Howard the Duck is now more important for subversion of the medium than the stories themselves. It's the polar opposite of most superhero books - whereas the majority of these are about extraordinary beings doing extraordinary deeds Howard is an ordinary person trying to live an ordinary life which gets complicated by strange events. He just happens to be a normal duck person from another dimension stranded in ours.

This gives Steve Gerber room to satirise the contemporary society of the day - credit card culture, the Moonies and Presidential elections are all mercilessly mocked. It’s never particularly subtle, but ranges from simple lampoons to full Monty Python absurdism. The targets, coupled with the disillusioned mindset of the writer, carbon date the book to the mid-70s, to the point of it now being a period piece. It’s part of the artistic reaction to the burnished optimism of the Sixties. More specifically it’s post-Watergate art, where Nixon’s cynical misuse of power led to a lack of faith in US institutions and to those institutions being questioned, the questioning there in The Conversation, All the President’s Men and even Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. These days there isn’t much faith to shatter, disenchantment with power and those who hold it is almost a de facto mindset, so all that really holds is the absurdity.

On those terms it’s entertaining enough, though never connected enough to build into anything like a coherent critique. It comes close in the storyline with Howard running for President but settles for the easy targets of the influence of big businesses. Gerber’s posing questions and seeing the issues he’s playing with as burdens and problems but stops short of offering anything but rage and frustration. Solutions aren’t easy and you probably wouldn’t expect to find them in the monthly treadmill of a mass market comic book.

The highlight for me is the infamous Zen and the Art of Comic Book Writing. Gerber, in the process of moving to Las Vegas, missed his deadline and instead turned in an essay reflecting on his move, the cross-country road trip and the life of a comic book writer. That we’d never see this sort of thing today, where greater organisation means a more standard issue by a fill-in writer would take its place, is our loss, and probably a touch ironic given Gerber’s rage at the modern world. The kinks have been smoothed out of comics, smooth conformity has won. Oh, the irony. Still, this collection remains a reminder of a very different time and a different industry and perhaps what’s been lost since it’s become such a slickly commercial industry. ( )