Adventures In Awesome: Howard The Duck: Media Duckling

A while back I came to the defence of the much-derided movie Howard The Duck, explaining that residual fondness for the Marvel Comics character and love of ILM's amazing work had been strong enough for me to look past the lack of satirical bite, but had a bit of a dig at the most recent Marvel incarnation of Howard the Duck, as written by Ty Templeton and Juan Bobillo:

Marvel have recently started rehabilitating the character, firstly with a Max mini-series a few years back, and now again with Ty Templeton and Juan Bobillo setting him in the modern era, with all of its attendant satirical fodder. Sadly, Templeton is a good writer, but doesn't have the anger that Gerber had, so the first issue of the latest mini is certainly brash but not quite as biting as it could have been... Let's hope the character can shake off the crap surrounding it and be used as an astute commentator on the nonsense of modern life, especially since Warren Ellis stopped writing Spider Jerusalem.

Seems I shouldn't have spoken so soon. I just saw this interview Templeton did with Newsarama this interview Templeton did with Newsarama, during which he not only admits to liking the movie as well, but has this to say of the criticism levelled at him for taking on the project:

I'm very aware of a large group of Howard fans who consider anyone who isn't named Steve Gerber working on the Duck, a form of blasphemy. Obviously I don't consider it blasphemous, or I wouldn't have taken the gig, but I get where these uber-Howard fans are coming from, and I'm disappointed I won't be able to reach them with this story. I think, they might actually like it when it's all said and done. The four issues build slowly (the first issue is fairly tame compared to what's coming up) and we're heading towards a big finale that Howard fans should enjoy.

And how. When I wrote my original Howard post I had only read that first issue, which had seemed mild in tone compared to Gerber's furious work. The following issues are full of satire, righteous anger, comic in-jokes, smut, and anarchic energy. Howard battles the evil M.O.D.O.T. (Mobile/Mental Organism Designed Only for Talking), based on the original, evil M.O.D.O.K. (Mobile/Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing), who has attempted to take over the minds of Americans everywhere by using his enormous brain and a series of radio and TV talk show host-robots to generate a never-ending stream of useless trivia that distorts our perception of serious issues around the world.


Templeton skewers the ridiculous media and its trivial preoccupations, as well as gun control issues, the war on terror, immigration paranoia, and a million other things that need satirising. Plus, Bobillo's art is just as good, if not better, than his work on Dan Slott's magnificent She-Hulk, and there's even a bit of fourth-wall japery added for good measure, as Ink Destroyed My Brush points out here. It was exactly the Howard we need in this century. Apologies to Templeton for doubting him (I'm sure he's read this [/delusion]). Get this book! It's one of the best things Marvel has put out in years.

Two Of My Childhood Heroes Have Passed Away

As I've mentioned before, Steve Gerber was one of my favourite comic writers when I was young, responsible for the satirical comic Howard the Duck. Here is his blog, currently left in the capable hands of Mark Evanier. Gerber's gift for writing piercing social comment was unlike anything else I had ever experienced, and my childhood was all the better for it. I'd like to think that experiencing his satirical genius has made me a better and more questioning person than I would normally have been, that perhaps his words and thoughts have opened my eyes enough to get me through life in a healthier state than I would have without his work filed away inside my head.

He could have managed more if Marvel had treated him a bit more fairly. I often wonder why so many comic writers seem so cantankerous, but seeing how they are treated, with the copyright to their creations out of reach, it makes sense. Sadly, this can lead to misunderstandings. Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude owes a great debt to Gerber's Omega The Unknown, and at a book signing a few years ago Jonathan Lethem geeked out about his work when I mentioned I was a fan. His enthusiasm for Gerber's work was immense, with special affection for Omega (so much so I hunted down the original run of ten issues the next day), and when he told me Marvel had asked him to write a comic for them, he got so psyched, though he admitted he was perhaps a little unsure about whether it was a good idea. I'd like to think that my enthusiastic reply convinced him to go ahead with it, but I'm not that arrogant (this is a lie). He went ahead with the project, choosing to update Omega, but Gerber interpreted this as a bad faith move on Marvel's behalf, and damned the project. After meeting Lethem and realising the project had been borne of respect for the original he relaxed his stance, but it's still terrible that the issues of copyright and ownership take such a toll on comic writers and artists.

