ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LET THE BOY MATURE, BUT DO NOT LET THE MAN HOLD BACK THE BOY.

PHILIP K. DICK

This is a book about some astonishing artists and authors, some of whom are still living and working among us. These individuals generously answered my insistent queries and read what I had written about them with both grace and helpful criticism. I am grateful, above all, to these practicing artists and authors: Doug Moench, Alvin Schwartz, Whitley Strieber, Roy Thomas, and Barry Windsor-Smith. In this context, I also want to thank Anne Strieber, who did so much to help me with Whitley’s work and the Communion letters, and Lawrence Sutin, the pioneering biographer and editor of Philip K. Dick. Larry’s two biographies of Dick and Aleister Crowley signal the core idea of the present book, namely, that the roots and effects of sci-fi and superhero fantasy are magical in structure and intent.

I would also like to thank a number of individuals from within the comic-book industry who helped me to understand that professional world. I am especially grateful to: Roy and Dann Thomas and Doug Moench again, for spending a week with a group of us in Big Sur and helping me with so many contacts and personalities; Ramona Fradon, for her own self-described gnostic quest and her teasing laughter at that oh-so-male fantasy that we call the superhero (I can still hear Ramona giggling); historian and archivist Bill Schelly, for his wonderful biography of Otto Binder and for pointing me toward Binder’s archives at Texas A&M; historian and artist Christopher Knowles, for his pioneering Our Gods Wear Spandex and stunning blog-essays on Jack Kirby and all things pop-gnostic; and graphic artist Arlen Schumer, for his dramatic lectures and insightful writings on the art of the Silver Age (and a really cool Batman drawing/autograph).

There were also a number of individuals who intervened at key points in order to add rich historical and critical perspectives, especially: Victoria Nelson, with her own writings on the modern Gothic in figures like H. P. Lovecraft, Dan Brown, and Guillermo del Toro (none of whom, alas, I could treat here); Elliot Wolfson, with his vision of the Kabbalah and his help here with my reading of Alan Moore’s Tree of Life; Rachel Fell McDermott, with her photos of the blue and black Kalis; Joscelyn Godwin, with help with the theosophical, Atlantean, and hollow-earth literature and a last-minute mailing involving Gene Roddenberry and a trance medium; Christopher McIntosh, with help with negotiating the Rosicrucian terrain; Hugh Urban, with help with the history of Scientology; Edwin May, with help with the personal and political complexities of the remote-viewing history; Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, with a cool tip on Julian Huxley; Erik Davis, with a close read in light of his own remarkable scholarship on the gnostic undercurrents of contemporary popular culture; Chip McAuley, with a very close and helpful read-through at the end; Sascha Scatter of the Icarus Project, with her readings of my work on the human potential in the light of her own mad gifts and inspiring zine, Mutant Superpowers & Lithium Pills; Dean Nicholas Shumay of the School of the Humanities at Rice University, with some generous financial help that made this book, literally, so colorful; and Hal Hall and Catherine Coker of Texas A&M University. The Moskowitz Collection on pulp and science fiction at that institution was a tremendous help with the Binder materials and a special inspiration for chapter 2.

None of this would have been possible without the support of two men: T. David Brent, my longtime editor at the University of Chicago Press, and Michael Murphy, the cofounder of the Esalen Institute and director of its Center for Theory and Research, which has become a kind of intellectual-spiritual home for me. David patiently guided and encouraged me throughout what proved to be a very long process (and two books instead of one), and Mike and Esalen supported the project by funding a multiyear symposia series on the paranormal and popular culture through which I was able to invite and meet many of the authors and artists treated in the pages that follow. There is really no way to thank, adequately anyway, either man.

The book is dedicated to my brother Jerry, who, along with my cousins Chris and Tim Fiser, collected and lived these fantasies with me when we were all still boys. I am reminded in this context of something the “dead” Philip K. Dick channeled through a medium to his friend and fellow writer, D. Scott Apel: “Let the boy mature, but do not let the man hold back the boy.” I have taken Phil’s channeled advice to heart in the pages that follow. I remain a man, but I have not held back the boy—at all.

Finally, I would like to thank Wendy Doniger, my Doktormutter and intellectual mentor who once remote viewed an apple corer in Big Sur with Russell Targ. Just nailed the thing. Wendy, this is my myth-book. I hope you find Wonder Woman and the “mental radio” you share with her in its strange pages.