Howard the Duck #6

Howard the Duck's signature tagline — "Trapped in a World He Never Made!" — sets the perfectly absurd tone for this November 1976 Marvel gem. Gene Colan and Tom Palmer's cover plunges Howard, candle in hand, into a shadowy cellar alongside a wide-eyed young woman, the two of them recoiling from a chained, cloaked figure slumped in a chair amid flickering flames and ominous machinery — with the teaser "There Are Some Things That Man — and Duck — Were Not Meant to Know!" doing its best to raise the hairs on your neck. Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes were doing something genuinely strange and funny with comics in 1976, and this issue, with Gene Colan's atmospheric interior art inked by Steve Leialoha, is a fine example of that wonderfully off-kilter run.