{"id":27689,"date":"2021-05-23T14:20:49","date_gmt":"2021-05-23T18:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=27689"},"modified":"2021-05-23T14:20:49","modified_gmt":"2021-05-23T18:20:49","slug":"why-howard-the-duck-didnt-get-laid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2021\/05\/23\/why-howard-the-duck-didnt-get-laid\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Howard the Duck didn’t get laid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Howard the Duck was supposed to get laid (sort of) in his debut issue cover-dated January 1976 \u2014 and though I no longer remember why<\/em> he didn’t get laid, I have proof of that editorial alteration thanks to papers discovered in my late sister-in-law Ellen Vartanoff’s collection.<\/p>\n

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In that issue, there’s a scene where Howard lands in a nest and explains how it “reminds me of where I was first hatched.” But that is not<\/em> how the word balloon was originally lettered.<\/p>\n

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As you can see from a photocopy of the original art for that page, the initial word balloon had Howard saying the nest reminded him of “where I was first laid.”<\/p>\n

I’ve found no Comics Code paperwork, so I have no idea if they’re the ones who decided “laid” was too much of a double entendre, or if it was an internal decision, but the change was made.<\/p>\n

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Here’s the actual replacement lettering of the word “hatched” \u2014 along with John Romita, Sr.’s instructions to have the word stripped in, which tells me this was caught and changed extremely<\/em> late in the process. <\/p>\n

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We’re unlikely to ever know the cause for this alteration … unless my continued poring over my sister-in-law’s collection reveals more. I live in hope!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Howard the Duck was supposed to get laid (sort of) in his debut issue cover-dated January 1976 \u2014 and though I no longer remember why he didn’t get laid, I have proof of that editorial alteration thanks to papers discovered in my late sister-in-law Ellen Vartanoff’s collection. In that issue, there’s a scene where Howard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18,582,20],"class_list":["post-27689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-comics","tag-howard-the-duck","tag-marvel-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27689"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27701,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27689\/revisions\/27701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}