Gerber will be sorely missed, especially now that he was beginning to work on more projects. I gather Paul Levitz has suggested fans donate to the Hero Initiative, a charity that I know for a fact employs very very good people who look after those left behind by the comics industry. As soon as I get paid, I shall offer what I can.

Also sadly departed is Roy Scheider, whose performances in Jaws, All That Jazz, Sorceror, and The French Connection thrilled me when I was younger. In later years he didn't seem to crop up in films anywhere near enough, though he was great in John Frankenheimer's 52 Pick-Up and David Cronenberg's underrated Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch as the vile Doctor Benway. I was going to post a clip of him singing the final song in All That Jazz (if you've seen the film, you know what the song is and what context it's sung in), but it made me so damn sad rewatching it that I just couldn't do it, despite his brilliant performance and the craziness of Ben Vereen. So, instead of that, here he is triumping over Malcolm McDowell's effete British helicopter pilot in the finale of one of my favourite movies, John Badham's technoporn thriller classic Blue Thunder.



"Catch ya later." You said it, Roy. You said it.

In Defence of Howard the Duck

The AV Club, touchstone of US pop culture criticism for hipsters everywhere, is currently running an excellent feature called My Year of Flops, where Nathan Rabin reappraises movies that failed miserably at the box office and didn't even get to have a cult following afterwards. It's been very entertaining, and I will miss it when his year is up, though I reckon he's stretched the parameters where necessary. I'm sure 1941, Mystery Men, Wicker Man, and Hudson Hawk have some kind of a following, and The Fountain surely will as time goes by and people realise what a fascinating, beautifully crafted film it is. I sometimes disagree with some of his conclusions (especially Hudson Hawk, and the haters can bite it right now), but he can often enlighten. This week he discussed the hyper-violent roller-skating classic Heaven's Gate, and though it's been years since I've seen it (back in the day I loved it and watched it repeatedly, which means I lost a lot of days to it), I reckon he might have nailed it.


However, there is one film I'm certain he will tackle soon that will annoy me no matter what, because I just know he will give it a Failure rating. That movie is Howard the Duck, or, as it was called in the UK following its miserable showing at the US box office, Howard: A New Breed Of Hero. Just a quick explanation of his rating system; Failure is a film that has little ambition and fails so badly it doesn't even achieve those minor ambitions, Fiasco is a movie that aims high and sadly falls short, and Secret Success is a movie that has a terrible reputation that is undeserved. Like Hudson Hawk. (Keep biting it, hater nation!) Now, I can safely say he will think HTD a Failure (though I will come back and edit this if he surprises me), and even though I watched it again recently and was saddened by how badly it has dated, I still think it has merits as a movie (though not as an adaptation; I'll get back to that later).

Yes, the slapstick is annoying, and yes, Tim Robbins' big movie debut is pretty terrible too, and the tone is all over the place, and the duck costume looks risible, and Lea Thompson is pretty annoying too, and the parts of the soundtrack that are performed and written by Sylvester (Airwolf theme) Levay and Thomas (Blinded Me With Science) Dolby sound like a medley of all that was wrong with 80s pop music, and a lot of the jokes hit the floor with the splat of a dropped duck egg, but still, I cannot hate on it. Mostly because I was so invested in it when I was a kid, as invested as I am now with Lost, and that's all down to the wonderful comic by Steve Gerber.

Sadly, most people's knowledge of Steve Gerber's bizarre creation is restricted to having heard that that George Lucas movie was a big flop ha ha ha, and as a result they're missing out on one of the funniest satirical creations of the 70s. When I were a nipper who had been fortunate enough to stumble across the character, I may have missed the majority of the jokes about, for example, Reverend Jun Moon Yuc (his followers are the Yuccies), and the evil accountant-wizard Pro-Rata and his castle made of credit cards (not to mention the arc where Howard runs for President), but even so, there were enough spoofs of superhero conventions that even I could get at that age, such as the introduction of Turnip-Man.


