Due to circumstances beyond my control, I only just saw There Will Be Blood, and I'm in awe. Paul Thomas Anderson is, it now seems clear, the finest American filmmaker to emerge since the seventies. His previous work suggested greatness--even the least of them, Magnolia, is absolutely fascinating--and now he has achieved it, a perfect synthesis of the thematic concerns of his earlier films with a new stylistic focus, absolutely free of the self-consciousness he'd displayed before. The character of Daniel Plainview is a fully realized human being, a mass of terrifying, impenetrable contradictions, and the film is bold, original, deeply moving and profoundly troubling.
The elation felt when I see something so amazing is, however, dimmed a bit by sadness: The passing at age 60 of comic book writer Steve Gerber, the creator of Howard The Duck. The first issue of Howard hit the newsstands when I was ten; I only bought it because it had a guest appearance from Spider-man. The premise seemed weird--a wisecracking duck from an alternate dimension trapped in modern-day Cleveland--but I enjoyed it; that first issue was both a spoof of sword-and sorcery conventions and a social satire (its villain a power-mad accountant), neither of which meant anything to me at that age, but I recognized and appreciated its singular weirdness.
So I kept buying it. The second issue featured a failed writer named Arthur Winslow who simply couldn't understand why his real life lacked the drama of the pulp fiction he loved. The fourth issue introduced a recurring character named Paul Same, a frustrated painter with a profound psychological disorder: a sleepwalker, he could only tell the truth, in his art or personal life, while in a somnambulant state. By the fifth issue, Gerber concentrated solely on Howard and his companion Beverly's desperate financial circumstances.
This wasn't stuff you saw in mainstream comics--or anywhere else--in the seventies. I'd read comic books my whole life, but Howard The Duck was my first introduction to an authorial voice, a character and a book with a distinct point-of-view. Though many of his adventures were parodies of superhero conventions, Howard himself only wanted to be left alone. He never was a hero, since he only acted out of self-interest, and yet he remained, despite his appearance, achingly human.
Gerber wanted more control of the character than Marvel Comics would allow, and was fired from his own book in 1978. It staggered on for a couple more issues, then mutated into a truly dreadful black-and-white magazine written by hacks with no understanding of the characters. The 1986 movie allegedly based on the strip is a blight on its memory.
As for Gerber, he should have flourished in the indie-comics boom of the eighties and nineties, but though he created several titles (Void Indigo, Destroyer Duck), his attention always wandered. After a few issues of each new title, he'd hand the writing reins to someone else, and the book would die a swift, unmourned death. Maybe with his own death Gerber's legacy will finally be appreciated, and his cracked genius will be celebrated as it never was in his life.
I don't think it's a leap to say there's a measure of Gerber's voice in There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson celebrates cracked dreamers who allow their dreams to be hijacked, rootless outsiders who defy society's conventions even as they want desperately to fit in. Arthur Winslow and Paul Same would have fit into Boogie Nights or Magnolia without any change in their characterization; Barry Egan in Punch-Drunk Love could actually be Howard The Duck in human form, a complex mixture of violent rage, severe alienation and sad, unspoken longing for acceptance. I don't know whether Anderson ever read any of Gerber's writing, but I like to think so. As Daniel Plainview would say, this does my heart good.
