First line of Gawker's Charlton Heston obit: "Well, you can have his gun now."

Talented comics people seem to be dying off faster than sympathetic corner boys on The Wire. Now comes word that Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens has died of leukemia, aged 52. Stevens was a craftsman of a kind they don't make much anymore: in love with his own idealized physical world and beautifully drawn line. As a teenage boy I had this poster up on my wall, for obvious reasons.

Gary Gygax, the cocreator of Dungeons and Dragons, is dead. The obituaries seem to be identifying the game genre he invented as "a bridge between the noninteractive world of books and films and the exploding interactive video game industry," as the NYT put it, and that may be right from a historical perspective, but I don't think it captures the man's achievement.

For non-initiates it's hard to see past the sword-and-sorcery surface, but at its core D&D and the other role-playing games that followed are vehicles for imaginative play. Kids make up stories together all the time. Thanks to Gygax, my friends and I did it into our teens. I miss it.

William F. Buckley Jr., 1925-2008

More strange new respect for Bill Buckley, this time from James Kirchick at the Plank. Kirchick cites Buckley's famous riposte to Gore Vidal -- "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered” -- in order, rather oddly, to praise Buckley for refraining from personal insults except in that one uncharacteristic instance.

I leave it to the reader to measure the distance between "you queer ... I'll sock you in your goddam face" and the remark I quoted yesterday: "I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks?"

I'm sure Buckley was nice to black people too, even as he wrote things like this, in 1957:

The central question that emerges ... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

Buckley later said he regretted opposing civil rights legislation, and supported the establishment of a national holiday on the birthday of Martin Luther King. He changed his mind, in other words, after the battle had been fought, with him on the wrong side, just in time to be in the right on a matter of pure symbolism. He was by all accounts a charming and generous man, and he propagated a worldview that consisted largely of sympathy for the overdog. He was certainly more amusing and less odious than Sean Hannity or Dick Cheney, but that's a judgment that leaves a lot of room for odium. Now he's dead, and his decency and fairness are gone with him. What survives is the movement he built, which reflects not his personal manner but the actions he took and the positions he chose, and which stands athwart America, shouting Fuck you, you queers and blacks and poors! in language that Buckley used only in occasional slips but that expresses his meaning more than adequately.

Various liberals (Hendrik Hertzberg, Joe Klein, James K. Galbraith) have nice things to say about the late William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley was evidently generous, eloquent, cultivated, intellectually honest, and ecumenical in his friendships. In that spirit, let's take a moment to recall Buckley's comments on antiwar demonstrators in 1965: "I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks?"

Hertzberg writes that "he could not have been happy with the vulgarity of the movement he did so much to spawn." Maybe so. Perhaps Buckley disliked hearing Ann Coulter call John Edwards a faggot. But one suspects he opposed the syntax more than the sentiment.

Steve Gerber, creator of Howard the Duck and Omega the Unknown and writer of some awesome and weird Defenders comics, died on Sunday. Gerber is one of those figures who seem to have occurred at the wrong moment: in the fifties he could have worked with Harvey Kurtzman at EC and seen his stories illustrated by Bill Elder; in the eighties he could have helped draft the Creator's Bill of Rights with Scott McCloud and Dave Sim and published Howard the Duck with Eclipse or Aardvark-Vanaheim. Instead he was a 1970s fan-turned-pro, like Roy Thomas and John Byrne, and he worked for Marvel, and he probably had very little chance at happiness in that situation, but fortunately for us all he was too ornery to turn into a bitter old drunk and instead he fought. If he hadn't appeared, no one would have filled his strangely shaped spot, and comics today would be different and worse. Tom Spurgeon has a lovely obituary.

Altman redux

David Edelstein, maybe my favorite movie critic currently working, has this to say about Altman:

On the Internet last week, I read that Altman had changed American cinema, but I’ve always been saddened by how little influence his work actually had in an era of wall-to-wall storyboarding and computer-generated imagery.

This is true as far as it goes, although the current vogue for large-ensemble pileups like Crash and Babel certainly owes something to Nashville. But it may turn out that Altman's influence was most strongly felt on the small screen. Hill Street Blues, with its elaborate tracking shots and overlapping dialogue, was always described as "Altmanesque" (that's where I first heard the word). Add to that NYPD Blue, The West Wing, and most of all The Wire, which in its subtle sound mixing and its gyroscopic portrait of the connections between moments and systems is basically Altman filtered through a bunch of genius crime writers. (Altman would never have attempted The Wire's intricate and satisfying narrative setups and resolutions.) Plus remember that Tanner '88, the HBO series Altman made with Garry Trudeau, anticipated the look and feel of The Office and every other video-documentary-style sitcom. Altman left television in 1969 to make the remarkable and remarkably adult films that are his legacy. He may have done more than any other filmmaker to drag television into its adulthood too.

A Prairie Home Companion, Walter Reade Theater, 11/27/06

There's a moment in A Prairie Home Companion, the last movie Robert Altman made before he died last week, when someone says, 'The death of an old man is not a tragedy." When the movie was released last summer, before it was publicly known that Altman was dying of cancer, that was a bit of offhand philosophy. At last night's memorial screening it carried an extra charge: Hey -- he's talking to us! Altman got to speak at his own funeral.

At another point Meryl Streep says, "I just love a happy ending," and the line plays as irony, because the film makes clear that, if you keep the camera rolling long enough, there is no such thing as a happy ending. Altman was particularly good at strange, complicated endings -- A.O. Scott began his remembrance with a discussion of the shocking end of California Split, in which the mystical energy that has propelled the protagonists and powered the entire film suddenly and momentously dissipates, like the air whooshing out of a balloon, and then the credits roll.

Artists always struggle with endings, but they rarely get to struggle (in a conscious-artistic-intent way) with the ending of their careers. For some, death comes as a surprise; for others, the illness that makes it predictable also prevents them from making artistic use of it; others find their efforts thwarted by the waning of their artistic powers. Altman, it now turns out, is the rare exception; the only other serious example I can think of offhand is Shakespeare. For his last movie, Altman took a radio show whose appeal is its insistent timelessness, and he added the element of death and made it into a tragedy. At the end of the film, the show has been cancelled and the stars are sitting in a diner talking about a reunion tour the same way they sing about heaven: joyfully, sincerely, but not literally. It is, in a way, miraculous that a man who got to make so many movies and so few compromises should have been able to approach even his own ending this way: with a thorough understanding of his situation, with all his artistic faculties intact, and with a circle of brilliant collaborators to carry him out. It's almost a happy ending.