A Marvel Madhouse Gallery!

As the 1980's blossomed in the United Kingdom, at time when Margaret Thatcher was ascendant as Prime Minister and trading kisses with our own President Ronald "Ronnie" Reagan, unemployment mushroomed as British Steel cut jobs, and a Beatles reunion becomes an impossibility, Marvel UK decided the time was ripe to launch some parody magazines. Dez Skinn was in charge at the time and he launched the title Frantic which drew from material developed for Marvel's Crazy magazine.

And then he launched Marvel Madhouse which used both stories and artwork from the over a decade old Not Brand Echh. I for one like to see foreign versions of a cover to see how the colors might changed or the layouts might differ. In this case these Marie Severin covers are topped by a lively and memorable logo.

The chain of NBE cover reprints ends when an interior image of Forbush Man is used with new images to decorate issue eight. 

There are two more Marie Severin reprinted covers than the book shifts focus welcoming a certain misplaced duck into its fold. 

While the art says Howard the Duck, there are still blurbs that announce new "old" NBE material inside. These covers of course come from issue of Howard and are by Frank Brunner and John Buscema. 

Forbush Man makes a final appearance on issue fourteen's cover, with art by Gene Colan. 

Marvel Madhouse closes up shop after seventeen colorful issues. The Not Brand Echh brand simmering to life again a decade after its demise in these United States. 

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The Incompleat Howard - Volume Four!

Howard the Duck - The Complete Collection Volume Four is the focus of this last lingering look at Marvel's most famous fowl. This is a wide-ranging collection of stories from Howard's career as he wraps up his black and white magazine phase and moves into that unenviable position of occasional guest-star. He also jacks out two more issues of his color series though all of the work is pretty much by divergent hands in both the arenas of writing and artwork. 

 

Howard the Duck #8 features one of Howard's most famous adventures, that of "Ducknight Detective". But first there's a story titled "The Grey Panther" by the regular team of Bill Mantlo, Gene Colan and Dave Simons. This yarn finds Howard and Beverly working in an unusual old folks establishment which we learn has nefarious schemes to rob the young of their vitality for the sake of the old, and all of this overseen by a mad doctor who dubs himself "The Grey Panther". Of course Howard and Beverly defeat this plan and escape. After that harrowing escape they visit a sunny Florida beach whee they meet an industrialist named "Spruce Payne" who hires to them help promote his products in the attire of two bogus superheroes -- Duckman and Duck Girl. This photo op gig though gets real when the men hired to play bogus villains Jokester, Puffin, and Quizling turn out to be baddies for real and are working for another villain named The Maller. When Payne goes missing it falls to Duckman and Duck Girl to save the day, which of course they do in a manner of speaking. This story by Mantlo is illustrated by Marshall Rogers who had won great acclaim for his work on a certain "Darknight Detective". This issue wraps up with anothe installment of "Street Peeple". 

In the ninth and final issue of the Howard the Duck black and white series we find our friend Howard and his best girl Beverly in New Orleans, and of course in the comic book world that means voodoo. 

Howard and Beverly become embroiled in a scheme by the third  Black Talon to bring a powerful "Duck Diety" back into this realm. He actually succeeds but thanks to Howard the duck god is less than impressed with Talon's ways and ends up punishing his own worshipper for acts of cannibalism. This story and the next one are by the regular Mantlo, Colan and Simons team. The second Howard story is a really signifcant one and has our devoted couple confronting aspects of themselves in motel mirrors and Beverly comes to the conclusion that she and Howard need to go their separate ways, at least for a time. In a game-changing move the story quietly comes to an end with Howard perhaps realizing at long last how precious their relationship was. Bill Mantlo now left Howard as the regular writer and is replaced on the third story by Steve Skeates who had been writing some offbeat episodes of Howard for Crazy magazine. The story seems to be a send up of The Big Sleep with Howard functioning as a mopey and bickery Philip Marlowe of sorts. He confronts a strange family, which the most strange is a two-headed bloke who turns out to be something else entirely. An article by Steven Grant closes out the issue and reprises Howard's history and implies that he will be returning to the color comic world. 

While all of that is going on Howard does indeed show up again in a color comic, specifically Marvel Team-Up #96 where he is still operating as a taxi driver and ends up in New York City helping Spider-Man defeat yet another deranged goober who celebrates the status quo. In fact he takes that name and wages a war on all fads. Quickly this war becomes a fad in itself and Howard and Spidey have their hands full. This story was written by Paul Kupperberg and drawn by same. 

Howard's next stop is in Bizarre Adventures #34, a color issue of the black and white magazine which features Christmas stories. In this Howard adventure by Steven Grant and Paul Smith the holiday classic It's a Wonderful Life gets turned on its head when an angel in search of his wings tries to show a forlorn and suicidal Howard how his presence has made life better for those he has met. But it seems Howard's friends would've prospered quite nicely without him, in fact probably better. So forlorn the angel himself seeks the balm of the final embrace. 

