BHOC: HOWARD THE DUCK #31

Every once in a while, my mother would go to a more outlying supermarket when she needed something in particular, something that apparently wasn’t carried by our local store. In that same shopping mall there was a card store or a candy store that sold comics. And that’s where I came across this issue of HOWARD THE DUCK. I had seen the previous issue spotlighted on the Bullpen Bulletins page a month earlier, and Howard being attired in a makeshift suit of Iron Man-like armor intrigued me. But my regular 7-11 didn’t carry the title, never had, and so I had no way of sating my curiosity–until I came across this issue. Consequently, I picked it up.

To be honest, I didn’t get Howard the Duck as a young reader. I didn’t have the life experience or the understanding of the world to get most of the social commentary or contemporary references, and I wasn’t truly familiar with either the Walt Disney comic books that had been so ubiquitous throughout the 1950s and 1960s nor the rise of the underground comics that gave the medium a new sensibility. So to me, Howard was just this weird thing, and the one earlier issue that I had read didn’t resonate with me. As I’ve said before, what I was looking for in my comic books was super heroes. But dress Howard up as a super hero and I had an entry point, a way in. It probably didn’t hurt matters that, rather than his creator Steve Gerber, the series was now being written by the much more mainstream-minded Bill Mantlo.

Ah, Bill Mantlo! The tragedy of what happened to him later in life has perhaps staved off a full accounting of his strengths and weaknesses as a writer during this period. But he was inevitably the man who would take on thankless jobs, toy tie-in books, emergency fill-ins, overnight scripting, whatever was available. So when somebody was needed to follow up he very popular Steve Gerber, Mantlo was there! Mantlo also had a fraught relationship with new EIC Jim Shooter, so any assignment he could get that would help Jim out was coin to earn, I expect. Bill’s Howard is little more than a shadow of Gerber’s character, but I have to admit that at the age of 11, I preferred what Bill was doing here. Fight scenes, even comedic ones, I could understand and follow. And there was something about Gene Colan’s primitive Iron Duck design that I found appealing. It probably didn’t hurt that Colan was a favorite Iron Man artist either.

So last time, having discovered that his wife Beverly Switzer still had feelings for her old boyfriend, the sinister Doctor Bong sought Howard out intent on ending his life. But before the Doctor could make good on his threat, Howard got some assistance from Claude Starkowski, a distant cousin of Tony Stark’s (and one whose last name would occasionally be given as Starkowicz in the future, Mantlo or somebody not remembering exactly what had been established) who kitted him up in a cut-rate Iron man suit to give Howard a chance of surviving the confrontation. As this issue opens, the battle is joined–and while there’s definitely a comedic sense hovering above the fray, it’s also treated about as seriously as any other fight sequence in any other Marvel book of the period. Howard and Bong use their assorted weapons and powers against one another, each one attempting to get the upper hand.

Running out of weapons with which to parry his opponent, Howard pulls out an emergency mallet and clocks Bong in the head with it, causing Bong’s sonic powers to transport the two of them back to Bong’s stronghold in the Himalayan mountains. Bong was, after all, a lampoon of Doctor Doom, so of course he had his own castle. There, the fight continues, and Bong slowly peels Howard out of his iron shell, leaving him exposed and vulnerable. But in the meantime, Beverly hasn’t been idle either, and now that the combatants have arrived back on her doorstep, she’s ready to put her plan into action.

In Doctor Bing’s absence, Beverly has used his genetic manipulator to whip up a quartet of tiny Bong clones grown from one of his toenail clippings. She’s also readied Bong’s own public relations machine to turn on him, preparing headlines with which to blanket the world indicating that Bong is a deadbeat dad who abandoned his wife and infant children to go out and conquer the world. As Bong is notoriously media-savvy, he realizes that he wouldn’t survive the blow to his reputation, and so reluctantly he allows Beverly and Howard to depart unmolested. In a flash, they’re teleported back to the hospital where the battle began. It’s the wrap-up to a long-running plotline that had begun under Gerber.

And that’s pretty much the issue, except for the announcement printed on the letters page. It turned out that this was the final issue of HOWARD THE DUCK…at least as a comic book. But the plan was for the series to relaunch as one of Marvel’s line of black and white magazines. These publications weren’t bound by the restraints of the comics code, and so they were permitted to go a bit further than the comic book version was allowed. Possibly a little bit too far in terms of the first issue (though, even then, not as far as artist Gene Colan had initially drawn.) Either way, that meant that this was my final encounter with Howard, at least for the time being. It wouldn’t be until perhaps a year later, when I’d moved into Junior High School and my friend Israel Litwack extolled the wonders of Howard that I would dip my toe back into these waters. But that’s a tale for the future.