, returning to the publisher to do occasional work in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Marvel-ous Accomplishments: Three words are synonymous with Gerber as comic book writer:
Howard the Duck. It’s a character that one generation knows as being one of the hippest things published in the 1970s, another generation bemoans as being the star of arguably the worst film of the 1980s, and another generation recognizes as that feathered alien sharing a drink with Benicio Del Toro in the post-credits scene of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie.
While much of Gerber’s fame and notoriety (the writer took legal action against Marvel over the character’s rights, leading to an ugly falling out with the publisher in the early 1980s), it was far from the writer’s only significant output for Marvel. Gerber was ahead of his time as a master of blending off-beat yet sharp satire with big and brassy fight comics on such titles as
The Defenders,
Omega the Unknown and
Man-Thing.
While almost any hack can superficially pull off a grim-and-gritty, noir for dummies Frank Miller pastiche or overwrite and over-subplot like Chris Claremont with some amount of competency, any pretenders to the throne who tried to ape Gerber’s style always look ridiculous.