When Howard the Duck #32 finally showed up on the racks it had been seven years since a color Howard title had been published. What prompted it? The movie coming from Lucasfilm, the folks who brought you Star Wars. (More on that later.) In this story we meet Howard (still wearing pants) when he meets Ceci Ryder, a lovely female trucker. In a story by Steven Grant, Paul Smith and Vinnie (Is-there-a-character-I-have-not-yet-inked?) Colletta the duo head underground to find a culture dedicated to reaping financial benefit from America's beautiful resources. It's led by a were-gopher and the pair a just able to survive and perhaps slow down  the scheme. When it's over Howard's back in Cleveland. 

Howard the Duck #33 sports a handsome Brian Bolland cover which makes me think of Uncle Scrooge. Over six months after the last issue the shine on Howard the Duck is tarnished after the movie doesn't deliver on the sales expected. This story is most interesting though for one reason in that it's the work of Val Mayerik, Howard's other creator and the first time I know of in which he worked on the character with a writer of his own choosing, a friend of his named Christopher Stager. In the story Howard gets rich by winning a contest and Beverly returns but leaves again when his personality is even nastier than it was before when he was mostly broke. A Dr. Clive offers Howard a chance to make more money and get companionship with his scheme to create life in the form of a female talking duck. But it costs Howard all his money and when she turns out to be a big-mouth spendthrift he takes off hooking up with another Walt Disney lookalike to skip out of town. The story is framed with Howard being interviewed on tell-all television show. It's not the greatest story really, though I found Mayerik's artwork quite fine. 

Now skip forward four years to 1990 and Howard shows up again in the hands of Steve Gerber. This time it's as a guest-star in the pages of the offbeat Sensational She-Hulk series (issues #14-17) featuring artwork by Bryan Hitch and Jim Sanders III. She-Hulk looks fantastic, but Howard seems a little off model to me and his pants are gone again. It's wild misadventure with She-Hulk and the former Blonde Phantom along with Howard battling the schemes of Dr. Angst who hasn't been seen since the Howard the Duck Treasury many moons before. He's causing cosmic trouble by bringing to Earth an endless array of mini-universes all trapped in tiny box-like shapes. Howard and She-Hulk end up in one dubbed the Baloneyverse and it gets worse from there. Dr. Angst escaptes jail and seeks out his old partners Tillie the Hun, Sitting Bullseye, The Spanker and The Black Hole. All of them have had a 90's redesign and they battle a She-Hulk who has gone gray and savage before becoming merely gray. The action of this hair-raising yarn is told by a big bald guy dubbed "The Critic" from a sect of the cosmic Watchers. He also gets involved together the heroes with the help of the Golden Age anti-hero The Terror stop Angst's plans. This is mostly a She-Hulk story (as it should be) and Howard is present but not so much signficant. 

When next we meet the Duck he shows up in the back of the venerable reprint comic Marvel Tales co-starring with another animal hero, namely Spider-Ham. Written and drawn by Paul Kupperberg the story is only a few pages long and the characters meet but do little to stop a plot by Duckter Doom. Frankly it left me confused. 

When next we encounter Howard it's now 1996, nearly a quarter century since his unexpected appearance in Adventures in Fear #19. The story is drawn by James Fry and Chris Ivy in that hyperbolic style so commonplace in the 90's and Steve Gerber steps up to write what I assume is his final Howard the Duck yarn. 

A lot has happened since Gerber began writing Howard the Duck stories. At one point he left Marvel and embraced the Direct Sales market with projects like Destroyer Duck, a character and debut comic book created  as part of Gerber's lawsuit to gain some ownership in Howard. It's a convoluted story that and to read about it in detail I recommend checking out this link. 

Anyway in this story from Marvel we have an unofficial crossover with Howard and  Spider-Man and the Circus of Crime with Rich Larsen's Savage Dragon and Destroyer Duck. It's a ramshackle story featuring some of Gerber's more offbeat contributions to the MU such as the notorious Elf-With-A-Gun and the Turnip Lady. KISS even gets a quick cameo of sorts. Sadly it's mostly a stunt with shadowy figures in Spider-Man Team-Up #5 and Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck #1 meeting but not officially. For more on this check out this link.  

The collection wraps up with a bevy of black and white short stories by Steve Skeates and Pat Broderick done for Crazy Magazine back in the 70's. Frankly they aren't very good and not really in the tone of Howard as far as I can tell. Broderick's art is fine though. Also we get a cover gallery featuring Marvel's adaptation of the ill-fated movie among other things such as Howard's appearance in Marvel Age. 

