I didn’t love the comic. I liked the magazine less–perhaps because at this point, Steve Gerber was gone–and he was the rare example of a writer who could make such a high concept, experimental character work. In 1978, Steve took out the ad above and moved his talents to the upstart indie publisher Eclipse to create Destroyer Duck.
Marvel didn’t want to give up on Howard, though (at this point, the movie rights were probably in negotiation–or at least the property was being shopped), so they handed him over to a bunch of other creators in an oversized, quarterly magazine.
(Truth: I only have a couple issues of it, so that, and the fact that I’m exhausted by this character, explain why I’m cramming all 9 issues into a single post. The magazine isn’t so bad, actually.)
Bill Mantlo wrote the stories, and some truly great artists were on board. Michael Golden–one of the unsung heroes of the ’80s–drew stories along with Gene Colan. And look at this art…
…Yes. Just a few more “strokes.” (Here’s what he actually drew:)
This magazine is actually pretty good at times.
A lot of it involved world-hopping, and honestly, Howard the Duck is a great character to do that, given that his tagline is about being “trapped in a world he never made.”
He meets Red Sonja.
Some of it takes place on Howard’s home planet.
Where, apparently, Howard is a God.
He meets Santa.
By the end of the book, Howard became a vampire at the hands of Dracula and then met other versions of himself (and duck versions of 616 characters) as he hopped across alternate Earths, via..
…Man-Thing’s swamp.
John Byrne did a pin-up where Howard meets the Living Mummy.
Including one with a Batman satire.
And we got to see Beverly naked.
But for all the duck-positive sex above, the series ends with Bev and Howard finally breaking up…
