(Apologies for the delays. It's marking season.)
It's fitting that today's issue is the last of the series I'll be looking at for a bit, and Howard and Bev finally get sick of Cleveland and hit the road. But not before Howard engages in an attempt at becoming some kind of star. He tries radio, television, and, finally, wrestling. I think a contemporary telling of this would see Howard trying to become a YouTube star, or start his own Bachelor-style reality show. Inevitably, nothing works, which perhaps should have been seen as a prophetic moment for the producers of the film version of Howard in the 1980s.
The impetus for this brush with celebrity is the strange couple's poverty. They can literally only afford a single chocolate bar at the beginning of today's story. It's not something we very often see treated in mainstream comics, especially superhero ones, the struggle to make ends meet in contemporary(ish) culture. Howard and Bev wrestle with this throughout the run, and perhaps are our first real jab in HtD at the state of the United States. Mr. Gerber is quite angry about a lot of things. He's going to use this duck to tell us all about them.
More to come...
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