And that as they say is that. I'm closing my series of posts with a bit of art by Frank Brunner done for  Gerber's Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck one-shot which gives the world Leonard the Duck and echoes the delightful cover he made for Howard the Duck #1 so long before. My closing thoughts are really questions. Why is the Howard the Duck movie regarded as being so terrible? I think the answer is that it didn't make a beaucoup of money as anticipated so it must have been bad. It's often ranked as among the worst movies ever made and that's just rubbish. It didn't do well in the marketplace and it has deficiencies but it's not that bad. Also why is Howard the Duck when he appears in later Marvel productions only identified as created by Steve Gerber when Val Mayerik even by Gerber's own admission technically created him. Sure they both deserve credit and since it's just a matter of credit and not profits why doesn't it happen. I'm unclear. All in all Howard the Duck was a wonderful comic with great artwork that caught a moment in the zeitgeist which elevated it. Being part of the Marvel Universe means never having say you're really dead, so I expect Howard will always return. So get down with that!

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The Incompleat Howard - Volume Three!

The third volume of Howard the Duck The Complete Series the focus shifts to the black and white magazine which followed on after the cancellation of the original color series. In these pages it was assumed I guess that the writers and artists could be more frank about the notions and ideas the series explored and about the exact nature of the relationship between Howard and Beverly. It's evident and flatly stated they are lovers and the incongruity of that circumstance becomes a constant of the of the stories going forward. 

Under a cover by Howard co-creator Val Mayerik and Pete Ledger we have two stories. Both are written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by Gene Colan. Inking Colan on the first is Klaus Janson and on the second Dave Simons. The first story titled "Animal Indecency" we meet Wally Sidney an ill-disguised variation of Walt Disney who in this incarnation is a clothing store magnate and as such has promulgated a campaign against the nudity of animals in order to sell more clothes. Howard becomes a target and as a consequence is forced to add pants to his permanent wardrobe. The spin that it was Disney which sued about Howard's proposed similarity to Donald Duck is of course the basis for this lampoon. The second story is titled "The Crash of '79" and pits Howard and Beverly once again against Pro Rata the Financial Wizard who lures the duo to a famous Cleveland location with a phantom movie picture production which vanishes when he no longer needs it. Instead Howard and Beverly must battle against a quickened Breakfast Special made up a evil eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, and juice. They battle these creatures of the table but in the end frustrated Pro Rata's attempts to get the cosmic key and so his outstanding debt is called in and him along with it. 

Under a raucous Jack Davis cover we have a story by the regular Mantlo, Colan, and Simons team titled "A Christmas for Carol". The Carol of the story turns out to be a little girl and despite his better judgment Howard attempts to pick up her spirits during the holiday since she is gloomy about the world and her parents who are divorced. Quickly the pair encounter Santa himself and an elf named Sunquist (he's from Florida) and their broken down sleigh. It seems Santa has sold out to OPEC and he's running short of fuel. They get the sleigh going but back at the North Pole a villain named Pinball Lizard has led a work stoppage and general uprising to shut down the  Christmas operations. It turns out that Pinball Lizard himself is a pawn in the plans of a greater villain named Greedy Killerwatt, a mutated human who resembles a lightbulb. Once again of course Howard despite his unheroic nature finds a way to save the day and Christmas and lifts Carol's spirits as well. The mag ends with a text feature by Mantlo titled "Duck Soup" which reprises of the long history of Howard for new readers. 

The fourth issue offers up a parody of Playboy with not only the cover by John Pound but also several features inside (including a double-page pin-up by John Byrne) showing what the magazine might look like on Duckworld. The lead story by Mantlo, Colan and Simons is a send-up of The Maltese Falcon with a giant insect named "Hemlock Shoals" taking Howard on a quick magical trip to NYC in his cab to follow the trail of the cosmic key again which is also being pursued by the villainous Cockroach. After much ballyhoo they universe is saved again and Howard ends up back in Cleveland but going against traffic as usual, but this time literally. The second story titled "The Dreadcliff Cuckoos" by Mantlo again welcomes John Buscema and Klaus Janson on the art chores. The gang (Howard, Beverly, Winda, and Paul) wind a vacation to a remote resort which is pretty spooky all things being equal, but they soon learn it's all a ploy to get access to Winda's psychic powers. It's a who's who of old Howard villains as the Reverand Jun Moon Yuk and the Sinister SOOFI join others to extract the information. The leader seems to be Adolph Hitler himself who at one time in the series seemed to operate a hospital Winda was in, but who is revealed at the end to have been merely Hitler's dentist with delusions of grandeur. This story seemed a clear attempt to tie up some old plot threads. 

