His greatest popular success was his own creation (along with artist Val Mayerik) -- Howard the Duck, terribly botched by the movie and terrifically compelling when written by Gerber. But Gerber created Howard for Marvel, which meant that when he left Marvel, Howard stayed.
Gerber did a lot of compelling comic-book work over the subsequent decades, from a terrific in-continuity Superman miniseries (The Phantom Zone, 1981) to an abortive scifi epic originally pitched as a reboot of DC's Hawkman (Void Indigo) to a host of other often short-lived titles.
Nevada supposedly sprung from a brief incident in a 1977 Howard the Duck story in which a chorus girl who works onstage with an ostrich fights a "killer lampshade." Some time in the 1990's, Neil Gaiman supposedly asked Gerber when he would go into this story in more depth. The six-issue DC/ Vertigo miniseries Nevada was the result.
It's a typically atypical Gerber story, mostly self-contained but clearly designed to allow for a sequel or a regular series that never happened. It's set in Las Vegas. There's a chorus girl and her dancing ostrich, a mysterious homeless man, a guy with what looks like a Lava Lamp for a head, a laser beaming a message from outer space into the security system of a casino, a series of strange locked-room murders, and some extremely cosmic vistas and philosophies. Gods and angels fight in the skies over Las Vegas. Well, gods and angels from the human POV.
It's a solid piece of off-kilter Gerber genre-bending, ably illustrated by Phil Winslade in a manner that keeps the stranger concepts grounded in representational verisimilitude. The ostrich is a bit of a hoot. Recommended.
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