There will be no jokes this week. No fake erudition. No ironic use of images. Just me talking about my friend and collaborator, George Edward Taylor III.

George died the day after Christmas, 2003.

The fact that this incredible artist--this man of faith and of vision--died without leaving his mark white-hot and blazing across the world will always haunt me.

The fact that he wasn't there to see me sell my first comics script will always be one of the supreme sadnesses of my life.

I first met George over a decade ago. I was finishing high school and working part-time at the local comic book store. George was a regular, coming in once or twice a week to pick up the latest books.

George got a discount because he was a comic book creator. He had a few minor credits to his name, but most of his work went uncredited, as an assistant to local artist Paris Cullins.

George was almost twice my age, with a wife and kids and a house in West Philadelphia, but we had a tremendous amount in common:

First and last, of course, there was our love of comics. Though even there we had our disagreements. Growing up in the 70's, George was heavily influenced by artists like Jim Starlin, John Buscema, and George Perez. George liked a good story, but it was the sheer power of visual storytelling that drew him in.

Intellectually, he understood that someone like Neil Gaiman was a good writer, but florid prose never impressed him the way that seeing Buscema's Surfer soar across the cosmos could. When the Surfer's hand reached out, half-tensed towards the future, and you could feel the full weight of his torment ripple through his body like a wave...

George's giddy preoccupation with the drama of image was infectious.

I met George at a critical time in my life as a creator. I had recently given up on becoming a comic book artist. I just didn't have the talent or the discipline for it. And more than anything, I wanted to write.

But a writer without an artist is like a playwright who's never met an actor.

George didn't want to collaborate with me. That's thinking too small. And George never thought small.

These were the days when comic book companies were launching new universes, three by three. These were the days of Valiant, Image, and the Ultraverse. These were the days when it seemed like readers were everywhere--poised, hungry, with a fistful of cash, ready to slam it down on the counter for anything and everything new.

George didn't want to create a comic book. He wanted to create a universe. And he was building the talent to do it. He put up fliers. He called his contacts. He visited local art schools. He beat the pavement looking for the best local artists.

And he trained them. "This is anatomy." "This is perspective." "This is storytelling." Some got it. Some didn't. But George kept working with them. George kept working on them.

My brother, John, helped George find writers. It was John who brought me in, but George had been circling for some time. I'm sure he would have recruited me directly, but my age made it awkward.

     I was seventeen.

George was running Morpheus Comics out of his house. There was no money. There were no publication dates. No promises. But by sheer force of vision and will, George held together a ragtag group of nearly two dozen creators. Writers. Pencilers. Inkers. Colorists. A lawyer. A business staff. And we were all doing it for George.

He had a tremendous personal magnetism and a tremendous generosity of spirit. He invited us into his home, and he invited us into his life. We ate dinner with his family. We had cookouts on holidays.

When he noticed that my sneakers had worn down, he bought me a new pair.

We all wanted George to succeed because we liked George. But more than that, we were in awe of him.

He had it all in his head. Thirty years of mad idea, heavily influenced by his devout faith and his mischievously paranoid mind. He infused the Starlinesque space opera that he loved growing up with religious iconography and wild conspiracy theories.

He envisioned a secret history of all things that began before the dawn of time and extended out into the distant future. Gods and mutants. Ghosts and robots. Angels and aliens.

One of my jobs was to distill all of this into one cohesive narrative. So I sat with George, and I listened, and I wrote the Morpheus Bible.

We wanted to launch with six titles because everyone was launching big. We were talking to investors, and investors were listening because--at least for that one brief moment in time--there was money in comic books.

And George made a good pitch. He was ahead of his time. It wasn't just comic books. It was movies. It was animation. It was toys and video games and theme park rides.

George had created his own universe, and he wanted it to take over ours.

And for a long time, it looked like it was going to happen. But then the bottom dropped out. Marvel went bankrupt. All the venture capitalists, who were so happy to talk to us before, started slamming their doors.

After a while, even someone with George's amazing persuasive powers couldn't keep it all together. People had to pay their bills. People had to move on.

Sadly, a lot of them left comics and never came back. They had dreamed big and the dream hadn't come true. Why stick around and suffer when there's guaranteed money and a guaranteed life waiting for them in marketing or in advertising?

We tried to scale back, adjust. But George had trouble thinking small. He had trouble focusing on just one thing. Every day, he'd bring us another "But maybe we could do this?"

And they were all great ideas. But in the end, he couldn't choose. He couldn't settle for just this.

And there was something else.

George was sick. George had been sick from the beginning, though only a few of us knew the real extent of it. An accident had damaged his spine and the nerves in his hands. So many days he wanted to draw--he ached to draw--but he literally couldn't. It was torture for an artist.

And just when he was beginning to recover from the nerve damage, his kidneys failed him.

Being sick in America costs money. And George had a family to support. And George had invested so much of his time and his money and his ego into Morpheus...

Sometimes, the depression was the worst of it.

Eventually, my life dragged me away from George and away from Morpheus. Away from the great dream. There was college, and a semester abroad, and after that I was moving to New York to try to make it on my own.

I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I was alone again. A playwright without actors.

I tried to put together a little independent comic called The Strikes, but that never quite came together.

I sent George a copy of the script for issue one, but I never heard back. That wasn't unusual. Like me, he had a hard time keeping in touch with people when they weren't directly in front of him.

Even then, his mind was too full, overflowing with ideas.

Like a lot of people, I tried sending in story ideas to Epic Comics in the Summer of 2003, but that door closed quickly.

It seemed like nothing was working. I couldn't do it. I had been in New York for close to five years, and I was nowhere.

December 26th, I was home for the holidays. I got the call. George was dead. After suffering setback after setback and battling back, his body had finally given out on him.

The funeral was unusually uncomfortable for me. I felt sad, of course, but guilty, too. I should have been there. I shouldn't have given up.

Irrational thoughts for an irrational day on irrational Earth.

But I wanted George's death to mean something in my life. I needed this new year to be different.

A month later, I was feverishly writing an entry for a contest, half-cribbed from something I had written for George years earlier. HEROES OF TOMORROW became my first sale as a professional writer.

And he wasn't there.

When I write now, I try to remember all the other voices that will never be heard. I think of George. And I think of all the other creators who came to Morpheus and shared our dream.

I think of amazing talents like Peter Kim and A.J. Ford, Mike Ney and John Gaeta. I think of all the names that you may never see printed on a comics page, but that are printed large now across my soul.

The world is full of absence. The air is thick with the silence of a million, million missing voices.

Not just the second Shakespeare or the other Ernest Hemmingway. Not just that one, brilliant, defining voice of the 20th century, lost to the ravages of polio at age 6. But the poets and the artists and the dreamers who would have inspired us just once. Who would have touched us. Who would have made us smile or laugh or cry just once, when that was exactly what we needed. Who would have helped us reach that extra inch higher. Who would have helped us hold on just that one second longer.

The air is thick with the silence of a million, million missing voices. Let us pause to listen.

Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

James 4:14, NIV

Drew Melbourne writes comic books and misses his friend.