As silly as it all sounds, there is a palpable air of melancholy running through it, partially due to Gene Colan's oddly apt art, which manages to be both absurd and dramatic at the same time. Mostly it's down to the central conceit of the character; who better to point out how ridiculous our society is than an alien. I can imagine Gerber was influenced by Walter Tevis and Nicolas Roeg's versions of The Man Who Fell To Earth, another bleak satire.

Whereas that was unleavened by humour, Howard the Duck is often hilarious, but at times it still manages to be unusually dour. Though Howard is lucky enough to find a companion in Beverly Switzler, he is otherwise utterly alone. Already a depressive individual, his accidental exile on earth makes him even more forlorn. For every joke the comic had, and for every absurd character like failed journalist turned super-villain Doctor Bong, there was usually some interlude with Howard having a nervous breakdown or furiously falling out with everyone and sending himself off on long dark nights of the soul. It's a much more affecting read than you would imagine, considering the high levels of wacky. I mean, seriously. Look at Doctor Bong. He's a magnificent bastard!


My love of the character meant I was primed to be thrilled by the existence of a movie, especially one produced by Lucas. Of course, that means little when it's actually written and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. Okay, so they wrote American Graffiti, and that's a stone-classic, but they also wrote Indiana Jones and The Almost Franchise-Killing Broad Comedy Nonsense (aka Temple of Doom), and they were solely responsible for Best Defense, which was a true soul-sullying nightmare. Howard the Duck is nowhere near as bad as that abomination, but it does its level best to ignore the potential of the character, eschewing the satire and gloominess and concentrating simply on the heelarryus reactions of humans to, get this, a talking duck! They also get rid of his hat, which is unforgivable.

So why do I still defend it? A lot of the soundtrack is terrible, but musical genius and trip-hop hero John Barry provides some excellent themes that give the film a lot more gravitas than it deserves, especially considering the performances. Huyck seemingly said to everyone that the broader the performance the better, which means most of the characters shriek and gurn and gesticulate as if their arms are on fire. It's hard going, sometimes. Only Jeffrey Jones comes out of it with any credit, at first playing things as deadpan as possible and then going all out when his character, Dr. Jenning, becomes possessed by a Dark Overlord of the Universe. He's very very good. I guess you'll have to take my word for it.


However, it does feature some of the best pre-digital effects work in ILM's history, filled with bizarre animation, cutting edge rotoscoping, and a truly remarkable go-motion monster by Phil Tippett, not to mention the first use of digital wire removal. I'm a whore for good effects, which is possibly one of the reasons I will watch any old sci-fi crap; i.e. just to see what crazy shit those guys get up to. All of those B-roll documentaries about the making of movies that got shown on ITV on Sunday afternoons would be taped and watched and rewatched ad infinitum. As a result I would get excited by FX technician names turning up in credits: Dennis Muren, Hoyt Yeatman, Joe Johnston (now a director of middling-to-good movies), Ken Ralston, John Dykstra (creator of the DykstraFlex), Richard Edlund...


I also sought out various stop/go-motion animators: the great Ray Harryhausen, Randall William Cook, David Allen, Tom St. Anand. My favourite, though was Tippett, who animated the AT-AT Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, Vermithrax Pejorative in Dragonslayer, and thousands of bugs for Starship Troopers. His best pre-digital monster, though, had to be the Dark Overlord. Pictures don't do it justice.


Considering who silly the rest of the movie is, when it turns up it's genuinely shocking, although Tippett has to have it do dumb things to keep the tone light. Otherwise kids would freak out. Part crab, part scorpion, part God-knows-what, it steals the film with ease. It has such personality, and moves with such speed and grace, that you totally buy into it. Post-CGI I can imagine people would think it looks clunky, but to me it's a thing of beauty. It's one of the best movie monsters, and yet it's stuck in a movie no one cares about. Unless you count the Furries. [ETA: From that page I note that the failure of the movie forced Lucas to sell ILM's fledgling CGI arm to Steve Jobs. They later became Pixar. Thanks, Howard the Duck!]


