Howard the Duck: Volume 1, No. 1, October, 1979

New York: Marvel Comics Group, 1979. Presumed first edition/first printing. Wraps. Good. No dust jacket. Cover has some wear and soiling.. 68 p. Includes illustrations. Page count includes cover. From Wikipedia: "Howard the Duck is a comic book character in the Marvel Comics universe created by writer Steve Gerber and artist Val Mayerik. The character first appeared in Adventure into Fear #19 (Dec. 1973) and several subsequent series have chronicled the misadventures of the ill-tempered, anthropomorphic, "funny animal" trapped on human-dominated Earth. 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." This is diametrically opposed to screenwriter Gloria Katz, who in adapting the comic to the screen declared, "It's a film about a duck from outer space...It's not supposed to be an existential experience....Howard the Duck was created in 1973 by Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik in Adventure into Fear as a secondary character in that comic's Man-Thing feature. He graduated to his own backup feature in Giant-Size Man-Thing, confronting such bizarre horror-parody characters as the Hellcow and the Man-Frog, before acquiring his own comic book title with Howard the Duck #1 in 1976....in 1979 Marvel launched the series as a bimonthly magazine, with scripts by Mantlo, art by Colan and Michael Golden and unrelated backup features by others; this series was canceled after nine issues.