Almost every day of my life in the last ten years, someone has asked me a question about Jack Kirby. And every day of those ten years, something I see or something that happens in my world causes me to think about Jack and to recall something I was privileged to hear him say. Often, it has nothing to do with comic books, the medium in which he was a declared master. Jack's mind was forever exploding in different directions, few of them predictable and not all immediately understandable. He was unable to drive a car because he could never focus on going in one direction, and conversations with Kirby often went much the same way. He would say something to you that didn't make immediate sense but you'd smile and nod, because Jack was a lovely man and he spoke to everyone, including some gross inferiors, as an equal, and with a great sense of openness and force. In hindsight, some of us came to realize that the bizarre associations and fragments of thought were all coherent and usually brilliant, as well. It just, you know, could take a while to put the pieces in order such that you could see the picture.
What I'm getting at is that today, ten years since he left us, he is still an active, positive force in many lives. Things he said that once seemed overdone are now demonstrably true. Things that seemed true then seem truer today. Time has proven how much of a lead Jack had on mere reality.
I find myself missing Jack while at the same time feeling he is around. His concepts still form the bedrock of so much popular fiction and again, it isn't just limited to comic books. Important authors, artists and filmmakers in a wide array of forms acknowledge his influence, and many of the characters he created or co-created are forever a part of American culture. It's hard to think of a guy like that as dead. Very hard.