Intermittently throughout his groundbreakingly awesome run on The Defenders, Gerber would draw attention away from the primary plot for a seemingly unconnected series of vignettes in which otherwise ordinary people caught in the midst of doing nothing spectacular were suddenly set upon by a homicidal mythical midget intent on shooting them down like wooden ducks on a fairway ...
The implication was, of course, that the Elf With A Gun was ultimately to somehow cross over into the primary Defenders storyline, and frankly wouldn't have seemed out of place considering that Gerber's other contributions included an evil possessed deer, a personality cult centered around a cosmic being masquerading as an abusive schlep, and about all the Jack Norriss you can handle.
In fact, the one occasion when the Elf got within some sort of proximity to the main story seemed to be teasing a confluence.
Fantastically though ... IT NEVER DID. Gerber offed the Elf suddenly (see below) in its final appearance.
A hundred issues after the Elf's debut, series writers J.M.DeMatteis and Peter Gillis revisited the idea with something approaching a conclusion. As an authority in the overwhelming epic that is the Elf With A Gun saga, I give it a thumbs-down. Gerber wrote an amazing story about a serial killer master-of-many-disguises elf and how he got killed by a truck, and I dare anyone to put a better coda on it than that.
8 comments:
Actually, Gerber did tie it into larger plots, much later...in a way. In the Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck special, in which he also kidnapped back Howard & Bev (Howard as "Leonard"), the elf showed up, and shot a whole room full of cloned ducks--the idea is that the one that went back to Marvel was a clone.
And ending your story with "And then they were all hit by a truck" is straight out of Michael O'Donoghue's contemporary "How To Write Good." Never stale.
I love this stuff. This is why Gerber had da funk in a way almost no other comics writer(NONE other in the 70s) ever did.
You really should post the Hellcow or Soofi stories.
By the way, seeing someone singing a John Denver song being shot warms me in an evil way of which I'm vaguely ashamed.
Awesome, you're still doing this.
How did Gerber ever get this concept past Marvel editors?
Gerber did some pretty twisted stuff; take a look at some of the Man-Thing stories he wrote. It was part of his appeal and Marvel recognized that.
Steve Gerber didn't run the Elf over with a truck, David Anthony Kraft did. Other than that, nice work.
astonishing
Just got a delightful load of Gerber comics for Christmas, with almost every elf appearance. The letters pages were rife with speculation as to his purpose; I smile every time I think about that. I've written a cool/smart?/weird Defenders story w/ illos you can see on integr8dfix.blogspot.com, but there's just no way to imitate the elf...
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