Steve Gerber

Stephen Ross Gerber was born on September 20, 1947, and became one of Marvel Comics' most distinctive voices of the 1970s, best remembered for creating Howard the Duck — a sardonic, cigar-chomping waterfowl stranded in a world he never made, whose satirical bite made him a genuine countercultural figure. Gerber died on February 10, 2008.

He broke into comics around 1972 and quickly demonstrated an appetite for unconventional storytelling. His runs on Man-Thing, The Defenders, and Daredevil showed a writer willing to mix genuine pathos with absurdist humor, while his work on Marvel Spotlight's "Son of Satan" and Marvel Presents' "Guardians of the Galaxy" revealed the breadth of his range. Among his notable co-creations was Omega the Unknown, a quietly strange superhero series that stood apart from anything else Marvel was publishing at the time. He also contributed to titles including The Sensational She-Hulk and Strange across a career spanning well over 400 credited issues.

A hallmark of Gerber's craft was his willingness to break the page — he regularly inserted extended prose passages directly into comic narratives, a technique that challenged reader expectations and blurred the line between comics and literary fiction, as seen in his graphic novel Stewart the Rat.

His influence on socially conscious, formally adventurous comics storytelling was recognized posthumously when he was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2010.