Can anything be less hip than a eulogy?

Nothing.

For the most part eulogies make human beings seem like institutions. In our culture we hire people to stand behind pulpits and make our deceased loved ones sound as proper and inhuman as greeting cards or multi-national corporations. Fairly disgust-oid. Anyone who's been to a funeral or a wedding lately knows that our tribal rites beg loudly for immediate revamping.

But Jack Kirby died yesterday. Frank Zappa died a couple of weeks ago. Isaac Asimov last year. And I miss them.

They were the architects of wonderful worlds that mean much to a lot of us. And if the law of Nature is that you become what you consume, than many of us can see parts of these nifty folks and their creations floating around in our memory banks. Our personal mindscapes owe much to them.

We are their children.

For one thing, I'll always have that young kid inside myself, laying in the way back of a beat Ford station wagon, reading a Kirby comic (Tales to Astonish? Astound?). Our family is somewhere in the middle of America, chewing our way across an endless landscape of rolling farm country straight out of a Grant Woods painting . . . and I just know I'm going to get car-sick from reading this Kirby comic.

And I can't stop myself.

Even though I can feel that high-low vertigo in the throat and the pit of my stomach, I'm going to read on because Kirby has lured me into a world where some egomaniacal creature the size of the Goodyear blimp is announcing that all & sundry must FEAR THE WRATH OF MELMOTH! or some such powerful inanity.

Believe me, I'm talking about much more than simple nostalgia. Nostalgia is something pleasant, a mental bubble-bath in past memories, styles, attitudes. And while I've absolutely nothing against nostalgia, the emotion I experience when I think back about first encountering Mr. Kirby's work is raw, electric, something more akin to a white-hot flash of religious ecstasy. Kirby's work acted (and acts now) as a kind of wake-up call from the world of imagination, an extremely close encounter with the agents of Novelty, Weirdness, & the Imagination in the Here and Now.

I can certify that my life has been shaped by such encounters. I think I can speak for Michael and assert that his life's been similarly shaped.

How about yours?

Face it, we're all on a mortal journey of 75, 80, 90 years, trying to stake out a territory in the space of those years that will mean something, mean something--hopefully--powerful. Kirby, Asimov, Zappa succeeded. We no longer have them, but we have their worlds, graphic, fictional, musical.

When Michael & I began Strange Attractors and received our first favorable notices, we both felt a similar emotion: we were thrilled to be a part of the Industry. By Industry I do not mean the business--the logistics both financial and physical of getting our tales of Sophie, Roshi, and Widow to readers and paying the freight thereon--which we are also a part of. By IndustryI mean something like the Industry of the Imagination, which is this epoch-spanning activity of humankind to build, thought-structures, story-structures that other human beings can inhabit. Jack Kirby, Frank Zappa, and Isaac Asimov created whole realms of such structures.