The next issue of Howard the Duck gives us another of Marvel's 70's hit characters -- The Prince of Darkness Dracula. Howard had already famously battled the Hellcow, one of Dracula's lesser offspring, but this time it's Howard himself who gets the bite and becomes something of a sympathetic vampire (as opposed to a real one) in a story titled "The Tomb of Drakula" by Mantlo, Michael Golden and Bob McLeod. Under an experimental cover by Larry Fredericks, it is needless to say after much vampiric action Howard comes to his senses, more or less. In the story "Captain Ameicana" Howard loses cabbie gig when his cab is demolished and seeking work offers up his skills as a babysitter of sorts to a family which prides itself on its dedication if not deification of mythic American norms. This platoon of two parents and two and a half kids (one is slow) threaten Howard when he tries to bring a bit of sanity to the natural order of  the American Dream. This story by the regular team of Mantlo, Colan and Simons had the "Good Housekeeping" seal of approval. At the end though Winda tells Howard she can send him home and he hops at the chance and Beverly goes with him. The magazine closes with an "Interview with The Duck by Lynn Graeme" (the editor) and "A Fond Look At Fowl Friend" which highlights the characters from Howard stories past. 

Howard at long last returns to his old paddling ponds in a story dubbed simply "Duckworld". Written by Bill Manto, this one marks the return of Michael Golden and Bob McLeod on the art. (Lynn Graeme admits in the next issue that she had over-burdened regular artist Gene Colan and that's why we get this nifty fill-in.) But they are more than up to the task and we find on Duckworld, a world proportioned to Howard-size a land teeming with  ducks of all kinds, but many if not most of them inspired by one single mythic figure -- the ascended Howard the Duck. It turns out that Howard's disappearance, coming at a media-covered event similar in many grim details to the Kent University shootings, had created the basis for a whole new relgion of sorts built around the phrase "Get Down!" But it had been used by those in power to cause folks to relinquish their free will and so Howard is both stunned and appalled that anyone has taken his life as some model to guide life as it should be lived. He makes his feelings known and causes the downfall of the very religion he unintentionally had triggered. At his side throughout his time on Duckworld is Beverly, who is a statuesque "hairless ape" and in a state of undress for much of the story. She finds that being the only human being in a world of ducks is much more alienating that she expected and her empathy for Howard is only increased and they realize that no matter where they are they don't fit in but have each other. With that goal in mind Howard digs up the local "Sorcerer Supreme" and has him magic them back to Earth, leaving Duckworld a less controlled but more independent land. The mag rounds out with a new feature called "Street Peeple" which as far as I can tell does factor into the Howard story at all. John Pound executes one of his best covers for the series. 

After Duckworld Beverly and Howard the Duck find themselves back in that old Okefenokee Swamp where his misadventures on Earth had started so long ago. Showing up quickly enough is the Man-Thing who grabs up Beverly and takes away. In a story titled "Of Dice and Ducks" by Mantlo, Colan and Simons (the regular crew) Howard pursues his kidnapped flame and finds in the middle of the swamp a town with a familiar and highly geometric layout. As he searches for Beverly, Howard is given an obligatory $200 and speeds along the streets in a race car finding himself lost in low rent areas, crisscrossed by railroads, and with a jail keen to catch up folks of all kinds. There are nifty little men who offer chances and opportunities but Howard must break a few rules and dodge some giant dice which repeatedly get in his way as makes way to Beverly across Oriental Ave to the ultimate goal of Boardwalk. There he finds a gorilla by the name of "Monk Kee" who runs the local "Kong Glomerate" after catching for himself the lovely Ann Darrow. Howard chases the baddie up a tower of consumer goods where ultimately the head of "Kong Glomerate" falls to his death and where Howard proclaims that "Booty killed the beast." Rewarded with money which is no good outside of the small town he and Beverly hit the road headed north for more adventures we can only hope. The magazine is rounded out with some tasty full-page pinups of Howard by Marie Severin, Howie Chaykin, John Byrne, Walt Simonson and Marshall Rogers. The "Street Peeple" make their second appearance as well. To my eye this cover for issue seven is the best of John Pound's covers for the series. 

This volume also begins to reprint some of Howard's appearances in Crazy, Marvel's MAD-like humor magazine of the 70's. We have stories by Michael Weiss and Roger Stern with art by Vincente Alacazar and Pat Broderick. One page appears to cobbled together with art from other sources by Colan and Frank Brunner. 

Here are some of the pin-ups featured in this issue and others. 

The key to these stories is the relationship between Howard and Beverly. The antics created by Mantlo and rendered by Colan and others are wild and raucous and funny but at the core is the true caring between the two protagonists. They not only need each other at times, but want each other. Gerber put the two together, but I have to say that Mantlo really makes the romance between these two have some pop and zing and some reality. Where it will end we'll find out next time. 

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