Hi yeah I’ve never seen this movie and I just wanna say, What the Fuck
I sat in a darkened theater one night in 1986, watching Howard the Duck.
It would be reasonable to ask me “why?” I have a few answers:
I was in love with Lea Thompson. I was a teenager, and had seen virtually everything she’d been in, including fucking Space Camp. And when she crawled across the bed in her panties in Howard, I was as happy as a horrible movie was capable of making me.
It was my birthday and there was no school the next day, so my friend and I were doing a double-feature… Howard and Aliens. As with every other weird, white, writerly boy in America that summer, Aliens had a huge impact. If you’re a nerd of the right age, it’s painfully clear that every Strong Female Character of the ‘90s and early 2000s flows from exactly two sources: Chris Claremont’s late ‘70s/early ‘80s X-Men, and Jim Cameron’s version of Ripley. We were a hive-mind.
I had situationally inattentive parents, who allowed a very young me to read the Howard the Duck comics of the ‘70s. Which was… probably not a good idea. The whole premise of the book —a belligerent talking duck falls through a door in space-time and ends up fucking the shit out of a hot human chick as he wanders the earth complaining about the human race— was probably too grown-up for me. And I suspect that the way Beverly kept getting kidnapped all the time may have had some small impact on my sexuality. (Ahem.) But for grade school me, it had everything… a pretty, damaged girl who spent half her time in a bikini top tied up somewhere, a cranky, outsider antihero, the most ridiculous arch-nemesis of all time, occasional excursions into funny/sad horror —Hellcow!— and Steve Gerber’s thoughtfully cynical, incredibly un-Marvel-like sensibility. (Decades later, the young internet gave me a chance to email Steve and thank him for teaching me the word “grotesque” when I was six. His response was lovely and kind.)