Perhaps the worst thing that could be said about the effects are that it seems like they belong to a different, better movie, but somehow I think the team were trying to emulate the crazy over-the-top art of the comics. In fact they manage to create something completely new and different; the energy animations are totally out there. In addition, some of the scenes, especially those set in a diner full of murderous rednecks, it seems Jenning has been matted into a shot with different lighting, which gives him an even more otherworldy quality than the make-up effects and rotoscoped electricity. It all added up. My little child brain was blown to smithereens by the invention of the animation team.


Of the many indignities visited upon the movies, most egregious is the Razzie Award for Worst Special Effects. Bullshit. That gets me madder than Crash winning Best Picture at the Oscars a couple of years ago. ILM's work on Howard the Duck was just phenomenal, but got overshadowed by the poor reputation of the rest of the movie and then disrespected by a bunch of snotty jerks with stunted senses-of-humour. ::seethe:: I'll be honest, a lot of the opprobrium heaped upon it is deserved, but it's different, filled with bravura effects sequences, and is often quite imaginative. Which, I'm fully aware, seems like the faintest praise possible, until you watch most of the cookie-cutter sci-fi/fantasy movies coming out at the time, many of which are less ridiculous but are horribly derivative and display none of the bravery Lucas, Huyck and Katz exhibited in making a movie about a talking duck saving the world.


I guess the main reason I get upset about it is that the character of Howard is a marvellous creation when handled right, and still has the potential to be used brilliantly, especially in a crazed modern era like the one we're attempting to survive. Marvel have recently started rehabilitating the character, firstly with a Max mini-series a few years back, and now again with Ty Templeton and Juan Bobillo setting him in the modern era, with all of its attendant satirical fodder. Sadly, Templeton is a good writer, but doesn't have the anger that Gerber had, so the first issue of the latest mini is certainly brash but not quite as biting as it could have been. That said, it does feature the best couple of panels I've seen in a long time, with Howard imagining he's playing poker with a series of Marvel grotesques, including Man-Thing, whose touch burns if you feel fear.


Let's hope the character can shake off the crap surrounding it and be used as an astute commentator on the nonsense of modern life, especially since Warren Ellis stopped writing Spider Jerusalem.

And you thought Ghost Rider was bad

Yes, as I was saying. Brett Leonard. Director of The Lawnmower Man, which was famously Flowers for Algernon with unpleasant cyber-rape, Pierce Brosnan in a tight bodysuit, and a sequel that would get on any bottom 10 movies list. Adapter of Dean Koontz' Hideaway, with Jeff Goldblum dying, coming back to life, chasing a serial killer, and ending up psychically battling with said killer in an outrageous FX blow-out for no other reason than that Leonard was the "Lawnmower Man guy" and it was kind of expected of him. Helmer of Virtuosity, with Denzel Washington as a disgraced cop with a robotic arm, and Russell "Le Roq" Crowe as a living serial-killer-program made flesh by something to do with very silly non-science. I think the word "nanobots" was bandied around at one point. Seems I don't remember much of it, except that I liked it more than I should have. Denzel! Le Roq! Come on! Bear in mind I have very low standards.

But not so low that I could find anything good to say about Man-Thing, his adaptation of the Marvel comic. To clarify, Man-Thing is not a euphemism for penis. He's an ecological, mystical, gooey being living in the Florida Everglades which doubles as the Nexus of All Realities. His full history is available on Wikipedia, and is more interesting than any attempt of mine to recap it. I have so little interest in the character, even though it was often written by Steve Gerber, the writer behind the magnificent Howard the Duck. I've not read Swamp Thing either. Not even Alan Moore's legendary run. I guess I just don't like reading about non-communicative magical swamp dwelling half-men, even when it's well-written.

Man-Thing the movie is not well-written. It doesn't seem to be written at all. I certainly couldn't tell what was going on. There's a town called Bywater with a new sheriff who investigates a bunch of disappearances, and there's an evil oil baron who has built his rig in the middle of the Nexus, and Man-Thing is pissed, and a shaman is pissed too, and Man-Thing kills everyone except for the sheriff and his hott new eco-warrior girlfriend, even though he had the chance and I was wishing for it really a lot, and then Man-Thing disappears in a swamp-tornado thing. Oh, sorry. Spoiler alert!

