"Jeepers Creepers " is, like my other Retropolitan images, set in the world of the future the way it used to be. Figure it's the sort of wide-open, adventurous day-after-tomorrow that you would have been expecting if you were reading a little more Buck Rogers than geometry back in about 1939.

This is one of those images that really feels like it's an illustration of a story, but I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure what this story is. You're welcome to provide your own.

The way I see it, our heroes - or at least Rusty the Robot - have been here before. "Here", I think, is another planet, or maybe one of our planets' moons. Whenever and wherever that was, Rusty made a big impression on the locals, without ever knowing that they were there, and his visit has been incorporated into their mythology.

Who knows exactly what they think he is or what he was doing there? But they seem to have decided that he's a pretty important character, and here we see a shrine they've built to him. Now that he's come back and found it, I'm afraid that he's a little embarrassed about the whole thing, and he's going to have some trouble explaining it to his friends.

And as for the locals, they seem to have taken to the Cargo Cult (or "Field of Dreams") approach: "if we build it, they will come". And it does seem to have worked out that way.