117th Post - Yet More Gerber Tributes

If you are a completist, you can read a few hundred online tributes to Steve Gerber. You'll see my blog amidst that huge list (it's alphabetically-arranged).

This man, his work, his death, have resonated with fandom in a way that I have seldom seen. When Jack Kirby died in 1994, the internet certainly existed, but I do not recall seeing these kinds of tributes to him then. Will Eisner died in 2005, and there were tributes aplenty then. But Eisner was 85 years old and died as a result of complications following heart surgery. Not exactly a surprise. But Gerber? Despite his illness, and his attitude toward it, his death remains a shock.

I guess, if I had to put my finger on it, Steve Gerber's passing is hitting those of us of a certain age so hard because so many of us read his work when he was in his prime, and we were at our most impressionable. We thought we, and he, would, could, and should, live forever. His crazy/insane Defenders work, his introspective Omega the Unknown, his satirical Howard the Duck, and his poignant Man Thing all resonated with us in a way that is difficult to convey to people who don't know what we're talking about.

Gerber's death reminds us that our heroes are fallible, are human, and prone to the same frailties, infirmities, and foibles that affect the rest of us. And we don't like that kind of reminder.

Bevboy