Consider the Duck

“There will always be a duck shaped hole in your heart,” my girlfriend told me. As absurd a sentence as that is, there’s no words that better encapsulate my feelings as Chip Zdarsky and Joe Quinones’ misanthropomorphic little pocket of the Marvel Universe draws nearer its issue 11 expiration date. Saying goodbye to their Howard The Duck run will be difficult for me in innumerable ways, least of all because it will feel like bidding adieu to an old friend who you’ve only known for two years.

Such is the appeal — might I even say power? — of this short-lived stupid duck comic. Since its 2014 launch, it has quietly set about establishing its own small universe of absurdity hidden within all of the Secret, Civil (II), and otherwise wars that frequently flood the publisher’s main stables. Whereas Wolverine, Deadpool, Cable, and many others since the 90s have eagerly embraced the nomenclature of “anti-hero,” Howard is a plain hero who is anti-super. There is simply nothing remarkable about him other than the world in which he operates. He ping pongs back and forth between our world and Marvel’s outsized cosmos, gaining the Silver Surfer’s Power Cosmic and occasionally containing within him the nexus of all realities, yet there’s really nothing super about him. June’s #8 issue (which has already earned itself some very real critical attention) is all about this contradiction at the heart of Howard. Trying to reconnect with his long estranged partner Bev (a mainstay from the original Steve Gerber days), Howard is forced to confront just how fucking bonkers his life has always been, to the point that people like Bev — people who deserve normal lives — simply can’t be around him.

This issue — which follows up an outlandishly large space opera chock full of cloning and time paradoxes — mostly takes place as a conversation between a woman and a duck in a cabin by the Maine shoreline. Its pivot in tone and tempo from the previous issues demonstrates the full range of the medium of comics when commanded by someone whose knowledge and passion for storytelling is as complex and wonderful as Chip Zdarsky’s. He has woven a tale both human (heh) and bold with a consideration for comics essentials like continuity and tie-in opportunity that never borders on intrusive.

Issues like the first #1 (before Secret Wars resulted in a second #1) and Volume II’s #7 (a one-off story in which Daredevil, Spiderman, Old Steve Rogers, SheHulk, and Howard all fly over to the Savage Lands to fight fucking dinosaurs) represent comics at their most fun and free-thinking. Quinones’ art is splashy and guileless, adding a sense of Silver Age boundlessness to Zdarsky’s stories. Issues like the previously mentioned #8 and the touching side story in Volume II’s #2 find a way to pivot towards a tone which “seriousness” fails to accurately describe. These are not the musclebound tales of masculine torment which so many “serious comics writers” have aimed at for so many years, but poignant acknowledgements of just how severe the absurdity of Howard’s universe really is. Through all of his trials, Howard remains a surly amalgam of uncomfortably recognizable contradictions which we usually expect to find only in ourselves: funny yet sad, normal yet bizarre, manic yet depressive.

Kid or grown-up, it’s in human nature to occasionally think of ourselves not simply as outsiders, but as real damn weirdos. “What am I doing?” “How did my life come to be the way it is?” “Who am I fooling with this normal person act?” Howard the Duck answers these sorts of questions with a gruff and wizened piece of advice that we could all use regardless of age: don’t be afraid to be weird. I’m sad to see Zdarsky’s Howard leave because I want that duck to be out there fighting the good fight for weirdos everywhere. He’s the Chris Gethard of waterfowl.

It’s conceivable that this message might be at the core of everything that Chip Zdarsky touches. From his affable social media correspondence with a local Applebee’s to his lunatic bid in Toronto’s Mayoral Race, Zdarsky’s gonzo public life is two parts Hunter S. Thompson and one part Middle School student acting out for attention. Hidden in his enduring performative craziness is a lust for life that also touches the very heart of his work in comics. Nobody but him is qualified to tell readers that it’s OK to be weird, whether that’s being weird at high school, in the bedroom, or across the Marvel Universe. His contributions to Jughead have fundamentally reinterpreted the character for the better, delivering a Forsythe Jones III who is at once a head-in-the-clouds loner and a deeply loyal friend in Archie’s world (he’s also openly Asexual — which, given the character’s past portrayals as deeply femme-phobic, is a welcome announcement). Meanwhile, his groundbreaking work as the artist on the Eisner Award-winning Sex Criminals is entirely about making the normal weird and the weird normal. SexCrims, in addition to being the primary series that got me back into comics, is an anthem to letting one’s freak flag fly in all of its many colors. Ostensibly about a man and a woman who freeze time when they orgasm (though this premise has shifted dramatically in the series’ third arc), the comic provides Zdarsky and Fraction with an opportunity to write love songs to masturbation, kink, asexuality, and all the sticky stuff that makes up both love and ourselves.

Zdarsky’s participation in creating an extremely R-rated comic for Image is in no way at odds with his role in making Howard. The trade paperback collecting issues #1–5 (the first 1–5) of HTD acknowledges Chip Zdarsky as a creator of Sex Criminals, while a metatextual authorial interlude in issue 14 of SC features a drawn-in Zdarsky telling Matt Fraction on the phone “My coke habit is 100% funded by a DUCK COMIC.” In the world of comics, creators are free and encouraged to cross between the worlds of kid-friendly and kid-unfriendly. There is nothing counter-intuitive or reprehensible about a man who draws penises professionally making a duck book for the kids on the side. This is what I love about Howard, Marvel, and comics in general: what to one set of people is an obvious pervert asserting an unhealthy influence over our children is to me a valuable and talented artist using his work to tell kids what they need to hear: don’t be afraid to be weird.

One need only read Zdarsky’s unfailingly sardonic addenda to Matt Fraction’s overly earnest presence in the Sex Criminals’ Letter Daddies section to get the gist of his persona. Of the many letters sections that I’ve become both obsessed with and a part of, Letter Daddies remains the most charming, revealing, and communal place of correspondence that I’ve found at the back of any comic book, and Chip’s facetious color commentary anchors many a confession or lament sent in by readers. It’s indicative of his role in comics overall these past two years: a laughing jester who instinctively deflates the stale and dour tone of many comics and replaces it with a silliness more meaningful than any seriousness.

Howard The Duck has been my home in comics since I pivoted towards Marvel. It was the first series in my box and in my heart. In an era with many, many, good comics, I fear that this series may be drowned out by the profiles of bigger, more ambitious, more “epic” stories that no doubt deserve to be remembered as well. Howard’s story is the odd duck out, at times both grand and small in scale, it pecks away on the fringes of Marvel’s universe, carving out bold and fresh stories where previously there had been none. Zdarsky and Quinones still have 3 issues of the book left to deliver before calling it quits and I will be there on the first day for each one. Though I will miss the unparalleled spirit and uniqueness of this book for a long time to come, I am pleased to say that the creative team never came close to betraying the quality of the series. I am confident that Howard the Duck, quirky little trip that it is, will end on a high.

Until next time, be kind to your fair feathered friends.