I could fart a more imaginative and coherent plot. It was written by Hans Rodionoff, who also wrote an excellent horror comic for Vertigo called Mnemovore. It was original, and creepy, and intelligent. If it were adapted as a film, I'd be first in line. So why is Man-Thing such an abomination? Was it the budgetary constraints? Its genesis was amusing. Marvel announced an alliance with Lionsgate Films, supposedly for a series of low-budget adaptations of Marvel properties, and promised they would all get a cinema release. So far, we've had the disappointing but entertaining Punisher, with Tom "Homeless Dad" Jane and John "Hairpiece" Travolta, and Man-Thing, which ended up being a Sci-Fi Channel TV movie. Avi Arad's expensive pants are on fire right now.

Anyway, Marvel are getting flack for the recent drop in quality of their films. I loved the first two X-Men movies and liked the first two Spideys, but other than that their output is disappointing. I admit, with great reluctance, to a fondness for the Fantastic Four movies. They're awful, but they're light and fun. And, contrary to the beliefs of a few unhinged individuals on the internet, they are better than the astonishingly bad Olle Sassone / Roger Corman version, which featured a frantically gesticulating Doom...


...making up for the fact that you couldn't see his face by voguing in the middle of every line, and ended with Reed Richards' bendy arm...


...played by a rubber pole with a glove on it, waving out of the top of a limousine. Daredevil was okayish, Elektra was very bad, Ghost Rider was appalling (yet my love for lean slices of Nicolas Cage ham saved it. Just). However, compared to Man-Thing, they are all masterpieces. Well, not Ghost Rider, but you get my point.

First strike against it, filming it in Australia with a bunch of actors who can't be bothered to master a Louisiana accent (yes, not only is it set in the wrong state, it's filmed in the wrong country). Worst of all is the lead, "hunky" Matthew Le Nevez as the new sheriff who arrives to clean up this one-monster town, dagnabbit.


There's laconic (which is good), and there's lifeless (more of a problem). Le Nevez crushes each cliched line under a mortis-like monotone that would make Zooey Deschanel jealous, if she could be bothered to muster the energy. When he's not doing that he walks around like a Gerry Anderson puppet, arms and legs wobbling away. I really wish I could find his walk on YouTube. Trey Parker and Matt Stone could have saved a fortune if they'd hired him for Team America: World Police.

The rest of the cast are dreadful too, but for the opposite reason, as if attending an all-you-can-eat scenery buffet. The main villain, Frederick Schist, is played by character actor Jack Thompson, who is usually much better than this. I'll blame Brett Leonard for leading him astray. The love interest is played by Transformers "hottie" Rachael Taylor. I'm still pissed at her for taking screentime away from Buffy and Angel vet Tom Lenk in Transformers. He was cast as a nerdy IT tech who is significantly less hott than Taylor (though significantly more talented), and so is deemed surplus to requirements 15 minutes into the movie. Damn you Michael Bay!

The chemistry between Taylor and Le Nevez is blistering! Well, actually it's barely recognisable as such, mostly because both actors seem unaware of each other for most of the movie, until Leonard randomly screams out, "Mack on each other, craven acting dogs!" and they suddenly start kissing on each other's face parts for no apparent reason. It's as if two strangers on a bus started getting busy right in front of you, and equally as discombobulating.

Of course, all of this is mere window dressing. We watched the damn thing for some Man-Thing action, and we sure got a couple of minutes of it. Luckily for our titular non-hero, various characters like to enter the swamp for very little reason other than to get killed. Again, we could see no reason for this. For all we knew, Man-Thing was phoning Bywater for takeout, and the townsfolk were all moonlighting as delivery men because of the high turnover. After many hints as to what he looks like, we finally see that...er...



Oh great, an Ent with tentacles and red contacts. Worth every penny. Still, it's good news for Stephen Hopkins' The Reaping. Watching Man-Thing a couple of days earlier meant that The Reaping wasn't the worst film set in a Louisiana swamp that we've seen this week.