I just learned that Steve Gerber passed away yesterday while waiting in the hospital for a lung transplant. I’m still sort of stunned right now, since he’d posted on his blog as recently as last Monday about his progress on a Dr. Fate project. He seemed hopeful, and so I was trying to remain optimistic.

I won’t attempt to go on at length here to explain to you who he was and why he mattered. You probably already know him from his work on Man-Thing, Omega the Unknown, and Howard the Duck, and I’ll leave it to others who can better keep their wits about them to recount the details of his life. You can also get more information and read remembrances from those who loved him here.

But I’d just like to quickly say that I remember him as much for what I knew of him off the page as for what the rest of the world knew of him from what was on the page. Around the Bullpen, he was always a funny guy, part Mort Sahl, part Lewis Black.

And he had no sense of shame when it came to making you laugh. Here he is, posing for a photo that appeared in the October 1975 issue of Crazy magazine, which he edited for Marvel back when I was on staff there. He used his sense of the absurd to make Crazy into more than just another clone of MAD. I’d like to remember him that way, smiling, happy, and in your face.

He followed a rough road in comics, because he pushed the envelope—both artistically and in fighting for creator rights—at a time when most didn’t bother. We need more like him.

We need him.