I’ve had a lucky relationship with some of my writing mentors. At the age of 8 or so, I saw a play that captivated me, if only because one of the characters had a swordstick. I remembered it as being a version of Ice Station Zebra, but it wasn’t: it merely shared a genre (thriller) and location (one of the poles) with that film. How did I find this out? Through attending scriptwriting workshops with Jon Wood some twenty years later, who turned out to be the man who’d written that play. I learned a lot from Jon, and he recognised that I was both serious about writing and had potential to succeed if I kept at it.

Another big early influence was Steve Gerber. It was his comics that made me realise comics could be used to tell all kinds of stories. While remaining captivated by the adventures of The Avengers, or Captain America and Falcon, I found in Steve Gerber’s comics an altogether different world, one that both more closely resembled the one I lived in, and had differences more intriguing than the presence of alien warriors and supervillains.

Nowhere was this more true than in the pages of Howard the Duck, which Gerber created for Marvel in the seventies and was beautifully illustrated by Gene Colan, with other strong artists on the series including Frank Brunner. ‘Trapped in a world he never made’ was the comic’s strapline, and I feel it served equally well as a summation of Gerber’s stance: here was a writer who was fascinated, bewildered, perplexed and angry about the world he lived in, and whose work captured those and other feelings convincingly.

I think of Steve Gerber as being Marvel’s own Woody Allen: a neurotic satirist with ideas too big for the medium he was working in. And like Allen, many people will tell you his best work was his early funny stuff. Howard the Duck is as much a commentary on the seventies as the songs of Steely Dan, with stories poking fun at kung fu, Moonies, election campaigns, and changing gender dynamics. All this through the ongoing adventures of a duck wearing trousers – apparently Disney threatened legal action if Marvel stepped onto their territory by having a bare-assed mallard – and his companion Beverley.

Gerber wrote plenty of other comics, and injected even mainstream superhero titles with a touch of the bizarre, but his heart was clearly there for all to see in Howard the Duck. Some of his other work carried on in the same vein, notably Nevada, the story of a showgirl and her ostrich. And more recently he did a great job on Hard Time, about a teenager imprisoned for his participation in a school shooting.

I interviewed Steve Gerber a few years back – anyone wanting a copy of the piece please email me and I’ll be happy to send it to you. His maverick intelligence was apparent, and he was sharp as he described his feelings about the moribund state of the contemporary comics scene, his experience working in television, and more.

More than anything, Gerber blazed a trail for the wave of writers who read him when they were younger and were influenced by his experimentation, his social conscience, his emotional honesty. Without Steve Gerber, would there have been an Alan Moore, a Neil Gaiman, a Grant Morrison? They’re just three of the writers who’ve admitted their debt to Gerber’s work – and pioneering stance on creators’ rights. And somewhere inside me, too, there’s a teenager who still relishes the all-text issue of Howard the Duck, when Gerber was late with the script and instead wrote a series of essays and short fictions addressed directly to the reader, and which captures a lot of what it’s like to be a writer.

If there’s anything good to come out of this – Steve died yesterday after succumbing to pneumonia while awaiting a lung transplant – it’s that at last he’ll now know the answer to a question that runs through his work. Seemingly agnostic in outlook, Gerber was still fascinated by the idea of the soul, and in his stories people lost track of theirs quite easily, as their heads are transplanted onto other bodies, or they experience cosmic revelations. The satirist in him couldn’t resist digging at New Age beliefs, but there was too a genuine curiosity about matters of the spirit in his work, and I hope he’s found peace, wherever whatever remains of him is now.