In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn how Steve Gerber used a Man-Thing supporting character (who played a major role in the introduction of Howard the Duck into Marvel Comics history) as a subtle tribute to the late, great David A. Kraft.
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and third installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for Part 1 of this installment's legends.
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COMIC LEGEND:
Steve Gerber named a Man-Thing supporting character in tribute to David A. Kraft.
STATUS:
True
We tragically lost an amazing member of the comic book community recently with the sad COVID-related death of David A. Kraft, the noted writer of The Defenders and Savage She-Hulk for Marvel and the publisher of Comics Interview, one of the best comic book magazines of all-time (I literally just used an old Comics Interview issue as the basis of an article about Mark Gruenwald just a couple of weeks ago. I cite it frequently. It's an amazing resource).
Kraft started hanging around Marvel and getting some gigs around 1973. He became friends with many of the writers working there at the time, including Steve Gerber, who Kraft would ultimately follow on The Defenders.
In a great interview with Kraft by Alex Grand and Jim Thompson for Comic Book Historians, Kraft joked about what it was like hanging out with Gerber and helping him sometimes come up with last second comic book plots:
Gerber was good at the cliffhangers and terrible at recovering. [chuckle] Which is why, all of us, at various times, would go out to dinner with him, because he’d be like, “Back against the wall, I’ve got to have a plot tomorrow, and I have no idea what I’m going… I did this.” And we would go out and kick ideas around and stuff. It was fun times but it was also the deadlines.
A lot of what you were asking me about the stories was, “Well, you need something tomorrow!” and it’s like, “Oh, shit.” [chuckle]
It's quite possible that maybe one of those times that Kraft helped Gerber out with a plot was during Gerber's iconic run on the Man-Thing feature in Adventures Into Fear, because in Fear #14 (art by Val Mayerik and Chic Stone), we met a new character named Dakimh the Enchanter, who interacts with Man-Thing and Jennifer Kale (Gerber introduced Jennifer to give the series a point of view character)...
Fives issues later in Fear #19 (by Gerber, Mayerik and Sal Trapani), Dakimh shows up again....
He arrives to inform them that there is a problem with the nexus of realties and that various other realities are sort of crashing together and that he needs to help them fix everything...
Well, as it turns out, one of those alternate dimensions that crossed over a bit with Earth was, well, you know, a world of all ducks! And thus, the world met Howard the Duck!
Dakimn eventually perishes during the storyline, but, like every great comic book character (and, okay, every comic book character period) he has returned here and there over the years.
What I didn't know, though, and I imagine many other people did not know, is that Dakimh was named AFTER David A. Kraft. Kraft's fellow Marvel writer and friend Peter B. Gillis wrote an excellent tribute to Kraft on Facebook and in it he revealed:
[W]hen Steve Gerber was writing Man-thing, in the story that gave us Howard the Duck, the secret behind the peculiarly named wizard was something Mr. G confessed to me (and others) which I’ll use today.
Dakimh the Enchanter?
David Anthony Kraft Is My Hero.
And always will be.
What an outstanding tribute. Thank you, Peter, for the information and thank you to David A. Kraft for decades of excellent comic book writing and comic book information.
CHECK OUT A TV LEGENDS REVEALED!
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MORE LEGENDS STUFF!
OK, that's it for this installment!
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