Howard the Duck
Marvel Comics character
Howard the Duck is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character was created by writer Steve Gerber, based very loosely on his college friend Howard Tockman, and artist Val Mayerik. Howard the Duck first appeared in Adventure into Fear #19 (cover-dated Dec. 1973) and several subsequent series have chronicled the misadventures of the ill-tempered anthropomorphic animal trapped on a human-dominated Earth. Echoing this, the most common tagline of his comics reads 'Trapped In a World He Never Made!'.
Howard's adventures are generally social satires, while a few are parodies of genre fiction with a metafictional awareness of the medium. Their tone is existentialist, and their 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."
Howard the Duck was portrayed by Ed Gale and voiced by Chip Zien in the critically and commercially unsuccessful 1986 self-titled film. Starting in 2014, the character, voiced by Seth Green, appeared in cameos in several Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films, the Disney XD animated series Guardians of the Galaxy (2015–19) and Ultimate Spider-Man (2016; with Kevin Michael Richardson), and the Disney+ series What If...? (2021–2024).
Publication history
Howard the Duck was created by writer Steve Gerber and penciler Val Mayerik in Adventure into Fear #19 (Dec.
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This entry incorporates text from “Howard the Duck” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.