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Who the Hell is Leonard the Duck?
Good question. To answer it, we have to travel way, way, wayyyyy back in time to the ancient times of the early 1970s, when crazed genius Steve Gerber was writing a comic book for Marvel called Adventure Into Fear. The Man-Thing walked. Korrek the Barbarian leapt out of a peanut butter jar. And in Adventures Into Fear #19 a talking, cigar-chomping duck called Howard waddled out of the swamp.Gerber has claimed that he didn't plan the Duck, that he just turned up of his own accord, and pushed him into oblivion in his very next appearance, apparently never to be seen again. Then the letters started pouring in, shrieking in agony. "How can you kill this duck?" they cried. Supposedly a package containing a real (cooked & eaten) duck carcass turned up in the mail. So Steve Gerber did the only thing he could do in these circumstances: CPR. The Duck Lived!
After an appearance in Man-Thing #1, and short stories of his own in the notoriously-titled Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 and #5 ("Frog Death" and "Hell Cow", respectively), Howard was given a series of his very own, starting in January 1976.In the decade that, in my opinion at least, produced the greatest comics Marvel has ever published (Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel and Warlock, Doug Moench & co's Master of Kung Fu, Steve Gerber's own magnificent run on The Defenders), Howard the Duck stands tall as the strangest (and some other titles were very strange indeed; see Jack Kirby's bizarre take on 2001 for example) and the best. Starting out as pretty much a superhero parody, fighting villains like Pro-Rata the Cosmic Accountant or giant gingerbread men, it soon metamorphosed into a deeply serious, though still hilarious, psychological study combined with deeply-felt social satire. I can't think of another character who's undergone as realistic nervous breakdown as poor Howard went through.
And who can forget Howard the Duck #16, "The Dreaded Deadline Doom" where Gerber - running behind schedule due to a move to Las Vegas - contributed a text-based (though ably illustrated by several hands) meditation on the creative process? This issue is justly famous now for the "Obligatory Fight Scene" sequence which spawned Gerber's recent excellent miniseries for DC/Vertigo, Nevada, but it deserves to be honored on its own merits.Howard even turned up in his own daily syndicated newspaper strip, also written by Steve Gerber. This strip is well worth tracking down if you can find it, as long as you're prepared to pay what seems like way too much money for a few old scraps of newspaper.
What really distinguished Howard the Duck from other comic books of the day wasn't just its relentless stream of surreal ideas or its wonderful satiric look at everyday life. It was the characters. Howard may have been a talking duck who was fully contemptuous of all those hairless apes, but in his way he was the most human comic book character anyone had ever written. His companion Beverly Switzler was that rarest of things - a fictional female character who actually behaved like a real woman. Even outside of comic books, this was rare. Still is. Go see just about any movie, and you'll see what I mean.
However, all was not well in the House of Ideas. After Steve Gerber left (or was he pushed?), several other hands - often talented folks like Bill Mantlo or Marv Wolfman - tried their hands at writing Howard. Not one of them wrote anything even approaching what Gerber had come up with. In the Howard the Duck B&W Magazine #1, Mantlo sunk low enough as to even write a sex scene between Howard and Beverly. I mean, YUCK! Gerber sued Marvel for ownership of the character. And rightly so. Many - most? comic book characters deserve to belong to their creators (Jack Kirby, RIP) but Howard was a special case in that whenever someone else has tried to write him, they've quite frankly sucked ass.
Which leads directly to the next important part of the genesis of Leonard the Duck. (Remember him?) To raise money to continue his lawsuit, Steve Gerber enlisted the help of the legendary Jack Kirby, and together they created a comic book called Destroyer Duck. "Duke to my friends - Destroyer to my enemies." Proceeds from Duke's comic went to help Gerber in his case against Marvel. Destroyer Duck is a worthy comic in its own right. The first issue features Duke traveling to a parallel dimension where hairless apes rule instead of ducks (sound familiar?) to save, then avenge, his friend The Little Guy from the corporation who exploit and then kill him. The name of the corporation? Godcorp. Their motto? "Grab It All, Own It All, Drain It All!" Duke ends up stranded in this dimension himself, and Gerber and Kirby continued to document his adventures for another four issues.
