It isn’t every day someone gets to meet the creator of existence. It’s even rarer when that person gets to have a drink with them and realize almost every preconceived notion they had of existence and the origin of intelligent life is completely wrong. It’s even rarer still when that someone is a walking, cigar-smoking duck with a bad attitude. But that’s exactly what happened to Howard the Duck when a series of supremely awful events culminated in him meeting God.
2002's Howard the Duck (by Steve Gerber and Phil Winslade) put the titular fowl straight into the wringer. Everything started rolling downhill fast for Howard when the supervillain Doctor Bong kidnapped him, dunked him into a tank of potent mutagenetic slime, destroyed his home, and forced him to move into a boarding house. What was rolling downhill reached terminal velocity when Howard started transforming into a variety of other creatures, got swept up into going onto a talk show, and then learning that the talk show host had become the conduit and host for an extraplanar entity. A showdown occurred, explosions happened, the crowd was skeletonized, and Howard tried to take a puff off the cigar that another extraplanar entity had been smoking. It didn’t go well.
Howard was turned to ash instantly, except instead of dying he found himself in the middle of a crowded and dirty city street, a clueless angel standing next to him. Turns out Howard had landed himself in Hell and was told he could talk with God if he wanted to. Howard walked into a nearby bar and found God, replete with long white robes and beard, sitting at the counter sharing a drink with Jesus.
God and Howard sit down, order a round of drinks, and begin to talk. About everything. Howard begins by asking God the big questions first: are any interpretations of the Bible real? Are any holy books real? Did God Himself even have anything to do with them? If existence has become burdened with the misunderstanding of religion then why not just destroy it start over? And, ultimately, what’s the point of existence?
God answers Howard and his responses stun the poor duck. It turns out that not a single book was a direct product of God. Mortal humans took divine inspiration to write their holy books, but did God himself sit down and pen them? Nope. Not at all. God also explained that the creation of not just Howard’s universe, but the entirety of the multiverse itself, had been designed by committee. To create existence with no soul, no conflict, was nice and all, but the lack of actual drama or flavor made it all pointless. Ornamental, as God put it. Free will and evolution were exciting little tidbits God tossed into the mix to liven up existence.
Naturally, Howard is dumbstruck by every answer God gives. To learn that God was little more than a member of some omnipotent committee and not the sole creator humanity had deigned him to be was a bit more than he could handle at first. But as Howard asked more questions and learned that God was actually a bit of a realist and didn’t partake in any of the hubris that humanity had created in His name, he found that God was actually pretty likable. His answers were still terrifying, but he was apologetic with how the universe had turned out. The most important answer that he gave Howard, though, was that the purpose of existence wasn’t to be found in a book. The purpose of existence was to be found through the eyes of people willing to look around and examine themselves and the world they live in.
Howard’s talk with God ends when he’s sent back to the world of the living. Howard looks around, rattled and confused, until he’s given a gift from a nearby homeless man. The gift is representative of the wisdom God imparted on him, something that Howard carries with him as he walks away. Howard was able to obtain real answers and that's more than most people can say in the Marvel Universe. It wasn’t the meeting he ever expected to have, but Howard was able to walk away from an encounter with God the better for it.