Over on Comic Book Resources, Greg Hatcher praises Steve Gerber’s seventies work. As I mentioned in my recent Comic-Con 2006 review, I’m also a huge fan of Steve Gerber’s work, and Greg’s take on Gerber’s Defenders^• is worth reading, but what got me laughing was why they hung out at Dr. Strange’s pad all of the time.

Gerber’s Defenders weren’t feared and hated because they were mutants, but because on some personal level they were socially unacceptable. Nighthawk and Valkyrie were both reformed villains, Dr. Strange was a weird mystic, and the Hulk was, well, a monster.…. Dr. Strange was the smart one that knew a lot of weird stuff, the one whose house they always hung out at because nobody wanted to go home. You just KNEW Strange had the coolest record collection EVER in that Greenwich Village pad.

It’s just right on so many levels.

Read Greg’s article. Note that while Greg is focused on the seventies, Steve Gerber continues to write some fine work. See Hard Time: 50 to Life^• and Nevada^• for examples.

I vividly remember the first Steve Gerber comics I read. The first Howard the Duck^• was the issue where Howard loses the election for president because he was in a bath with Beverly. I was twelve years old and lived in a town so small that there was no regular comics supplier—at the time, I couldn’t have even kept up with X-Men, even if I’d wanted to. So I lost track of Howard until I went to college and discovered the wonders of back issues.

The other most memorable comic from that era was also Gerber’s: the Sons of the Serpent storyline from the Defenders a year before Howard ran for president has stuck with me for decades.