The lawsuit was settled out of court. Marvel retained ownership of Howard, and made certain concessions in return. I have no idea what these concessions were, thanks to a nondisclosure agreement preventing Steve Gerber from talking about them, so that'll have to remain a mystery at least for the moment.In 1985, however, Marvel approached Gerber with the idea of relaunching Howard the Duck. He thought this was a swell idea, and penned a great first issue which cleverly and humorously undid the damage wrought upon Howard by other writers. Sadly, then-Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter took it upon himself to change and rewrite parts of the script in a manner Gerber found unacceptable, so he pulled it, and the Howard relaunch stalled.
In 1990, Steve Gerber was writing a terrific, satirical run on The Sensational She-Hulk and came up 
with a hilarious four-part story guest starring Howard. There was no promotion and no fanfare, and most people didn't even realize it had happened.
with a hilarious four-part story guest starring Howard. There was no promotion and no fanfare, and most people didn't even realize it had happened.Later still, in 1996, events conspired, allowing Steve Gerber to pull off possibly the most audacious ploy any comic creator has even attempted, with help from The Savage Dragon creator Erik Larsen.
Now, Steve Gerber has told this story in a far more interesting way than I have. The story used to be on his old web page, Gerber's Alarming World - sadly defunct in favor of his new, still-cool-but-this-story-ain't-there site, Steve Gerber.Com. It's also available in the back pages of Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck #1, which any Leonard the Duck fan surely already owns. I'm going to tell the story in my own boring way, but you should really track down his version.
Anyway.
Two things came together at once. The first was the Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck one-shot. There's a story behind this too, but I'm not going to tell it here. Suffice to say that Destroyer Duck and Savage Dragon were set to get together in a story published by Image Comics.The second was Spider-Man Team-Up #5. The editor of that title, Tom Brevoort, contacted Steve Gerber and asked him if he'd be interested in writing a story teaming Spidey with Howard. Gerber wasn't sure this was something he wanted to do, especially as he was already in the process of reviving Duke over at Image and didn't want to pull attention away from that. Erik Larson suggested the idea of a sly crossover between the two comics, where all the characters met up in a warehouse in the dark in a scene occurring in both issues. Gerber made this a condition of his writing the Spider-Man story, thinking Marvel would never go for it. To everyone's surprise, they did. Gerber set about plotting this story, filling it will all kinds of nostalgic goodies from his '70s gear.
Then word leaked out about the OTHER Howard stories. By OTHER writers. The guest appearances in Generation X. The soppy-as-shit Howard the Duck Christmas Special. (I mean, what the FUCK?) Gerber started regretting his decision to write the Spidey/Howard story at all. But Erik Larsen suggested a bold solution.The crossover scene in the warehouse is pretty much identical in both comics (except for a line being changed from "Crap!" to "Rats!" by Marvel's skittish censors). But the Destroyer Duck/Savage Dragon version has a little sequence that isn't in the others.
(Ow! Ow! Owie! I just cut my finger open on the lid of a baked bean can! Fuck!)
Ahem. To cut a long story short - I'm not gonna summarize the whole issue; at least, not here - the sequence involved many, many clone ducks being created. (Spiderman was actually a clone himself at this point - another story I'm not gonna tell.) Duke and the Dragon grabbed the real Howard and Beverly and ran like hell.
Dragon: "We should let these two join their friends on the other side."Duke: "They haven't got any friends over there! They're comin' with us! Anyhow, one of the clones ran out that way. They'll never know the difference!"
Decked out in a new set of clothes and a pair of glasses, his feathers dyed green, Howard was renamed Leonard and put in the witness protection program. Beverly was renamed Rhonda Martini. (I always wondered where the other Beverly left in the Marvel Universe came from, actually...) The two of them were packed off to Buffalo. *WAAUGH*
To my knowledge, Leonard has only made one other appearance. It was a one-panel cameo in Vertigo Winter's Edge #2, in a Nevada story scripted by (of course) Steve Gerber. It was an okay little story, but I liked it less than the rest of Nevada which was quite frankly brilliant, Gerber's best work in years. Leonard's appearance was the highlight. But hopefully, one day, he'll return again...
Everything on this page is hearsay. Any inaccuracies are my own stupid fault. And I didn't even mention the stupid movie!