Howard the Duck gets stolen back by his creator (Steve Gerber)

Howard the Duck gets stolen back by his creator (Steve Gerber)

I heard about this in two podcasts and did some digging.

Yep, you heard that right. Gerber had major problems with Marvel and their use of his character Howard the Duck. He even sued Marvel to get the character back. However, he lost the lawsuit and Marvel retained the character. I believe this irked Gerber, and he hatched a clever plan to get his character back into his hands.

I'll let The Comics Cube guys explain. From Comics Cube, ((Gerber was, at the time, working on a one-shot with Chris Marrinan and Erik Larsen, teaming up Larsen's Savage Dragon and Gerber's Destroyer Duck (whom he had created to help fund his lawsuit against Marvel). The one-shot was called...The Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck.  ))

In that Savage Dragon crossover, Spider-man and Howard the Duck show up, somewhat in shadows, in that same comic book. The Spider-Man/Duck crossover showed them meeting Dragon and the other Duck in the same location. Basically two different comic book companies had an unofficial/official crossover within their own crossovers. Got it?

Here's where it gets better.

The Spider-Man version ends as if nothing happened when they part ways with SD. However, the Savage Dragon version ends with SD and the other hero stealing Howard the Duck and his girlfriend from a collection of cloned ducks in the warehouse. They make it a point to announce they are the real characters from Marvel. SD basically stole the Howard Duck character from Marvel into the Image universe. Howard and his girlfriend change their hair and feather colors. They go on to live away from the Marvel universe. BTW, Howard changes his name to Leonard the Duck.

Here's the kicker. Spider-Man leaves the warehouse with a pair of clones of Howard and his girlfriend! And Marvel didn't even know it.

What makes it clever is that within both universes, actual characters took a character and stole and brought him into another universe and left a cheap knock off in his home universe! Within our real world, this was a creator stealing his own creation from a company and leaving clones in its place and doing so legally.