Howard the Duck first appeared in Adventure into Fear #19 (September 11, 1973) and several subsequent series have chronicled the misadventures of the ill-tempered, anthropomorphic, “funny animal” trapped on human-dominated Earth. Howard is abducted from his home planet and is dropped into the Florida Everglades by the demonic Thog the Overmaster of the realm Sominus. He falls off the inter-dimensional stepping stones and materializes in Cleveland, Ohio. Howard’s adventures are generally social satires, while a few are parodies of genre fiction with a metafictional awareness of the medium. The book is existentialist, and its main joke, according to Gerber, is that there is no joke: “that life’s most serious moments and most incredibly dumb moments are often distinguishable only by a momentary point of view.”
September 11th saw the debut of Howard the Duck in Adventure into Fear #19 in 1973!
